CHINA
Landslide buries workers
More than a dozen workers remained missing yesterday after a landslide in Sichuan Province’s Ganluo County buried a section of railway that was under repair, according to state media. The 17 missing people were carrying out maintenance work on the track on Wednesday when the hill above them gave way, China Daily reported. The landslide happened very quickly, a witness told the newspaper. “I spotted a strange movement on the mountain slope after a truck passed, and I shouted, telling everyone to run away,” said Chen Kun, an official from the China Railway Chengdu Group. “The rocks and mud fell within two or three seconds ... while we were running, we could feel rocks chasing us,” Chen told China Daily.
DENMARK
Danes baffled by Trump
About two weeks before US President Donald Trump heads to Copenhagen for his first state visit there, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has asked his White House counsel to explore the idea of purchasing Greenland, which forms a key part of Denmark. The report has left Danes bewildered. Trump’s idea “must be an April Fool’s Day joke,” albeit out of season, tweeted Lars Lokke Rasmussen, who was prime minister until June and now heads the opposition. Another prominent opposition member said the report indicates that Trump is “insane.”
UNITED STATES
Ohio shooter was inebriated
The gunman who killed nine people outside a bar in Dayton, Ohio, had cocaine, Xanax and alcohol in his system at the time of the shooting rampage, the county coroner said on Thursday. Dayton police announced the findings at a news conference and on Twitter and said that two victims of the massacre were struck by gunfire from law enforcement officers responding to the scene. “While it weighs heavily on us that our response caused harm to these victims, we are comforted that none of our rounds caused the death of any of these innocent people,” Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl said on Twitter.
UNITED STATES
Truck drives into protesters
Rhode Island’s attorney general and state police launched investigations on Thursday after a truck drove through a group protesting federal immigration policies at a detention center, which has since placed an employee on leave. At least two people were injured, one seriously, on Wednesday night outside the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, which is used by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Jewish youth movement Never Again Action said that Jerry Belair, 64, of Warren, suffered a broken leg and internal bleeding. It did not identify the other person.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the