Protesters angry at Sri Lanka’s offensive against Tamil Tiger rebels broke into and vandalized the Indian embassy in central London on Monday, police said.
A similar move against the Sri Lankan embassy near London’s Hyde Park was thwarted, but the capital’s Metropolitan Police said two officers were injured in the clashes. Six protesters were arrested at both locations.
MISSILES
“They pushed through [police] and entered the reception area. Some of the building’s windows were damaged and missiles thrown at the building itself,” a police spokeswoman said, describing the protest at India House, home to the Indian High Commission.
Police said on Monday afternoon that the 250 or so protesters outside the Sri Lankan embassy had dispersed, while the 175 people or so people gathered outside the Indian embassy left later in the evening as workers moved in to fix the damage.
PROTESTS ABROAD
Tamils and their supporters across the world have mounted a series of demonstrations demanding an immediate end to fighting between Sri Lankan forces and Tamil Tiger separatists after the government largely cornered the rebels in a small strip of land along the northeast coast.
The move puts the Sri Lankan government in a position to defeat the Tigers and end the country’s quarter-century civil war, but the UN says thousands of civilians have been killed in the fighting over the past three months.
HUNGER STRIKES
In Britain, the former colonial power in Sri Lanka, protests included a mass march by at least 100,000 people on April 11, as well as hunger strikes and at least two attempts by protesters to set themselves on fire.
A group of Tamil supporters has been camped outside parliament since April 6.
India, home to a large population of ethnic Tamils, has sent envoys to try to demand a halt to the fighting, but Sri Lanka still rejects talk of ceasefire.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
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
RSS