■TURKEY
Warships save vessel
Turkish and Danish warships intercepted an attack by pirates on a Vietnamese cargo ship in the Gulf of Aden, the Turkish army chief of staff said yesterday. Two Turkish helicopters helped repel Sunday’s attack off Yemen’s southern coast after the Vietnamese boat issued a distress signal, an army statement said.
■SAUDI ARABIA
Iran urged not to interfere
Saudi Arabia’s top diplomat on Sunday urged Iran to stay out of internal Arab disputes, in particular in Lebanon and among the Palestinians. Iran’s foreign minister made a surprise visit to Saudi Arabia amid rising tensions between the Islamic republic and the Arab world. Manouchehr Mottaki was met by his Saudi counterpart, Prince Saud al-Faisal, at Riyadh Air Force base and met later with the Saudi monarch. The visit comes after Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria held a mini-summit in Riyadh last week to patch up their differences, which largely revolve around the role of Iran in the region. Iran supports Islamist movements Hamas and Hezbollah and is often at odds with US-allied Arab regimes in the region. Arab nations such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia are also wary of Iran’s nuclear program. At a news conference on Sunday, al-Faisal called for “mutual respect” between his nation and Iran. “Although we appreciate the Iranian concern in Arab issues, from our point of view, this should be conducted through the legitimate Arab doorways,” he said.
■SOMALIA
Gunmen kidnap aid workers
Gunmen kidnapped four humanitarian workers, one thought to be foreign, in southern Somalia yesterday, a humanitarian source said, in the latest attack on aid workers. “The aid workers were in transit in Wajid, where they spent the night on the way from Puntland. They were taken early on Monday morning,” a UN worker, who declined to be named, said. He said some worked for the UN World Food Program.
■IRAN
Group claims harassment
An opposition movement says Iraqi troops have been preventing food and fuel from entering its camp north of Baghdad for the past four days. A statement by the People’s Mujahedeen Organization of Iran said the move against Camp Ashraf is part of a pattern of harassment that has escalated under pressure from Tehran. The Iranian government considers the People’s Mujahedeen a terrorist group and has insisted that they leave Iraq. The government has assured the US that none of the estimated 4,000 residents of the camp would be forced to return to Iran.
■PHILIPPINES
Kidnappers’ leader wounded
Fighting erupted yesterday between troops and Muslim militants holding captive three international Red Cross staff on a southern island, wounding the leader of the kidnappers, the military said. The fighting erupted when the rebels tried to break through a cordon of soldiers on Jolo island, 1,000km south of Manila. The cordon was set up to prevent the guerrillas from spiriting their hostages out of Jolo. Lieutenant Colonel Edgard Arevalo, a navy spokesman, said Abu Sayyaf Commander Albader Parad was hit by a sniper when the group tried to move out. The fighting was ongoing, said Lieutenant Nelson Allaga, a regional military chief. A military source said the hostages, staff of the International Committee of the Red Cross, were spotted when the firefight broke out. “The hostages were seen and were not harmed,” the source said.
■UNITED STATES
Sheriff hit by identity theft
“This goes to show that no one’s immune from identity theft,” said Sheriff Mark Pazin of Merced County, California. And he should know. On Thursday, while his deputies were searching the home of a woman accused of forging checks, they discovered on her computer the copied signature of their boss. Investigators said the woman, Christina Valenti, 34, lifted Pazin’s signature from a standard check given to departing inmates to reimburse them for pocket money confiscated during booking. She had uploaded the signature to a check-writing program, investigators said. For the sheriff, it was the second time in two years that his personal finances had been in danger. A year ago, someone charged about US$100 to his credit card. “I do take it personally and that’s why she’s in jail with US$300,000 bail,” Pazin said of Valenti.
■MEXICO
Soldier killed in accident
A soldier was killed and five others were injured in a car accident when returning from Ciudad Juarez, where the military has stepped up its counternarcotics operations, officials said on Sunday. The injured included a corporal in critical condition as well as a colonel, a sergeant and two soldiers in stable condition, the Ministry of Defense said in a statement. The soldiers’ van overturned in the northern-central state of Zacatecas “as they traveled from Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua to Mexico City after having participated in operations in the state of Chihuahua,” the statement said. The soldiers were part of a detachment of 2,200 troops being replaced this weekend with a reinforcement of 5,000 troops.
■UNITED STATES
Ron Silver dies aged 62
Actor Ron Silver, who won a Tony Award as a take-no-prisoners Hollywood producer in David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow and did a political about-face from loyal Democrat to Republican activist after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, died on Sunday at the age of 62. “Ron Silver died peacefully in his sleep with his family around him early Sunday morning” in New York City, said Robin Bronk, executive director of the Creative Coalition, which Silver helped found. “He had been fighting esophageal cancer for two years.”
■MEXICO
‘Emos’ suffer discrimination
The National Human Rights Commission said that followers of the youth music and fashion trend known as “emo” have suffered discrimination and violence, and recommended sensitivity training to prevent it. Emos wear long bangs and skinny pants and listen to angst-ridden music. The youths were heckled and harassed in a pair of incidents in the center of the country early last year, aggressions apparently fueled by an Internet hate campaign by other youths. The government rights commission says an investigation shows emos “have suffered violence and discrimination both by authorities and the public at large.”
■SUDAN
Aid groups thrown out
President Omar Hassan al-Bashir said yesterday he had ordered that all international aid groups should stop distributing aid inside the country within a year. “We have ordered the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs to completely Sudanize the voluntary work in Sudan within one year and after that no international organizations will distribute relief to Sudanese citizens,” Bashir told a rally of armed forces. “They can just leave their food aid at the airport and Sudanese NGOs [non-governmental organizations] can distribute the relief.”
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees