■VIETNAM
Paracel ‘president’ named
The nation yesterday named a “president” for the government body overseeing the disputed Paracel islands, which are occupied by China, an official and press reports said. “It’s a matter of the sacred earth of the homeland ... and we are going to continue our struggle to defend the integrity and the maritime sovereignty of the islands,” Dang Cong Ngu was quoted as saying by the VNExpress news Web site. China has administered the islands, also claimed by Taiwan, since 1974 when its troops overran a South Vietnamese outpost shortly before the end of the Vietnam War. Ngu was named president of the Paracel district People’s Committee at a ceremony in central Danang, a civic official in the city said.
■INDIA
Rahul Gandhi: No to PM
Rahul Gandhi, scion of the country’s most powerful family dynasty and touted as a future prime minister, yesterday said he would refuse to accept the top job if it was offered to him after the general elections. The 38-year-old Gandhi, whose father, grandmother and great grandfather were all prime ministers, is backed by some senior Congress leaders and millions of supporters to take over the top job, replacing current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. “I would refuse to be [the prime minister],” Gandhi told reporters in Calcutta, adding that he was not shirking any responsibility by saying no. “I don’t have the experience.” The country is holding a month-long election process, staggered over five stages, with experts saying the result, which will be known on May 16, could produce a weak coalition.
■AUSTRALIA
Refugee boat captured
Local authorities yesterday intercepted a boat carrying 54 illegal immigrants near Ashmore Reef off the north coast. It was the eighth refugee boat to arrive so far this year, one more than the tally for the whole of last year. The 54 asylum seekers and two crew members were stopped 900km from Darwin and taken aboard the patrol boat HMAS Albany. They are being transported to Christmas Island for processing. On Wednesday 32 Sri Lankan migrants arrived off the west coast. The week before that there was an explosion aboard an Indonesian fishing vessel carrying mostly Afghan immigrants off the west coast in which five people died and dozens were injured. The wooden boat carrying 47 refugees and two Indonesian crew members went up in flames while being escorted to Christmas Island by a navy vessel.
■HONG KONG
Students oust union chief
Students at a leading Hong Kong university voted to oust its union president for controversial remarks on China’s bloody crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests. The poll result released yesterday signifies that the crackdown remains a sensitive issue in the territory, where sympathy ran high for the demonstrators. In a series of activities to mark the 20th anniversary of the uprising, the president of University of Hong Kong’s student union, Ayo Chan, drew criticism from students for saying the military crackdown in Beijing could have been avoided had protesters dispersed peacefully. Local media also quoted Chan, a 20-year-old social sciences student, as saying that some protesters were “runaway student leaders.” Among 2,668 students who voted in the three-day poll, 1,592 voted for the removal of Chan — well above the required 10 percent of students needed to oust the union president. Some 949 voted against.
■SPAIN
PM defends Sarkozy
Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said on Friday he had “no problem” with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, dismissing reports that the French leader had questioned his intelligence. “I have very good relations with Nicolas Sarkozy and I know that any comment he may have made about me would be positive,” Zapatero said, in an interview with the French daily Le Monde. Last week, Sarkozy was forced to deny reports he had disparaged Zapatero at a lunch meeting with French lawmakers, during a playful attack on his French Socialist opposition. “Perhaps he’s not very clever but I know people who were very clever and who didn’t make the second round of the presidential election,” sources quoted Sarkozy as saying of Zapatero.
■GERMANY
Bomb causes evacuation
Police say a World War II bomb uncovered during construction at the Neues Museum in central Berlin has caused evacuations and traffic jams. Police would not confirm reports that the apartment of Chancellor Angela Merkel, who lives nearby, needed to be evacuated. A Berlin police statement said the 100kg unexploded bomb appeared to be a type used by the Russians during the war.
