INDIA
Mogul gives villages billions
Technology mogul Azim Premji has announced he will donate nearly US$2 billion to fund education and development programs in villages in one of the largest charitable donations in the country’s history. Premji, chairman of Wipro Ltd, India’s third-largest software services exporter, said on Wednesday he would transfer 213 million shares worth 88.4 billion rupees (US$1.95 billion) in the company to the Azim Premji Foundation by Tuesday. The trust is controlled by Premji, and he will continue to retain the voting rights of the transferred shares, the foundation and the company said in separate statements.
The foundation will use the new infusion of money to fund education programs and other initiatives in rural India as well as a new university it is establishing in Bangalore.
THAILAND
Passport forgery ring busted
Authorities in Thailand say at least some of the suspects arrested this week in Spain and Thailand in connection with an international ring that provided forged passports to terrorists may have passed fake documents to the perpetrators of the 2004 Madrid bombings. Authorities in Bangkok said yesterday the 10 suspects — seven in Spain and three in Thailand — belong to a group that received stolen passports, doctored them in the kingdom and then distributed them to terror groups.
UNITED KINGDOM
War crimes law changed
London sought to soothe strained ties with Israel on Wednesday by publishing an amendment to a law that puts visiting officials at risk of arrest for alleged war crimes. Foreign Secretary William Hague said the change would ensure that private arrest warrants for offenses under certain international laws, including as the Geneva Convention, would first have to be approved by the chief prosecutor. The move was welcomed by Israel, whose politicians and officials have been targeted by warrants brought by local pro-Palestinian campaign groups.
HONG KONG
Jewelers buy bogus bullion
Jewelers and pawn shops have been hammered by a gold scam after unwittingly buying hundreds of ounces of bogus bullion, the Financial Times reported yesterday. “It’s a very good fake,” Haywood Cheung (張德熙), president of the Chinese Gold and Silver Exchange Society, the territory’s gold exchange, told the paper. Cheung said jewelers and pawn shops have discovered at least 200 ounces of fake bullion — worth about US$280,000 — so far this year. Among the fakes was a specimen with a pure gold coating that masked a complex alloy with similar properties to the precious metal, suggesting fraudsters used sophisticated techniques and equipment, the report said.
UNITED STATES
Man linked to slaying dies
A man police called a “person of interest” in the slaying of Hollywood publicist Ronni Chasen shot and killed himself at a Los Angeles residential hotel on Wednesday as Beverly Hills detectives served a search warrant, authorities said. The detectives were serving the warrant at the Harvey Apartments in Hollywood at about 6pm when the man shot himself, police said. The man, whose name was not released, died at the scene. Beverly Hills police Chief David Snowden told The Associated Press in an e-mail that the man “was a person of interest only” in Chasen’s death.
‘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
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
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
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