ISRAEL
Holocaust remembered
The eerie wail of air raid sirens has brought the ordinarily bustling nation to a halt, marking two minutes of silence in memory of the 6 million Jews who perished during the Nazi Holocaust. Cars stopped in their tracks and millions of people stood in an annual tribute to the dead. Sounding a common theme in recent years, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has drawn a parallel between the Nazis who sought to exterminate the Jewish people and Iran’s talk of the nation’s destruction. Restaurants and places of entertainment were closed. About 200,000 aged survivors of the Nazi genocide live in the country.
CHINA
Sea surveillance to increase
Beijing is stepping up its maritime surveillance by hiring more staff and increasing the number of inspection ships, state media said yesterday, amid deep-sea territorial disputes with neighboring nations. China Marine Surveillance, the nation’s ocean monitoring agency, will hire more than 1,000 people this year, raising staff numbers to “at least 10,000,” the official China Daily reported. It will also buy 36 inspection ships over the next five years, the newspaper said.
HONG KONG
Senior fights off muggers
An 81-year-old man single-handedly fought off a gang of teenage muggers, police said yesterday, with eight youths arrested and some requiring hospital treatment. The elderly man, only identified as Mak, was assaulted by the gang aged between 15 and 19 in a pedestrian tunnel during the 4am incident when he was on his way to do morning exercises. He was attacked from behind. “They pushed him to the ground and tried to rob him. The man fought back and the gang ran away empty-handed,” a police spokeswoman said. Some of the teenage suspects, five boys and three girls, sustained cuts and minor injuries after the man put up a fierce fight. Police later traced a trail of blood to a nearby apartment and detained the teenagers. The injured were taken to hospital for treatment. “They are still being detained and under investigation for assault with intent to rob,” the spokeswoman said.
VIETNAM
Publisher arrested
An underground publisher has been arrested after receiving an overseas award honoring his courage and contribution to freedom of expression, an industry federation said. Bui Chat, who received the International Publishers Association (IPA) Freedom to Publish Prize in Buenos Aires last week, was arrested on Saturday when he returned to the country, according to the Geneva-based IPA. “The award and prize certificate were confiscated,” the group said in a statement dated Sunday. “IPA condemns the arrest and calls for his immediate release.” The association said Chat was being held for investigation, but it did not say what specific allegations he faced.
RUSSIA
Nationalists protest Caucasus
About 500 nationalists rallied in central Moscow on Sunday to protest against their government’s financial support of the mainly Muslim, impoverished regions that make up the North Caucasus. Donning surgical face masks, bands of young people marched peacefully down Moscow’s mutli-laned streets with large red and black banners reading “Russia for Russians!” and “Migrant workers get out!” “We are united against the lawlessness committed by members of the ethnic diasporas,” said Alla Gorbunova, the spokeswoman of the Russian Social Movement, a nationalist group.
MEXICO
Charred remains found
Police found nine plastic bags and a barrel filled with charred human remains in the northern state of Durango, officials said on Sunday in the latest grim find tied to a brutal drug war. A military patrol on Saturday discovered the human remains, which included some bones, in the town of Santiago Papasquiaro. Gerardo Ortiz of the Durango prosecutor’s office said it had not yet been determined how many bodies had been charred. In the state’s capital, also named Durango, a total of 104 bodies buried in mass graves have been found since April 11. Most have not yet been identified.
GERMANY
Several detained after clash
Police arrested several people after left-wing extremists and the police clashed in Berlin late on Sunday following peaceful May Day marches by tens of thousands. Rioters claiming to protest against rising rents threw bottles and stones at two banks and shops and set fire to waste containers. Police used water cannons to break up the mob, but did not give a figure of those detained. About 4,000 anti-fascists demonstrated against a far-right rally in the northern city of Bremen. Two officers were lightly injured.
ISRAEL
Peace concert in Gaza
Renowned Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim will lead a “peace concert” by an orchestra of European musicians this afternoon in the Gaza Strip, tbe UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East peace process said in a statement yesterday. The rare concert will take place at Al-Mathaf Cultural House in Gaza City. Barenboim, an outspoken proponent of peace between Israel and the Palestinians, said he was delighted to be going to Gaza for the concert. “We are very happy to come to Gaza,” he said in the UN statement. “We are playing this concert as a sign of our solidarity and friendship with the civil society of Gaza.”
CUBA
Raul Castro joins march
Hundreds of thousands marched in May Day protests on Sunday to honor workers, even as the cash-starved government pressed ahead with reforms to slash jobless benefits and cut the number of public workers. Among those taking part in a rally held at Revolution Square in the city of Santiago de Cuba was President Raul Castro, wearing a traditional white guayabera shirt and waving a Cuban flag. It was Castro’s first appearance at May Day festivities in the city since taking power from his brother Fidel about five years ago. Massive rallies were also held in Havana.
EGYPT
Border opening mulled
The government intends to open its border with Gaza permanently to ease life for Palestinians under an Israeli blockade, but the mechanics of such a step are still being worked out, the foreign ministry said on Sunday. The initiative, received coolly in Israel, suggested a further Egyptian policy shift since the toppling of president Hosni Mubarak, whose government cooperated with the Jewish state in enforcing the blockade on the Islamist Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. Under Mubarak, Egypt only sporadically opened up the Rafah border crossing for food and medicine, or to let through people, mainly those seeking medical treatment or traveling to study from the area, which is home to about 1.5 million Palestinians. Foreign ministry spokeswoman Menha Bakhoum said the issue was being studied “at all levels,” but did not say when this might be implemented.
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘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
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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