PAKISTAN
Bombings kill five
A pair of bombings targeting police in Peshawar yesterday killed five people, including a senior police officer. In the most deadly attack, a suicide bomber struck a vehicle carrying Rasheed Khan, the deputy superintendent of police in southern Peshawar, killing him and three others, including his driver, one of his guards and a passer-by, police official Shafqat Malik said. Seven people were wounded in the attack, which took place on the outskirts of Peshawar, he said. Less than three hours later, a roadside bomb hit a police vehicle on patrol, killing one policeman and wounding three others, police official Fazle Wahid said. The bombing took place several kilometers away from the first attack.
JAPAN
Ozawa charged over scandal
Ruling party powerbroker Ichiro Ozawa was charged yesterday over a funding scandal, a court spokesman said, a widely expected judicial move that could widen a rift in the ruling party over whether he should leave the party. Ozawa’s indictment will give fresh ammunition to opposition parties who control parliament’s upper house and are refusing to join multiparty talks on tax reform to curb the country’s huge debt. They are instead trying to force Prime Minister Naoto Kan to either resign or call a snap election for the powerful lower chamber.
SRI LANKA
News offices set alight
Unidentified attackers in Colombo set ablaze the offices of an anti-establishment news Web site yesterday. The lankaenews.com premises were torched in a pre-dawn attack, but there were no reports of casualties, a police officer at the scene said. Yesterday’s attack appeared similar to the July burning of a private television station, Siyatha, in Colombo. In January 2009, another independent television station, Maharaja Television, was bombed by an unidentified group of people. A spokesman for President Mahinda Rajapakse’s office said he had ordered police to carry out a thorough investigation.
NEW ZEALAND
Jackson in stable condition
Lord of the Rings director Sir Peter Jackson is in stable condition in the intensive care unit of Wellington Hospital after surgery for a perforated ulcer. Publicist Melissa Booth said yesterday that Jackson was “doing well,” but would be in the hospital for at least a few more days. She said doctors expect Jackson to make a full recovery. He was admitted to Wellington Hospital on Wednesday after complaining of acute stomach pains.
BOLIVIA
Flood claims 34 lives
At least 34 people were killed when a river near Pampahuas burst its banks, sweeping away a passenger bus and a truck, authorities said on Sunday. Bodies have been washing up on the banks of the Mollepunku River since the incident late on Friday near the town, which is 700km southeast of La Paz, police said. The passenger bus had been carrying 39 people, and regional police commander Iver Marquez said the truck was carrying two people at the time of the accident, indicating the final death toll may rise. Firefighters were on the scene recovering bodies and locating any survivors, Marquez said.
VENEZUELA
Military arms depot explodes
A fire and a series of explosions tore through a military arms depot on Sunday, killing one person and leading authorities to evacuate thousands of people. About 10,000 residents fled their homes in areas up to several kilometers from the site as the burning ammunition produced powerful blasts, officials said. The cause of the pre-dawn fire was unclear. Hours after the initial explosions, faint booms could still be heard in the distance as clouds of white smoke rose from the area alongside hills in Maracay, 100km west of Caracas. Vice President Elias Jaua said state television that authorities were investigating — and suggested they weren’t ruling out sabotage.
IRAN
Porn site operators get death
The courts on Sunday sentenced two people to death for running porn sites, Prosecutor General Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi said, according to the IRNA news agency. “Two administrators of porn sites have been sentenced to death in two different [court] branches and [the verdicts] have been sent to the supreme court for confirmation,” Dolatabadi said, without naming the two convicts. In December last year, Canada expressed concern about the reported death sentence handed down to an Iranian-born Canadian resident for allegedly designing an adult Web site.
ISRAEL
Activist jailed nine years
A court sentenced an Israeli-Arab human rights activist to nine years in prison on Sunday after convicting him last year of spying for the Lebanese organization Hezbollah. Amir Makhoul had confessed to the spying charge as part of a plea bargain at Haifa District Court, which added a further year’s suspended sentence to the nine years behind bars. Makhoul initially pleaded not guilty, but agreed to enter a new plea in exchange for reduced charges and to drop his previous complaints of maltreatment while under interrogation. In October last year, the three-judge panel at the Haifa court found Makhoul guilty of passing information to Hezbollah on the location of several secret installations in Israel and of passing information on various other matters to the group.
UNITED KINGDOM
Composer John Barry dies
Oscar-winning composer John Barry, who wrote the scores to Out of Africa, Dances With Wolves and numerous Bond films, has died at the age of 77, the BBC reported yesterday, citing relatives. John Barry Prendergast died of a heart attack, the broadcaster said.Barry won five Oscars for his work on Out of Africa, Dances With Wolves, The Lion in Winter and Born Free, for which he won best song and best music score.He also composed scores for a string of James Bond films, among them Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice.
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
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
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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