NEW ZEALAND
Student charged in crash
Police on Friday charged a US student with careless driving over a crash on a remote highway that killed three of his college classmates. The 20-year-old Boston University student was charged with three counts of careless driving causing death and four of careless driving causing injury, police said. The crash occurred on Saturday last week, when the van he was driving — one of two carrying 16 students on a hiking excursion — rolled, near Tongariro National Park on North Island. The students were taking courses at Auckland University as part of an exchange program. Police did not name the driver, but local media identified him as US citizen Stephen Houseman. He appeared at Auckland District Court on Friday and was bailed to reappear on June 8 after surrendering his passport.
JAPAN
Penguin still on the run
A penguin that has been on the run from a Tokyo aquarium is alive and well, a park official said on Thursday. More than 30 sightings of the 60cm Humbolt penguin have been reported to Tokyo Sea Life park since it fled in early March, “many of them recently, including today,” park spokesman Takashi Sugino said. With an identification ring attached to its wing, the one-year-old bird has been spotted swimming in various locations around Tokyo Bay, “mostly in our neighborhood,” Sugino said. “It is difficult to capture the animal unless we gather more information and narrow down the area of its movement,” he said. “It moves fast like a fish and cannot be captured by a net from a boat. One idea is to catch it when it is on the land.”
JAPAN
Two whaling ships set sail
A pair of whaling vessels left on Friday for the northwestern Pacific, aiming to catch 260 whales for scientific research, a fisheries ministry official said. The Yushin Maru and Yushin Maru No. 2 departed from Shimonoseki port in Yamaguchi to join the mother vessel, Nisshin Maru, which has already set sail, the official said. The fleet is scheduled to catch about 260 of the mammals, including 100 minke whales and 10 sperm whales, between now and early August, the official said. Commercial whaling is banned under an international treaty, but Japan has since 1987 carried out “lethal research” in the name of science.
NORTH KOREA
North denies jamming
Pyongyang has denied claims that it jammed electronic signals on hundreds of flights and ships in South Korea. Seoul said the North interfered with GPS on civilian flights and commercial ships operating near the nations’ western border between late last month and earlier this week. The North’s Ministry of Post and Telecommunications on Friday called Seoul’s claim a “smear campaign” and accused the South of trying to escalate tension.
UNITED STATES
Japan unnerved by plaque
Japanese officials are asking a small northern New Jersey town with a large Korean immigrant population to remove a public monument dedicated to women who were forced into sexual slavery by Japanese soldiers during World War II. The New York Times reported on Friday that Palisades Park administrators were surprised by the request from two delegations of visiting Japanese officials. Town officials have declined the request to remove the plaque. It was dedicated in 2010 to the “comfort women” of World War II, many of whom were Korean.
INDIA
Bus crash kills 16 people
About 16 people died when a bus carrying Muslim pilgrims exploded in a ball of fire after colliding head-on with a truck in the north of the country, officials said yesterday. The bus, which was en route to the Muslim shrine of Ajmer Sharif, slammed into a truck parked on a road near Bahraich Town, 105km from Lucknow, the state capital of Uttar Pradesh, on Friday, district officials said. The bus erupted in flames after it crashed, leading to police to suspect that cooking gas cylinders carried by the passengers were to blame for the explosion.
MALAWI
Gay ban repeal urged
President Joyce Banda urged parliament on Friday to repeal the country’s ban on homosexuality along with unpopular laws that allow newspaper bans and warrantless arrests. Banda is seeking to repeal some of the more oppressive laws pushed through by her predecessor Bingu wa Mutharika, who died of a heart attack on April 5. Mutharika’s increasingly hardline laws led to the nation being ostracized by many in the international community, including major donors the US, Britain and Germany, which suspended funds to the country. Banda’s move to repeal the laws is a latest effort to address donor concerns about poor governance.
ITALY
Dog, cat tax withdrawn
A proposal to levy a tax on cats and dogs that stunned the nation on Friday turned out to be all bark and no bite after a wave of popular anger saw it withdrawn on the same day it was made public. Protests were voiced by everyone from animal rights groups — who said it would prompt more people to abandon animals — to politicians who called it everything from “grotesque” to “surreal” to “idiotic” to “shameful.” However, the proposal was withdrawn by early Friday evening and it seemed everyone on the commission where it was discussed was denying its paternity. “The only thing that’s left to tax are wives and children,” parliamentarian Domenico Scilipoti said.
