DENMARK
Pro-HK graffiti on Mermaid
Copenhagen’s famed Little Mermaid statue was found doused with pro-Hong Kong graffiti early yesterday. Three lines in red, reading “Free Hong-Kong” were painted on the rock on which the bronze statue sits, next to the same text in white. Police were seen searching for clues in the area with flashlights and a dog after the pre-dawn vandalism was reported. No one has been apprehended. The Little Mermaid was created in tribute to author Hans Christian Andersen.
Photo: REUTERS
CANADA
False alert shakes Toronto
Toronto-area residents had a rude awakening on Sunday after receiving a false alert about a nuclear power plant emergency. The message was accompanied by a shrill emergency broadcast noise. It said an unspecified event had occurred at the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station. There was no abnormal release of radioactivity, and people did not need to take protective action, it added. More than half an hour after people received mobile alerts, plant operator Ontario Power Generation tweeted that there was no emergency and the warning was a mistake. “The alert was issued in error to the public during a routine training exercise” by Ontario Province’s emergency operations center, Provincial Solicitor General Sylvia Jones said in a statement. The provincial government apologizes for raising public concern and would take steps “to ensure this doesn’t happen again,” she said.
JAPAN
Billionaire looking for love
Billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has launched an online advertisement for a girlfriend to fly around the moon with him on a SpaceX rocket. Maezawa is seeking “single women aged 20 or over” who want to enjoy life to the fullest. The matchmaking exercise is to be turned into a TV show for a Web streaming service. “I’m 44 now. As feelings of loneliness and emptiness slowly begin to surge upon me, there’s one thing that I think about: Continuing to love one woman,” he said in the ad. The deadline to apply is Friday and he is to make a final selection by the end of March after going on dates with the applicants.
AFGHANISTAN
Winter storms prove deadly
Severe winter weather has struck parts of the nation with heavy snowfall, rains and flash floods that left at least 18 dead, officials said yesterday. Most highways were closed due to heavy snowfall and fears of avalanches. The severe weather also killed at least 25 people in Pakistan, where Baluchistan and Punjab provinces were the hardest hit, as many roofs collapsed under the weight of the snow.
VATICAN CITY
Benedict defends celibacy
Former pope Benedict, in a new book written with a conservative cardinal, defends priestly celibacy in the Catholic Church in what appears to be a strategically timed appeal to Pope Francis to not change the rules. Benedict wrote From the Depths of Our Hearts with Cardinal Robert Sarah, who heads the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. Excerpts were published on Sunday on the Web site of the French newspaper Le Figaro. The Vatican had no immediate comment on the book, which was due to be published yesterday.
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