UNITED STATES
Scouts told to surrender files
A California appellate court has upheld a Santa Barbara judge’s order saying the Boy Scouts of America must surrender decades of confidential files detailing alleged child sex abuse. A Scouts spokesman told the Los Angeles Times on Thursday that the organization will appeal the decision to the state Supreme Court. A lawsuit alleges that a local Scouts official tried to keep a boy’s mother from reporting his 2007 abuse by a volunteer leader to police. The youth group denies the allegations. Lawyers for the former Scout who was sexually abused by a volunteer leader in 2007 say the files they seek will expose a culture of hidden sexual abuse.
MEXICO
Crash theft suspects arrested
Officials say two state police officers have been arrested on suspicion of stealing unspecified items from the scene of the plane crash that killed Mexican-American superstar Jenni Rivera. The Nuevo Leon state government said authorities found images of the scene on the smartphone of one of the officers, who is 23, while trying to determine now the media got photographs of the secured site, including images of body parts and personal documents.
CHINA
Knife attacker injures 23
Police said 22 children and one adult have been injured in a knife attack outside a primary school in central China. A police officer said the attack in the village of Chengping, Henan Province, happened shortly before 8am yesterday as students were arriving for classes. The officer said the attacker, 36-year-old local villager Min Yingjun, is now in police custody. A county hospital administrator said the man first attacked an elderly woman, then students, before being subdued by security guards who have been posted across China following a spate of school attacks in recent years.
CHINA
Officials crack down on cult
Authorities have launched a crackdown on a cult it said is calling for a “decisive battle” to slay the “Red Dragon” Communist Party, and which has been spreading doomsday rumors, state media said yesterday. In recent weeks, hundreds of members of the “Almighty God” group have clashed with police, sometimes outside government buildings, in central Henan, northern Shaanxi and southwestern Gansu provinces, according to popular microblogs. The group has “incited followers to launch a decisive battle with the ‘Big Red Dragon,’ to make the ‘Red Dragon’ extinct and to establish the reign of the kingdom of the ‘Almighty God,’” the Shaanxi Daily said on its Web site.
SRI LANKA
Ministry defends China role
Officials have defended China’s increased naval presence in the Indian Ocean and rejected claims that it is a threat to regional power India, the defense ministry said yesterday. The ministry quoted its top official, Gotabhaya Rajapakse, who said that Colombo understood China’s growing interest in the region and insisted that their bilateral cooperation was purely commercial. “It is obvious that the safety and stability of the Indian Ocean is critical for China’s energy security, and its increasing interest and increasing naval presence in this region is quite understandable,” Rajapakse said. Rajapakse said that China was carrying out major infrastructure projects in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Maldives, Pakistan and at the Hambantota port in Sri Lanka.
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
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
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