AUSTRALIA
Import of NZ apples allowed
The government agreed yesterday to allow the import of New Zealand apples for the first time in almost 90 years, but said it would first review quarantine to make sure they were free of pests. The government lost its appeal overnight against a WTO ruling that it should accept the New Zealand fruit, forcing the export-dependent nation to give up the long-running fight. Australian Agriculture Minister Joe Ludwig said the government would now conduct a review of the import risks posed by New Zealand apples, a process which could take the best part of a year. New Zealand Prime Minister John Key said his country had scored a “resounding victory” and he hoped Australia would not “play games” with unfair quarantine measures designed to bypass the decision.
PAKISTAN
Police station bombed
A suicide bomber blew himself up near a police station in the northwest of the country yesterday, killing a child and three other people, officials said. The attack occurred in the town of Bannu, which lies close to Pakistan’s lawless tribal belt on the Afghan border, an area which Washington has branded al-Qaeda’s global headquarters and the most dangerous region on Earth. “It was a suicide attack. The bomber came on foot and detonated himself near a police van close to a police station,” Bannu police chief Iftikhar Khan said.
CHINA
Activist detained for picture
The wife of a Chinese activist says he has been detained on a subversion charge after posting a photo from the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations online. Yang Dan (楊丹) says her husband, Bai Dongping (白東平), was taken away on Saturday and Beijing police called her on Sunday to tell her why. She said yesterday he has never been detained before and she doesn’t know why her husband put the photo on the Internet. Bai’s detention comes shortly after a Chinese woman was sentenced to a year in a labor camp for posting a satirical Twitter message about smashing the Japan pavilion at the Shanghai Expo.
INDIA
Duo eyed for sedition
Police were investigating yesterday whether a Booker Prize-winning author and a hard-line Kashmiri separatist leader can be tried for sedition for questioning India’s claim to disputed Kashmir. Author Arundhati Roy and separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani are accused of saying that Kashmir was not an integral part of India during speeches at a seminar in New Delhi last month. A court in the capital ordered police to look into the case after a complaint was filed by a private citizen. Sedition carries a possible life sentence.
CHINA
Twitter-like site back up
An early Chinese clone of micro-blog site Twitter that was shut down by authorities last year amid fears it was fanning unrest in the country’s restive west has re-emerged. Fanfou, which is widely believed to have been the first Chinese provider of such micro-blogging services, was restored last on Thursday, the Beijing Evening Post reported. Fanfou had more than 1 million users before it was forced to go offline in July last year during a government crackdown on social networking after deadly riots in Urumqi, capital of the northwestern Xinjiang region. Bill Bishop, who blogs on China’s Internet, said it was unclear why Fanfou would be allowed to restart now.
UNITED KINGDOM
Bad sex prize awarded
Author Rowan Somerville won literature’s little-coveted Bad Sex in Fiction Prize on Monday for the use of unsettling insect imagery in his novel The Shape of Her. Judges of the annual literary award said they were especially impressed by a passage comparing lovemaking to “a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect.” The prize, founded in 1993 by Literary Review magazine, aims to draw attention to “the crude, tasteless and often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in contemporary novels.” Somerville took his victory in good humor, noting that “there is nothing more English than bad sex.”
PERU
Inmate killed girlfriend: police
A Dutchman imprisoned in Lima for drug trafficking murdered his girlfriend during a visit and walled up her body in his jail cell, police said on Monday. Authorities discovered the body of 22-year-old Leslie Paredes Silva three months later. Jason Sanford Stalig Conquet, 32, confessed to his crime when prison guards asked him about the odor emanating from a concrete ledge he had built into a corner of his cell to hide her body, they said. The head of the national prison system told RPP radio that Stalig Conquet received a visit from Paredes in the Lurigancho prison sometime in August. “Apparently they had an argument inside [the cell] and he ended up strangling her,” Wilson Hernandez said.
KENYA
Panic after PM’s comments
An official with the country’s largest gay rights organization said there is panic among its members following remarks made by Prime Minister Raila Odinga that homosexuals should be arrested. The office of the Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya received calls from concerned members, some of whom are HIV-positive and fear they will be arrested when they collect life-prolonging medicine from government clinics, board member Nguru Karugu said on Monday. Odinga on Sunday said homosexuals who are found in the midst of sex acts would be arrested. In an audio recording of the speech, Odinga said in Kiswahili that “if a man is caught having sex with the other we jail them, or if a girl is caught with the other ... we will jail them.” He later used profanity to explain lesbianism.
UNITED STATES
Obama recovers, plays again
After a rough game of hoops left him with a busted lip last week, President Barack Obama said his return to the basketball court was less traumatic because his opponents — his two young daughters — “took it easy on me.” During a basketball game on Friday, a player accidentally elbowed Obama in the face, requiring him to get 12 stitches to repair the resulting injury to his mouth. “Although Washington is supposed to be a town of sharp elbows, it’s getting a little carried away,” he said. By Sunday, Obama said he had recovered well enough to trade shots with daughters Malia and Sasha.
EGYPT
Elections draw US concerns
Washington is raising serious questions about the fairness of last weekend’s parliamentary elections, saying it is disappointed by reports of voter intimidation, arrests of opposition supporters and a ban on independent vote monitors in the close US ally. In a statement on Monday, US Department of State spokesman P.J. Crowley said the Egyptian people would not have confidence in their elections until the government allows opposition candidates to campaign freely and permit observers to inspect the polls.
