CHINA
Police crash activist dinner
Police on Tuesday night broke up a dinner party attended by activists in Hangzhou and detained a dozen people, an activist who attended the dinner said. Activist and blogger Wang Wusi (王五 四) said he and another 10 people were released after spending about two hours in custody. He said police held Wen Kejian (溫克堅) until yesterday morning and then released him without his cellphone or computer. Wen is a signatory of Charter 08, a document calling for democracy and the end of one-party rule. Wang yesterday said the activists had been warned by police that they were not allowed to meet for the dinner they organized in response to the recent detentions of other activists. “We just wanted to get together and discuss this because we all feel the pressure growing,” Wang said.
CHINA
Study looks at student suicide
The high-pressure, exam-driven national education system is responsible for the vast majority of schoolchildren suicides, state media said yesterday, citing the 2014 Annual Report on China’s Education. A Ministry of Health journal said that about 500 primary and middle-school students kill themselves every year. A study of 79 such suicides last year found that almost 93 percent happened after arguments between the pupils and their teachers, or after the students experienced heavy pressure at school. Most killed themselves because “they could not bear the heavy pressure of the test-oriented education system,” the state-run China Daily quoted the findings as saying. The study follows a spate of suicides, including a 13-year-old boy in Jiangsu Province who hung himself this month after failing to finish his homework, the China Daily said.
PNG
Boy’s limbs found in croc
The limbs of an 11-year-old boy have been found inside a huge crocodile and his head discovered nearby where he was attacked in Siloura River in Gulf Province, a report said yesterday. The 4m croc grabbed Melas Mero as he was fishing with his parents last week, police commander Lincoln Gerari told the National newspaper. “The crocodile swept the boy with its tail and then attacked the defenseless child,” Gerari said. He added that police found two hands, two legs and a hipbone inside the crocodile after they tracked it down and killed it.
SOUTH KOREA
Toilet door taken for drone
The Ministry of Defense yesterday said that a suspected crashed drone was a false alarm, after it turned out to be the door of a portable toilet. An investigation team responded to a passer-by’s report of what he thought was the wreckage of a drone in a fenced-off military area in southern Seoul, only to find that the object was the broken door of a portable toilet, a ministry spokesman said. The door was a similar sky-blue color to three drones recovered in the past two months.
PAKISTAN
Seminary teacher held for rape
Police have arrested a seminary teacher and two of his friends on charges of gang raping a college girl in Mansehra, an official said yesterday. The incident took place on Monday when the seminary instructor and two companions lured the victim and a friend on the pretext of dropping them off home, then raped the girl in a moving car, police officer Zulfiqar Jadon said. The teacher confessed, but then retracted his statement, saying the two girls joined him and his friends on an outing. The case is unusual since rapes are rarely prosecuted.
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
A Zurich city councilor has apologized and reportedly sought police protection against threats after she fired a sport pistol at an auction poster of a 14th-century Madonna and child painting, and posted images of their bullet-ridden faces on social media. Green-Liberal party official Sanija Ameti, 32, put the images on Instagram over the weekend before quickly pulling them down. She later wrote on social media that she had been practicing shots from about 10m and only found the poster as “big enough” for a suitable target. “I apologize to the people who were hurt by my post. I deleted it immediately when I
At first, Francis Ari Sture thought a human was trying to shove him down the steep Norwegian mountainside. Then he saw the golden eagle land. “We are staring at each other for, maybe, a whole minute,” Sture said on Monday. “I’m trying to think what’s in its mind.” The bird then attacked Sture five more times on Thursday last week, scratching and clawing the 31-year-old bicycle courier’s face and arms over 10 to 15 minutes as he sprinted down the mountain. The same eagle is believed to be responsible for attacks on three other people across a vast mountainous area of southern Norway
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