RUSSIA
Amnesty condemns jailings
The head of the nation’s branch of Amnesty International said on Thursday that jailed opposition leaders Sergei Udaltsov and Alexei Navalny were “prisoners of conscience.” Both Navalny, a charismatic lawyer and whistle-blowing blogger and Udaltsov, a shaven-headed radical activist, are currently serving the latest in a series of 15-day terms for disobeying police at protests. The position of Amnesty International is that they are prisoners of conscience, Sergei Nikitin, director of the group’s office in Moscow said, confirming earlier comments to the Russian news agency Interfax.
RUSSIA
Man rescued from chute
A man had to be rescued by emergency workers from a garbage chute where he jumped to escape his girlfriend, but ended up getting stuck after sliding down three floors, officials said on Thursday. “According to the 31-year-old victim, he jumped into the metal chute on the eighth floor to escape his girlfriend,” the emergency ministry branch in the oil-rich Tyumen region said on its Web site. The un-identified man apparently traveled three floors down the chute before getting jammed on the fifth floor level, when he started calling for help. Rescue workers had to use an “electric instrument” to cut the metal and extricate the victim and passed him to a waiting ambulance team, the ministry said.
MEXICO
Murder suspects detained
The army says it has detained eight suspected members of the Gulf cartel and seized drugs, guns and hand grenades during investigations into the May 13 discovery of 49 dismembered bodies on a highway in the north. The Defense Department says the suspects were caught on Thursday as part of an operation designed to capture those responsible for the grisly discovery in the city of Cadereyta. The department said on Friday that a total of 44 people have been detained and 140 guns and about 3.6 tonnes of marijuana have been seized during the investigations.
BRAZIL
Police on guard for terrorists
Authorities will closely monitor security at major international events the country will be hosting to thwart any terrorist plots, Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota said on Friday. Patriota was reacting to an unsourced report from Washington in the Italian daily Il Corriere della Sera stating that security services were on alert following plans by a group allegedly close to Iran to attack in Brazil, Colombia and possibly Bolivia. In November last year, Roberto Troncon, chief of the Sao Paulo federal police, said he was concerned about possible terror attacks during the 2014 World Cup, saying that authorities were working on “a scenario of rather high risk.”
UNITED STATES
Priest sentenced in death plot
A Texas jury has sentenced a former Roman Catholic priest to 60 years in prison for plotting the death of a man who accused him of sexual abuse. Prosecutors had asked jurors on Friday for a life sentence for 53-year-old John Fiala. His defense attorney argued that anything more than 15 years would be a “travesty.” The Dallas Morning News reports the former priest will be eligible for parole after 15 years. Fiala was convicted on Thursday for solicitation of capital murder. Prosecutors say Fiala tried to hire a neighbor’s brother to kill the man who accused him of abuse in 2008, when Fiala was the priest at a rural West Texas parish and his accuser was 16.
UNITED STATES
Gay marriage goes viral
President Barack Obama’s announcement that he favors same-sex marriage led to a huge spike on the video--sharing Web site YouTube. The announcement resulted in a record number of searches and a rush of users uploading videos on the subject. Gay marriage was also the most popular topic on YouTube’s news and politics category this week. Gay rights issues have a history of sparking online viral videos. Following Obama’s announcement, more videos with the key words “gay marriage” were uploaded on YouTube than ever before, drawing more than 3 million views and 100,000 comments.
VENEZUELA
Four die in helicopter crash
The defense minister said a military helicopter had crashed during a training flight, killing four servicemen. Minister of Defense General Henry Rangel Silva said one of the five on board the helicopter was injured, but survived. Rangel said the Russian-made MI-17 helicopter crashed during a training flight at an airport in the western town of San Felipe. He said among those killed in Friday’s crash was Colonel Oscar Martinez Mora, a flight instructor and commander of a helicopter battalion in the town. Rangel said the helicopter had been about 10m off the ground when it suddenly dropped and crashed. He said officials are investigating what might have caused the accident.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
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