CHINA
Rural harmony index begins
The government has released its first-ever “rural social harmony index,” state media reported yesterday, with the gauge apparently able to measure happiness down to the nearest ten-thousandth of a decimal point. The index shows that social harmony in the countryside at 59.2526 on a 100-point scale, Xinhua news agency said, citing a report by the Center for Chinese Rural Studies at Central China Normal University. The measurement was based on six criteria related to the Communist Party’s definition of a “harmonious society,” Xinhua said, including “democracy, justice, honesty, vitality, stability and harmony between humans and nature.” The study found that rural areas ranked highest in the area of honesty (83.65), but lower in achieving harmony between humans and nature (50.74), the agency said. The notion of a harmonious society was introduced by former Chinese president Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) as a call for a unified nation pulling together, but the slogan has been tarnished in recent years by persistent social turmoil and outbreaks of violent unrest over a wide range of issues, including corruption, police brutality and unpaid wages.
INDONESIA
Vimeo banned over ‘porn’
The government has ordered a ban on popular video-sharing Web site Vimeo after accusing it of hosting pornographic content, sparking social media fury yesterday. The Ministry of Communications announced on Monday that the US-based site would be blocked following the discovery of Vimeo pages with names such as “Art of Nakedness” and “Nudie Cutie,” featuring naked and scantily clad women. The ministry is headed by Minister of Communications Tifatul Sembiring, who has waged a campaign against illicit material on the Internet. It said that Vimeo had been added to a list of 119 other sites banned over content deemed pornographic. Vimeo said on Twitter that the site was “blocked for some Indonesian users, but it’s on the Indonesian side and we can’t unblock it.” Social media users reacted furiously to the news that the site was being blocked. “It’s insane... The world will laugh at Indonesia for considering Vimeo a pornographic site,” Savic Ali said on Twitter.
JORDAN
Diplomat held in Libya freed
Ambassador to Libya Fawaz Aitan has been freed a month after masked gunmen kidnapped him in Tripoli and returned home yesterday. Aitan’s release came days after Tripoli said it had ratified an extradition agreement with Amman. There was no claim of responsibility for the abduction, but Libyan sources say the abductors were demanding the release of a Libyan jihadist jailed in Jordan for more than seven years. Mohammed Saeed al-Darsi was tried and convicted on terrorism charges and sentenced to life in prison in 2007. He was found guilty of possessing explosives and planning an attack on Amman’s international airport. Aitan was handed over to the Jordanian authorities in Libya at 3am, Jordanian Parliamentary Minister of Affairs Khaled al-Kalaldah told reporters. “Last week, [al-]Darsi was handed over to Libyan authorities in line with the [extradition] agreement so that he will spend the rest of his sentence in Libyan jails,” al-Kalaldah said. Minister of Foreign Affairs Nasser Judeh said on local state TV that Aitan was “doing well” following his release. Upon landing at Marka military airport in Amman, the ambassador was greeted by relatives and officials led by Prince Faisal bin Hussein, the brother of King Abdullah II, state news agency Petra said.
CANADA
Railway crash charges laid
Authorities on Monday charged Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway Ltd (MM&A) and three employees with criminal negligence following the train derailment in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, that killed 47 people last year. Thomas Harding, Jean Demaitre, Richard Labrie and the company itself were charged with 47 counts of criminal negligence causing death, public prosecutor’s office spokesman Rene Verret said. He said Harding was the train driver, while Labrie was a controller at MM&A and Demaitre was director of operations. Verret said the three were placed under arrest on Monday and would appear in court yesterday afternoon in Lac-Megantic. The derailment occurred after Harding parked his train for the night on a main line uphill from the small town. The train of oil tankers started rolling and eventually derailed, exploding into balls of fire and flattening the center of the town. US-based MM&A initially blamed the catastrophe on the failure of the train’s pneumatic air brakes after an engine fire, but chairman Edward Burkhardt later said the train’s engineer did not apply an adequate number of handbrakes to hold the train in place.
MEXICO
Zetas founder killed
A most-wanted founder of the ultra-violent Zetas drug cartel has been killed in a clash with the military that involved grenades and assault rifles, authorities said on Monday. Galdino Mellado Cruz, a military deserter known by the alias Z-9, was killed in one of two gunfights in the northern border city of Reynosa on Friday that also left five civilians and a soldier dead. The skirmish came amid a surge in violence in Tamaulipas State that has left more than 80 people dead since April 5, including the state police’s chief of investigations. Intelligence work led the troops to a house in Reynosa where Mellado was hiding, national security commissioner Monte Alejandro Rubido said. Grenades were lobbed from the house and shots fired at the soldiers. Several carloads of gunmen arrived at the scene with assault rifles, apparently to help Mellado. When the clash ended, Mellado was found dead inside the house next to a submachine gun, Rubido said.
VENEZUELA
Leprosy vaccine maker dies
Scientist and doctor Jacinto Convit, renowned for developing a vaccine against leprosy, died on Monday in Caracas at the age of 100, his family said. Convit won many international honors, including Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award and France’s Legion of Honor, and was tipped for the 1988 Nobel Prize for Medicine, although he did not win. Convit also made significant contributions to a better understanding of infectious and parasitic diseases such as Leishmaniasis and Chagas. In the past 15 years, he devoted much of his time looking for a cure for cancer.
UNITEDS STATES
Boy in court over killing
A 13-year-old Colorado boy suspected of shooting his father dead and concealing the killing for days by calling the man’s work to say his dad was sick made his first court appearance on Monday as prosecutors weighed whether to charge him as an adult. Kai Kelly was arrested last week on suspicion of first-degree murder in the death of his father, Joseph Kelly, in the small town of Gypsum. Jill Sarmo, spokeswoman for the Eagle County District Attorney’s Office, said the boy was appointed a public defender on Monday and will be formally charged at a later date.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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