UNITED STATES
Anchor man in trouble
The FBI says a California man who says he was drunk dropped anchor on a moving cruise ship. According to an FBI affidavit posted on Monday on The Smoking Gun Web site, passenger Rick Ehlert entered a restricted area and released the rear anchor on Holland America’s MS Ryndam. It was heading from Costa Maya, Mexico, to Tampa, Florida. Ehlert is in custody and faces federal charges of attempting to damage a vessel and endangering a ship’s safe navigation. The ship was not damaged but the FBI says the anchor could have punctured the ship and caused it to sink or severely flood.
MEXICO
Spanish set to boom
By 2050, 10 percent of the world population will be speaking Spanish, Cuban linguist Humberto Lopez Morales said on Monday at a book fair in Guadalajara. “The projections couldn’t make us happier,” the head of the association of Spanish language academies told his audience after he received a special prize at the fair for his book on the evolution of the Spanish language throughout the world. Lopez said that thanks to the growing Spanish-speaking population in the US, the language of Don Quixote will also increase proportionally worldwide. He said the Spanish language will go from 450 million speakers at present — or 6.5 percent of the world’s 6.9 billion population — to 10 percent of a UN-estimated global population of nine billion by mid-century.
UNITED STATES
Trio charged for hate crime
Three former McDonald’s employees in New Mexico have become the first people in the nation to be prosecuted under a new federal hate crimes law. The men allegedly shaped a coat hanger into a swastika, placed it on a heated stove and branded the symbol on the arm of a mentally disabled Navajo man. Authorities say the men then shaved a swastika on the back of the victim’s head and used markers to scrawl messages on his body, including “KKK” and “White Power.”
UNITED STATES
Agents in the right: Holder
Attorney General Eric Holder said on Monday that federal agents acted properly in the case of a Somali-American man who allegedly tried to blow up what he thought was a van full of explosives in Portland, Oregon, during the city’s Christmas tree lighting ceremony. The FBI set up a sting operation to investigate Mohamed Osman Mohamud after receiving a tip. Holder rejected the suggestion that Mohamud was a victim of illegal entrapment by the FBI. Once the undercover operation began, the suspect “chose at every step to continue” with the bombing plot, Holder said. “He was told that children — children — were potentially going to be harmed,” the attorney general said.
UNITED STATES
Man sentenced over attack
A federal judge in Virginia sentenced a Somali man to 30 years in prison on Monday after he pleaded guilty to his role in an April attack on a US Navy vessel off the coast of Africa. Jama Idle Ibrahim was sentenced on three charges related to the April 10 attack on the USS Ashland amphibious dock landing ship: attacking to plunder a vessel, engaging in an act of violence against persons on a vessel and using a firearm during a crime of violence. Ibrahim and five other Somalis allegedly mistook the Ashland for a merchant vessel. “Today marks the first sentencing in Norfolk for acts of piracy in more than 150 years,” US Attorney Neil MacBride said in a statement.
Romania’s electoral commission on Saturday excluded a second far-right hopeful, Diana Sosoaca, from May’s presidential election, amid rising tension in the run-up to the May rerun of the poll. Earlier this month, Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau barred Calin Georgescu, an independent who was polling at about 40 percent ahead of the rerun election. Georgescu, a fierce EU and NATO critic, shot to prominence in November last year when he unexpectedly topped a first round of presidential voting. However, Romania’s constitutional court annulled the election after claims of Russian interference and a “massive” social media promotion in his favor. On Saturday, an electoral commission statement
Chinese authorities increased pressure on CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd over its plan to sell its Panama ports stake by sharing a second newspaper commentary attacking the deal. The Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office on Saturday reposted a commentary originally published in Ta Kung Pao, saying the planned sale of the ports by the Hong Kong company had triggered deep concerns among Chinese people and questioned whether the deal was harming China and aiding evil. “Why were so many important ports transferred to ill-intentioned US forces so easily? What kind of political calculations are hidden in the so-called commercial behavior on the
‘DOWNSIZE’: The Trump administration has initiated sweeping cuts to US government-funded media outlets in a move critics said could undermine the US’ global influence US President Donald Trump’s administration on Saturday began making deep cuts to Voice of America (VOA) and other government-run, pro-democracy programming, with the organization’s director saying all VOA employees have been put on leave. On Friday night, shortly after the US Congress passed its latest funding bill, Trump directed his administration to reduce the functions of several agencies to the minimum required by law. That included the US Agency for Global Media, which houses Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Asia and Radio Marti, which beams Spanish-language news into Cuba. On Saturday morning, Kari Lake, a former Arizona gubernatorial and US
Indonesia’s parliament yesterday amended a law to allow members of the military to hold more government roles, despite criticisms that it would expand the armed forces’ role in civilian affairs. The revision to the armed forces law, pushed mainly by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s coalition, was aimed at expanding the military’s role beyond defense in a country long influenced by its armed forces. The amendment has sparked fears of a return to the era of former Indonesian president Suharto, who ex-general Prabowo once served and who used military figures to crack down on dissent. “Now it’s the time for us to ask the
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