■MALAYSIA
Judge rejects Anwar’s bid
A judge yesterday refused to let opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim see statements made to the police by the man who accuses him of sodomy, dealing another blow to his beleaguered defense. Anwar, 62, denies the charge, calling it a plot by the administration to cripple his opposition coalition. High Court Judge Mohamad Zabidin Diah ruled that there was no basis for the defense to obtain statements that Anwar’s former aide, Saiful Bukhari Azlan, made to police in 2008 — statements that Anwar’s team said would show Saiful had changed his story.
■JAPAN
Ozawa under probe: Kyodo
Prosecutors are seeking to question ruling party kingpin Ichiro Ozawa over a political funding scandal, Kyodo news agency said yesterday, in a possible blow to the Democratic Party ahead of an upper house election. The party needs to win a majority in the election, expected in July, to avoid policy stalemate as the country tries to bolster a fragile economic recovery. Prosecutors are seeking to question Ozawa as party secretary-general following a judicial panel’s decision last month that he should be charged over a scandal, Kyodo said.
■PAKISTAN
Grenade kills two girls
Two girls were killed yesterday when a hand grenade exploded while they were playing on the outskirts of Peshawar, police said. The incident took place in the Khazana area where small children were playing on a building site. “An unknown person threw a hand grenade at a house under construction in Khazana, killing two girls aged four and six,” senior police official Mohammad Karim Khan said.
■UNITED STATES
Biden’s son hospitalized
Vice President Joe Biden’s oldest son, Delaware Attorney-General Beau Biden, had a mild stroke on Tuesday and was transferred to a Philadelphia hospital from the Deleware hospital he had initially been taken to, authorities said. Beau Biden, 41, will undergo further tests at the Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia and was expected to recover, doctors said. He returned last year from a year-long deployment to Iraq with his Army National Guard unit, where he served as a military lawyer.
■MEXICO
Bridegroom found dead
Police have found the decomposing bodies of a bridegroom, his brother and an uncle dumped in a van on Monday after they were abducted from a wedding in Ciudad Juarez. Inhabitants of a residential area alerted authorities to a nauseating smell coming from the abandoned van, where police found the three bodies and another unidentified corpse. The four bodies were handcuffed, tied at the feet, with plastic bags over their heads, a police source said. Eight armed men stormed a church on Friday and dragged the three men away. They shot dead another man who tried to flee as they arrived outside.
■CANADA
Fundraiser pleads guilty
A Sri Lankan immigrant pleaded guilty on Tuesday to charges that he helped raise money for the Tamil Tigers militia. Prapaharan Thambithurai, now a Canadian citizen, was the first person convicted under the Anti-Terrorism Financing law, British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Robert Powers said. The law was enacted after the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the US. Thambithurai acknowledged raising money from Tamil immigrants for the World Tamil Movement, but admitted knowing that some of the money would end up funding the Tamil Tigers. He was arrested in March 2008. Outside court, Thambithurai, 46, said Canadian Tamils “failed to teach the Canadian government the Tigers are not terrorists … The Sri Lankan government are terrorists. He will be sentenced tomorrow.
■CANADA
Sinkhole bodies recovered
The bodies of all four members of a family who went missing after their house was swallowed by a gaping sinkhole northeast of Montreal have been found. The family was in their basement cheering on the Montreal Canadiens in their Stanley Cup playoff game against the Pittsburgh Penguins when the massive landslide hit on Monday night in Saint-Jude, a town of 1,000 near the Yamaska River. The first body found belonged to father Richard Prefontaine. The others were his wife Lynne Charbonneau and daughters Anais, 9, and Amelie, believed to be 11. The landslide tore a hole more than four times the size of a football field.
■BRAZIL
Pre-dinosaur fossils found
Paleontologists announced on Tuesday they discovered the well-preserved and near-complete fossils of a pre-dinosaur predator that lived some 238 million years ago. The creature, a Prestosuchus chiniquensis, was about 7m long, weighed 900kg and lived in the Triassic Period (250 million to 200 million years ago), paleontologists from the Lutheran University of Brazil said. The remains were found in a sedimentary rock formation that was a lake millions of years ago. Paleontologists believe that herbivore creatures stopped to drink at the site and were ambushed by carnivores such as the Prestosuchus.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
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
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
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