MYANMAR
Currency to be floated
A state newspaper says the nation’s currency will be largely unshackled from government controls next week in a significant step toward reforming the impoverished country’s economy. The New Light of Myanmar said yesterday that the value of the kyat would be determined by a managed floating exchange rate system that will become effective on Sunday. For decades, the kyat has been held at an artificially high level based on a notional currency that is managed by the IMF. The official rate of the kyat is about 120 times stronger than its rate of about 800 kyat to the US dollar in the widely used black market.
PHILIPPINES
Aide arrested in killing probe
Police said they have arrested an aide to a former governor in the killing of a radio anchor and prominent environmentalist. They were also searching for the former governor himself and a local mayor whom the journalist had accused of corruption. Gerardo Ortega was fatally shot last year by a self-confessed hit man who implicated former Palawan governor Joel Reyes, his brother who is also a mayor and an administrator. A Palawan court issued warrants that led to the former administrator’s arrest on Tuesday. Police Director Samuel Pagdilao said yesterday that authorities are still looking for the Reyes brothers. Ortega’s killing alarmed environmentalists, who say he was silenced for opposing mining on the island.
FIJI
Government seizes airline
The military government yesterday seized control of national carrier Air Pacific from Australia’s Qantas, issuing a decree preventing Fijian airlines being owned or controlled by foreigners. The South Pacific nation’s government, which took power in a 2006 coup, denied the move amounted to nationalization, saying it corrected an anomaly that gave Qantas control of the carrier while having only a 46.3 percent stake. “With this law, the ... government has now corrected the activities of prior Fijian governments, which allowed foreign citizens to control Fiji’s national airlines,” the decree said. The government, which owns 51 percent of Air Pacific, has been in negotiations with Qantas to purchase the Australian carrier’s stake since at least 2010, but talks have stalled over a price.
INDIA
Army chief exposes failings
The nation’s tank fleet lacks ammunition, its air defenses are “97 percent obsolete” and its elite forces lack essential arms, the country’s army chief wrote in an explosive letter leaked yesterday. The letter to the prime minister dated March 12 lists the shortcomings of the armed forces in embarrassing detail in a blow to the government. Its publication also ups the stakes in a public battle between army chief General V.K. Singh and the government which began with a dispute over Singh’s retirement earlier this year. “The state of the major [fighting] arms i.e. mechanised forces, artillery, air defence, infantry and special forces, as well as the engineers and signals, is indeed alarming,” Singh wrote in the letter.
INDIA
Tibetan protester dies
A Tibetan exile who set himself on fire in India to protest a visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) has died hours before the leader’s expected arrival in New Delhi. Meanwhile, police are holding hundreds of other activists without charge. Jamphel Yeshi set himself on fire on Monday in front of reporters. He died from his burns yesterday in a New Delhi hospital.
MEXICO
Candidate rejects security
Leftist presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Tuesday rejected government offers of a security escort as part of a plan to protect lawmakers from organized crime. “I do not accept that there should be an apparatus that prevents me from communicating with citizens,” Lopez Obrador said at a press conference. President Felipe Calderon announced last month a plan to protect presidential candidates and members of Congress against the threat of powerful drug cartels before the elections scheduled for July 1. Drug cartels have stepped up pressure on local politicians in recent years as the country has been gripped by brutal turf wars waged by rival gangs, with an estimated 50,000 people killed in drug-related violence since 2006. In the past five years, 28 mayors have been assassinated by organized crime groups, according to official figures.
UNITED STATES
Limbaugh’s boss ‘delighted’
Advertisers and some radio stations may have abandoned radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh for calling a Georgetown law student a “slut.” However, the CEO of the radio company that distributes Limbaugh’s show, Clear Channel, said he would stick with the conservative host, calling him the “king” of radio. Bob Pittman said in an interview on Tuesday that the outrage over Limbaugh’s comments last month was “part of the normal day-to-day of talk radio.” He also said that Limbaugh apologized for the first time in 30 years. Speaking publicly for the first time since the controversy erupted late last month, Pittman said that advertisers leaving the program did not have a major impact on the company and there has not been a major move among stations to drop Limbaugh. “Rush is Rush and radio is radio,” Pittman said.
UNITED STATES
Militia’s charges dropped
A judge has dismissed the key charges against members of a Michigan militia who were accused of plotting war against the federal government. The Tuesday decision is an embarrassment for the government, which secretly planted an informant and an FBI agent inside the Hutaree militia and claimed members were armed for war in rural southern Michigan. Detroit federal Judge Victoria Roberts made her decision five days after prosecutors rested their case. Her decision affects all seven militia members who have been on trial since Feb. 13. Only weapons charges remain against two of the defendants. Prosecutors say Hutaree members were anti-government rebels who combined training and strategy sessions to prepare for a violent strike against federal law enforcement.
BOLIVIA
Firearms for police: US
Firearms found by police in a US embassy van in La Paz on Tuesday — an incident called a threat to national security — are for local police tasked with protecting US installations, US diplomats said. Interior Minister Carlos Romero earlier said the discovery of three Remington shotguns, a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver and more than 2,000 .38 caliber cartridges had “put the security of the nation in danger.” The weapons were found when the embassy vehicle was stopped and checked in the city of Trinidad. In a statement in Spanish, the US embassy said it “provides a limited amount of weapons and ammunition to the Bolivian police for the protection of our diplomatic installations, as we do in many countries around the world.”
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Tuesday declared martial law in an unannounced late night address broadcast live on YTN television. Yoon said he had no choice but to resort to such a measure in order to safeguard free and constitutional order, saying opposition parties have taken hostage of the parliamentary process to throw the country into a crisis. "I declare martial law to protect the free Republic of Korea from the threat of North Korean communist forces, to eradicate the despicable pro-North Korean anti-state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people, and to protect the free
The US deployed a reconnaissance aircraft while Japan and the Philippines sent navy ships in a joint patrol in the disputed South China Sea yesterday, two days after the allied forces condemned actions by China Coast Guard vessels against Philippine patrol ships. The US Indo-Pacific Command said the joint patrol was conducted in the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone by allies and partners to “uphold the right to freedom of navigation and overflight “ and “other lawful uses of the sea and international airspace.” Those phrases are used by the US, Japan and the Philippines to oppose China’s increasingly aggressive actions in the
‘ANCIENT AND MODERN’: The project, which took 22 years to complete, unearthed more than 300,000 treasures now on display across the network It caused untold commotion, decades of disruption and — among historians and archeologists — controversy and despair, but at midday on Saturday, the antiquities-rich subterranean world of Thessaloniki opened to a world of driverless trains and high-tech automation with the inauguration of its long-awaited subway. The excitement on the streets of the northern Greek port city is almost palpable. “Archaeologically, it has been an extremely complex and difficult endeavor,” said Greek Minister of Culture, Education and Religious Affairs Lina Mendoni of the more than 300,000 finds made since construction began 22 years ago. “To get here required a battle on many
‘AMERICA FIRST’: Patel, 44, previously called for stripping the FBI of its intelligence-gathering role and purging its ranks of anyone who refuses to support Trump’s agenda US president-elect Donald Trump has tapped Kash Patel to be FBI director, nominating a loyalist to lead the chief US law enforcement agency — which Trump has long derided as corrupt. Patel rose to prominence expressing outrage over the agency’s investigation into whether Trump’s campaign conspired with Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. With the nomination of Patel, Trump is signaling that he is preparing to carry out his threat to oust FBI Director Christopher Wray, a Republican first appointed by Trump during his first term as president, whose 10-year term at the FBI does not expire until 2027. FBI
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