INDIA
Top rebel likely killed
Security forces likely killed the top military commander of the Maoist rebels in an eastern jungle on Thursday, the government said. Koteshwar Rao, known as Kishenji, was held responsible for the death of dozens of police. The interior ministry confirmed a man was killed in a fire-fight during an operation to capture the leader. “Officers on the spot said it was Maoist leader Kishenji ... 99 percent sure it was Kishenji,” Home Secretary RK Singh told the PTI news agency. Kishenji had evaded capture for three decades.
CHINA
14 to be charged in oil spill
Fourteen people will be charged and 29 punished over an oil pipeline blast last year in the city of Dalian that caused a massive spill, the State Council said in a statement late on Thursday. Two pipelines exploded at an oil storage depot belonging to national oil giant China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) in July last year, triggering a spectacular blaze that burned for at least two days. The council estimated about 1,500 tonnes of oil poured into the Yellow Sea after the fire, but environmental watchdog Greenpeace said up to 60 times that amount may have escaped. CNPC chairman Jiang Jiemin (蔣潔敏) and 28 senior executives will receive warnings or “demerit” marks over the incident, the council said. Fourteen employees will face criminal charges, it said.
SOUTH KOREA
Building on disputed islets
The government will spend 400 billion won (US$345 million) building a breakwater, a power plant, an underwater observatory and a tunnel at a disputed group of rocky islets that are also claimed by Japan. Construction will begin in 2013 and is scheduled to be completed in 2016, said Lim Hyun-taek, a development official at the Ministry of Land, Transport and Maritime Affairs in Seoul. The 200m tunnel will connect the largest of the two islets, which are known as Dokdo in Korean, Takeshima in Japanese and the Liancourt Rocks internationally.
JAPAN
Book by killer to be filmed
A book written by the Japanese man who raped and killed young British teacher Lindsay Ann Hawker is to be made into a movie, production company Sedic International said yesterday. Most-wanted Tatsuya Ichihashi spent more than two-and-a-half years on the run after the brutal 2007 killing and even had plastic surgery to evade capture. He was finally caught in November 2009 and was sentenced to life imprisonment in July. He has appealed the sentence. After his arrest, Ichihashi described his life as a fugitive in the book Taiho Sarerumade — Kuuhaku no Ninen Nanakagetsu no Kiroku (Until the Arrest — The Blank Two Years and Seven Months). The film will star Japanese actor Dean Fujioka, 31, Sedic International said.
CHINA
Food standards criticized
State-run media and Web users yesterday criticized the health ministry after it ruled that small amounts of a potentially lethal bacterium were permissible in frozen food. The ministry ruling followed a series of recalls of products, including dumplings made by Synear Food — one of the nation’s largest frozen-food producers — because they contained traces of Staphylococcus aureus bacterium. A commentary in the People’s Daily urged authorities to “address public anxiety” after the revision. Internet users went further, accusing authorities of deliberately lowering food safety standards to pander to big business.
LIBYA
New government sworn in
A new transitional government was sworn in on Thursday tasked with uniting the war-ravaged country and paving the way to a new constitution and general elections in seven months. The ministers pledged to remain faithful to the “objectives of the Feb. 17 revolution” and to “preserve the independence of Libya, its security and the unity of its territory.” Several ministers were absent, including the new defense and oil ministers, who will take their oaths of office at a later date, Prime Minster Abdel Rahim al-Kib told reporters at the ceremony.
GERMANY
Activists protest waste
Police have used water cannons against demonstrators gearing up for the arrival of a shipment of nuclear waste from France. News agency DAPD reported that police said they used water cannons on Thursday after fireworks and paint were thrown at officers. Protesters had previously blocked a crossroads at Metzingen, near the shipment’s destination. The waste set off from northwestern France on Wednesday. It was not immediately clear when it would cross into Germany. The waste shipment to the country is the first since Berlin decided, after Japan’s nuclear disaster, to shut all its nuclear plants by 2022, but officials have not resolved where the waste should be stored permanently. Activists argue the Gorleben storage site, where the waste is headed, is unsafe.
UNITED KINGDOM
Berlusconi injunction fails
Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi on Thursday failed in a bid to prevent evidence relating to corruption charges against him from being heard in a British court. The recently-deposed leader made an application for a temporary injunction to prevent David Mills, his former tax lawyer, from giving evidence via a video-link from London to Milan, where he is on trial for fraud. Judge David Bean dismissed the application after a private hearing in London and Mills will now be able to give evidence on Monday as planned. Berlusconi launched a judicial review to prevent Mills from testifying, but no decision has yet been reached, prompting his lawyers to apply for a temporary injunction.
