CHINA
Prisoners buy pets, booze
Guards at a jail in Hebei Province sold luxuries including pure-breed dogs, liquor and cellphones to inmates, Shanghai’s Oriental Morning Post reported yesterday. An investigation into the jail found guards were supplementing their income by selling pets and bottles of baijiu, the paper said. Access to prison keys was poorly supervised and some inmates even had copies, the Shanghai Daily said. The lax security and perks enjoyed by the inmates only emerged after an inmate who was serving 10 years for robbery escaped last month, it said. The jailbreak sparked a massive manhunt involving hundreds of police before he was captured two weeks later, and prompted the government to investigate the jail, which has more than 3,000 inmates. The warden and two guards arrested.
SINGAPORE
Molester postman jailed
A postman who sexually abused 52 young girls over a 20-year period has been jailed in the city-state’s worst recorded case of serial molesting, police and press reports said yesterday. Abdul Razak Hamid, a 53-year-old father of three, was sentenced on Tuesday to 16 years in jail after being charged with 75 instances of restraining and molesting girls aged five to 11 years since 1991, a police spokesman said. The Straits Times said Razak lured some of his victims during his rounds by asking them to help retrieve items from letter boxes in exchange for treats like coins and ice cream, and then took them to secluded spots to molest them. Razak surrendered to police in April after seeing footage of himself on TV. He pleaded guilty to 12 counts of wrongful restraint and 63 other charges involving molesting young girls were taken into consideration when he was sentenced.
HONG KONG
University president quits
Hong Kong University president Tsui Lap-chee (徐立之) has said he will quit next year, a move critics say is due to the controversial manhandling of student protestors during Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang’s (李克強) three-day visit to the territory in August. A group of student protesters were forcibly carried away by police in the campus as Li was attending an event. The protesters, some clad in “Vindicate June 4” t-shirts referring to Tiananmen Square, had attempted to approach the venue of the event Li was attending, but were shoved and one was pushed to the ground by the police. However, no reasons were given for Tsui’s decision. Tsui, a Canadian citizen who grew up in the territory, was appointed as school’s 14th vice chancellor in September 2002.
UNITED STATES
Aung San Suu Kyi honored
Myanmar pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi, who was honored by the University of Michigan on Tuesday night, says freedom from fear is the “master key” that clears the way to other freedoms. The Nobel peace prize laureate received the Wallenberg Medal, named for the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews during World War II. She did not attend the ceremony, but gave a videotaped speech.
AFGHANISTAN
Tanker blaze kills dozens
At least 10 civilians were killed and 35 wounded on a road near a major US base after a small bomb punctured a hole in the side of a fuel tanker that was later engulfed by a large blaze, eyewitnesses and officials said yesterday. The tanker started leaking after the initial small blast on Tuesday night and people from a nearby village, including children, rushed to collect some of the oil.
BRAZIL
Thousands forced to work
Thousands of people still toil in forced labor nationwide, despite government attempts to curtail the practice, the International Labour Organization said on Tuesday in a new report. Since 1995, more than 40,000 people have been rescued from forced labor, citing field reports from the poor, rural areas in the country’s northeast and interviews with 121 people who were released between 2006 to 2007. The workers were found to be mostly black males who grew up in poverty, began working as children and had little formal education, the organization’s report said. Many of them were working in near slave-like conditions without contracts and did not receive any salary, doing long hours of manual labor without the possibility of leaving their remote work sites, the report said.
URUGUAY
Senate revokes amnesty
The senate in Montevideo has voted to revoke an amnesty law protecting scores of officials in the country’s 1973 to 1985 dictatorship from human rights prosecutions. Backed by the governing Broad Front coalition, the vote has squeaked through by a 16-15 margin and was to be voted on by the Uruguay’s Chamber of Deputies yesterday.
UNITED STATES
Court denies salvage claim
A federal court in Washington has dismissed a private salvage company’s claim to half of a treasure potentially worth billions of US dollars and believed to lie in the wreck of a Spanish galleon that sank 300 years ago off Colombia’s coast. The court ruling notes that the statute of limitations has expired on a breach-of-contract claim by the American company Sea Search Armada and noted that “no specific money judgment exists to be enforced.” Sea Search Armada has been embroiled in a two-decade-long dispute with the Colombian government over who has rights to the estimated US$4 billion to US$17 billion in gold, silver and emeralds in the wreck.
UNITED STATES
Biggest nuke dismantled
The last of the nation’s most powerful nuclear bombs has been taken apart in Texas. Technicians at the Pantex Plant near Amarillo removed the uranium on Tuesday from the last of the nation’s largest nuclear bombs, a Cold War relic known as the B53. The bomb, put into service in 1962, was 600 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, that killed as many as 140,000 people at the end of World War II. Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel Poneman watched workers take the bomb apart. He says it’s “a milestone accomplishment” and a step toward US President Barack Obama’s mission to rid the world of nuclear weapons. The nation’s largest nuclear bomb now is the 1.2 megaton B83. The B53 was 9 megatons.
UNITED STATES
Puppy rescued from train
A black Labrador puppy that was rescued from the top of a freight train now has a new home in Liberty South Carolina. Tina Parker says she and her family were at a train crossing on Sunday night when they saw the dog moving around on a boxcar. She called emergency services and followed the train for about 9.6km. A Norfolk Southern spokeswoman says they stopped the train. The Parker family helped firefighters find the car, and they used a ladder to reach the pup. No one knows how the dog ended up there. The dog appears healthy and happy. Her new name is Boxcar Hunter, or Boxy for short.
Tens of thousands of Filipino Catholics yesterday twirled white cloths and chanted “Viva, viva,” as a centuries-old statue of Jesus Christ was paraded through the streets of Manila in the nation’s biggest annual religious event. The day-long procession began before dawn, with barefoot volunteers pulling the heavy carriage through narrow streets where the devout waited in hopes of touching the icon, believed to hold miraculous powers. Thousands of police were deployed to manage crowds that officials believe could number in the millions by the time the statue reaches its home in central Manila’s Quiapo church around midnight. More than 800 people had sought
DENIAL: Pyongyang said a South Korean drone filmed unspecified areas in a North Korean border town, but Seoul said it did not operate drones on the dates it cited North Korea’s military accused South Korea of flying drones across the border between the nations this week, yesterday warning that the South would face consequences for its “unpardonable hysteria.” Seoul quickly denied the accusation, but the development is likely to further dim prospects for its efforts to restore ties with Pyongyang. North Korean forces used special electronic warfare assets on Sunday to bring down a South Korean drone flying over North Korea’s border town. The drone was equipped with two cameras that filmed unspecified areas, the General Staff of the North Korean People’s Army said in a statement. South Korea infiltrated another drone
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
Cambodia’s government on Wednesday said that it had arrested and extradited to China a tycoon who has been accused of running a huge online scam operation. The Cambodian Ministry of the Interior said that Prince Holding Group chairman Chen Zhi (陳志) and two other Chinese citizens were arrested and extradited on Tuesday at the request of Chinese authorities. Chen formerly had dual nationality, but his Cambodian citizenship was revoked last month, the ministry said. US prosecutors in October last year brought conspiracy charges against Chen, alleging that he had been the mastermind behind a multinational cyberfraud network, used his other businesses to launder
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