AFGHANISTAN
Wedding attack toll hits 80
The death toll from a suicide bomb attack on a wedding reception in Kabul has risen to 80, two senior officials said yesterday. The initial death toll after the blast on Saturday last week was 63, but some of the wounded had died while hospitalized, Ministry of Interior Affairs spokesman Nasrat Rahimi said. “Seventeen others have succumbed to their injuries in hospital and over 160 are still being treated either in hospitals or at home,” Rahimi said. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack.
HONDURAS
Bonilla convicted of fraud
A court on Tuesday convicted former first lady Rosa Elena Bonilla of embezzling about US600,000 in government money from 2010 to 2014, when her husband, Porfirio Lobo, was president. Bonilla’s sentence is to be announced on Wednesday next week and could run between 58 years and 87 years in prison. Bonilla’s brother-in-law, Mauricio Mora, was acquitted. The case was originally brought forward by the Organization of American States’ anti-corruption mission, which began its mandate in the country in 2016 after large street protests against graft. Investigators for the non-governmental National Anti-corruption Council have told prosecutors that Bonilla deposited US$600,000 in government funds into her personal bank account five days before Lobo ended his four-year term in January 2014. Prosecutors said that she used the money to buy jewelry and pay credit card debt. Earlier this month, US federal prosecutors accused Lobo and his successor, President Juan Orlando Hernandez, of receiving campaign contributions from cocaine traffickers in exchange for protection. Lobo has denied the accusation.
INDIA
‘Militant’ killed in gunfight
Security forces yesterday killed a suspected militant in a gunfight in Kashmir, police said, the first clash since the federal government removed the special status of the territory this month, fueling anger. Two policemen were wounded in the fighting that erupted in Baramulla in northern Kashmir, one of them dying later in a hospital, police said. Militants fighting Indian rule in Muslim-majority Kashmir have vowed to carry on their armed struggle after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government lifted restrictions on property purchases and government jobs and opened them up to people from outside the state. Thousands of additional paramilitary troops have been deployed to control the insurgency and on Tuesday night they raided the old part of Baramulla, a police officer said. Suspected militants fired a grenade, wounding two policemen, the officer said.
MEXICO
Officials, vigilantes in talks
The government is talking to armed groups to try to bring peace to the country, Secretary of the Interior Olga Sanchez Cordero said. “We are in talks with many groups, and they have told us they do not want to continue with this violence,” she said. She mentioned groups in the northern border state of Tamaulipas and the southern states of Guerrero and Michoacan, but her office quickly clarified that she was talking about vigilantes rather than drug cartels. Known as “self-defense” forces, some vigilante groups have been infiltrated by gangs and fight each other. A number of such bands originally took up arms to fight the cartels. The Secretariat of the Interior on Tuesday said that “the federal government does not have and will not hold talks with any organized crime group.”
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