IRAQ
Bombs kill 19 in Basra
Three bombs exploded on Thursday in the southern port city of Basra, killing 19 people, including high-ranking army and police officers, and wounding at least 65, security and medical officials said. A roadside bomb and a motorcycle bomb exploded simultaneously at about 6:40pm in a market in central Basra, an interior ministry official said. Following a common pattern in the country, a third roadside bomb went off as people gathered at the scene, said the official, who put toll at 19 killed and 67 wounded. An army brigade commander and a high-ranking police officer were among the dead, while police and soldiers were also wounded.
GERMANY
New arrest in neo-Nazi probe
Authorities made a fresh arrest on Thursday in the probe of a neo-Nazi cell believed to be behind 10 murders of mainly Turkish shopkeepers that has deeply embarrassed the country’s leaders. The GSG9 elite anti-terror police unit captured a 32-year-old alleged accomplice, identified only as Andre E, near the eastern city of Potsdam and searched four homes, the federal prosecutor’s office said in a statement. It said the suspect is under investigation for “supporting a terrorist network,” the National Social Underground.
UNITED STATES
Students released in Egypt
Washington thanked Egypt on Thursday for expediting a case involving three American students arrested during protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. “We appreciate the ongoing expeditious consideration of this case by the Egyptian authorities,” state department spokesman Mark Toner said in a statement. Egypt’s MENA news agency reported that a court on Thursday ordered the release of the students from the American University in Cairo, who the prosecutor-general had ordered detained for four days just one day earlier.
UNITED STATES
Kerouac book published
The first book written by Jack Kerouac, which went unpublished and was considered “lost” in his lifetime, was finally published on Thursday. The original 158-page handwritten manuscript was Kerouac’s first novel, begun when the writer — most famous for his free-wheeling trip across the US captured in On The Road — kept a journal of life at sea as a merchant marine, in 1942, when he was 20 years old. The Sea is My Brother: The Lost Novel, published by Penguin Classics, showcases a young Kerouac’s gritty talent, which would later bloom during the late 1950s “beat” movement.
CANADA
Alleged mobster found dead
An Italian-Canadian man considered to be the head of an organized crime group in Montreal was shot dead and his body recovered on Thursday, according to Quebec media outlets. Salvatore Montagna, who was born in Canada in 1971 and raised in Sicily, allegedly rose quickly in New York’s Bonanno crime family, becoming its interim leader in 2006. He was deported from the US in 2009. Quebec police would confirm only that the body of a middle-aged man with “signs of violence” had been found in northeast Montreal.
UNITED STATES
NBC apologizes to Bachmann
NBC television has apologized to Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann after the band played part of Fishbone’s 1985 song Lyin’ Ass Bitch as Bachmann walked onto the set of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, her spokeswoman Alice Stewart said. The lawmaker from Minnesota accused the band of bias and sexism. “The fact that someone did something so hateful and disrespectful is unfortunate,” Stewart said. A day after the appearance, however, Bachmann received a personal letter from NBC vice president of late night programming Dough Vaughan, who called the incident “not only unfortunate but also unacceptable,” Stewart said. In offering his apologies, Vaughan also promised that The Roots, the band that performed the song, had been “severely reprimanded,” Stewart added.
BRAZIL
Air crash fraud gang jailed
Authorities dismantled a gang on Thursday that faked documents to fraudulently collect compensation owed to air accident victims. Federal prosecutors brought charges against 20 people who masqueraded as relatives of air crash victims who died leaving no heir. The victims had died in a 2009 Air France crash that killed 228 people, a 2007 TAM airlines crash in Sao Paulo and the crash of a Gol airliner in the Amazon in 2006. “As many of the people who died [in the crashes] had no next of kin, the fraudsters faked [social security] documents to pass themselves off as relatives and thus illegally collected pensions,” prosecutors said in a statement. Officials said the gang illegally collected US$1.6 million through their scheme.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
OVERHAUL: The move would likely mark the end to Voice of America, which was founded in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda and operated in nearly 50 languages The parent agency of Voice of America (VOA) on Friday said it had issued termination notices to more than 639 more staff, completing an 85 percent decrease in personnel since March and effectively spelling the end of a broadcasting network founded to counter Nazi propaganda. US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) senior advisor Kari Lake said the staff reduction meant 1,400 positions had been eliminated as part of US President Donald Trump’s agenda to cut staffing at the agency to a statutory minimum. “Reduction in Force Termination Notices were sent to 639 employees at USAGM and Voice of America, part of a
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