■GERMANY
Abandoned kids return
Three young children — abandoned in an Italian pizzeria after their mother and her companion ran out of cash — arrived home on Friday in Germany, where they have been made wards of court, authorities in the district of Olpe said. Two child protection officials from Olpe, east of Cologne, had traveled the day before to Aosta in Italy to pick them up. Authorities said the boys, 10 months and six years old, and the girl, four, were unharmed. The mother, 26, and her male companion, 24, were located in woods near Aosta on Thursday. They said they considered themselves financially unable to care for the children, whose biological father is in prison for a fatal assault on the couple’s fourth child. The mother was released by Italian police, but her new partner, a prison inmate who had failed to return to his German jail from two days’ furlough, remained in Italian custody on Friday.
■ITALY
Quake zone to host G8 talks
G8 partners have welcomed Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s decision to move July’s summit from the Mediterranean island of La Maddalena to the earthquake-hit city of L’Aquila, an Italian official said on Friday. Berlusconi made the surprise announcement on Thursday, saying the change of venue would save money and show solidarity with the people of L’Aquila, where 296 people were killed on April 6.
■GERMANY
Toads sing kara-croak-e
Forget the Eurovision song contest. The most hotly-awaited international music competition of the year takes place in Germany on May 10 — the second annual international toad song contest. Fire-bellied toads from Denmark, Germany, Latvia and Sweden will croak it out for the coveted prize, won last time by Sweden “in the glorious tradition of ABBA,” says the nature protection society in Schleswig-Holstein state. The competitors sound like “church bells underwater” when they break out in song and “sing out of love — like in any good opera,” the society said. In the wild, males enter their own singing contest every spring to attract mates. The competition — to be telecast on the Internet — is to raise awareness of the state’s endangered species.
■UNITED STATES
Mother accused of murder
A woman was arrested on Thursday for allegedly murdering her one-year-old daughter, dumping her body along a highway and telling authorities the child was kidnapped. Stacey Barker, 24, has been under investigation since her toddler was found on March 20 in tall grass a few blocks from a Los Angeles highway. The woman initially reported being knocked out by someone while putting young Emma into her car and waking up to find the child missing. She later recanted the story and claimed the child died in an accident. “Investigators discovered several inconsistencies in her story almost immediately,” said Steve Whitmore, spokesman for the Los Angeles County sheriff’s office.
■UNITED STATES
Israel-bound plane diverted
A Delta Air Lines flight from New York to Tel Aviv, Israel, has been diverted to Boston after an unruly passenger rushed the cockpit. Phil Orlandella, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Port Authority, says the 22-year-old Israeli man ran toward the cockpit and pounded on the door. He says passengers and crew helped to subdue the man. The passengers were being held in Boston as investigators interview them and check their luggage. No other flights have been affected. Anthony Black, a spokesman for Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines Inc, said Flight 86 had 206 passengers and 11 crew members aboard when it landed Friday night at Logan Airport. The plane had left New York about two hours earlier.
■MEXICO
Nine bodies found at resort
The bullet-riddled bodies of nine men have been found in and around the Mexican resort of Acapulco. Guerrero state police said in a statement that the bodies of five men were found in a sport utility vehicle parked near a highway connecting Acapulco and Zihuatenejo. The men had their hands and feet bound. In Acapulco, another man was found shot twice in the head. Three other bodies were located outside the city. Two of the victims were found in an empty lot in Coyuca de Catalan. The third victim was found shot to death in Ayutla de los Libres. All were found on Friday.
■COLOMBIA
FARC suspect arrested
Venezuelan authorities deported to Colombia a man believed to be a member of its largest guerrilla group, officials said on Friday. The man, Yeiner Esneider Acosta Pena, was deported on Thursday night, telling authorities that he wanted to leave his rebel group, said Henry Corredor, director of the DAS state security agency in the Guajira region. A suspected member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Acosta was arrested for possessing a false Venezuelan identification card, said Odalis Caldera, public security director in Venezuela’s western Zulia state.
■VENEZUELA
Seven bodies found at base
The bodies of seven people, including three children, have been found in an apartment on a military base. The attorney general’s office said in a statement on Friday that police found the bodies of a sergeant, his wife and three children — ages 12, seven and three — along with two neighbors: another sergeant and the woman he lived with. It said a letter was found in the apartment that appears to explain events leading up to the deaths, but police did not reveal what it said. Investigators have yet to determine what caused the deaths at Fort Tiuna in Caracas. The seven are believed to have died on Wednesday.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
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