PAKISTAN
Gunmen kill popular singer
Unknown gunmen shot dead a popular female singer in the northwestern city of Peshawar in the latest attack against female artists, officials said yesterday. Gulnar, 38, famous under her performing name Muskan, was shot by four gunmen who barged into her house on Wednesday. She died in hospital. “The singer Gulnar has been shot dead,” local police station chief Riazul Haq said. “She had married three times and had some personal enmities.” Attacks against female singers are common in the conservative northwestern province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, where many consider the performing arts to be un-Islamic. A young actress suffered burn injuries in June last year, when she had acid hurled at her while she was sleeping. Popular singer Ghazala Javed, 24, was shot dead by gunmen as she left a beauty salon in Peshawar two years ago over a dispute with her ex-husband.
CHINA
Family planning killer to die
A court has imposed a death sentence on a man who killed two government workers and injured four other people in an argument related to the one-child policy. Xinhua news agency says a court in southern Guangxi region convicted He Shenguo (何深國) of intentional homicide. He slashed people at a family planning office after it refused to register his fourth child because he had not paid a fine for breaking family planning rules. Footage of police trying to subdue the man while he brandished a machete in July last year was widely shared on social media. Many comments at the time voiced sympathy for him and opposition to China’s family planning limits. Since then, the government has slightly relaxed the policy to allow more people to have two children.
CHINA
‘Critical reporting’ banned
The country has banned its journalists from undertaking “critical reporting” without prior approval, state media said on Wednesday, a further clampdown in a country whose media restrictions already rank among the world’s harshest. Journalists “are prohibited from engaging in critical reporting unless they have received the approval of their work unit,” the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television announced on Wednesday, according to Xinhua news agency. Journalists are barred from “cross-industry” reporting, Xinhua said, without explaining the term, but adding that the move was mainly aimed at curbing extortion, paid news and false news reports. Those suspected of such activities could be held criminally liable, as well as face the withdrawal of their press cards and expulsion from the Communist Party if applicable, Xinhua added.
MALAYSIA
Another boat sinks
Nine people were missing after an Indonesia-bound boat sank off the west coast early yesterday, a report said, as authorities searched for 26 passengers unaccounted for after a similar incident a day earlier. The boat, believed bound for the Indonesian island of Sumatra across the busy Malacca Strait, sank off the coast near the district of Sepang, south of the capital Kuala Lumpur, the Star newspaper quoted an official as saying. “Initial investigations revealed that the boat sank at about 3am bound for Tanjung Balai [in Sumatra],” Maritime Enforcement Agency official Mohammed Hambali Yaakup was quoted as saying. He said 18 people had been rescued. There was no mention of any bodies found.
CHILE
Neruda poems discovered
Twenty previously unknown poems by Pablo Neruda have been discovered among sheaves of manuscripts in boxes and will be published this year. The poems were stumbled upon when the Pablo Neruda Foundation was cataloguing the Nobel prize winner’s manuscripts and have been verified as being his work after being examined by experts, the foundation said on Wednesday. Six of the poems relate to the theme of love and the others have different themes and date from 1956 onward. “It has not been possible to date all these poems, because they don’t all carry the date on which they were written; the poet only dated them in some cases,” said Dario Oses, director of the foundation’s library. Neruda died in September 1973. Famed for both his passionate love poems and staunch communist views, he is best known for his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, published in 1924.
ISRAEL
Soldiers, Palestinians clash
Troops yesterday traded gunfire with Palestinians, the military said, in the fiercest street battles in the occupied West Bank since a search began for three Israeli teenagers missing for a week. Hospital officials said three Palestinians suffered bullet wounds in the overnight clashes in Jenin, a militant stronghold. There were no reported Israeli casualties. In a statement, the military said about 300 Palestinians, including some who “hurled explosives and opened fire,” confronted soldiers who entered Jenin looking for the three seminary students. The government says Hamas abducted them on Thursday last week as they were hitchhiking near a Jewish settlement. Thirty “terror suspects” were detained in the West Bank, bringing to 280 the number of Palestinians taken into custody over the past week.
UNITED STATES
Auschwitz suspect arrested
An 89-year-old man has been arrested and denied bail for alleged war crimes as a teenage Nazi guard at Auschwitz. Johann Breyer, a retired machinist born in Czechoslovakia to a US mother, admits joining the Waffen SS aged 17, but denies being a guard at the concentration camp in Poland. He emigrated after World War II and is married with children and grandchildren. However, German authorities in 2012 opened an inquiry against him on suspicion he was an accessory in the killings of hundreds of thousands of Jews in 1944 as an Auschwitz guard. Media quoted court documents as saying that Breyer has been charged on 158 counts of aiding and abetting Nazi atrocities. His lawyer Dennis Boyle said Breyer was arrested in Philadelphia on Tuesday on a warrant from Berlin and faces an extradition hearing on Aug. 21.
TURKEY
Former coup leaders get life
A court on Wednesday handed life sentences to two aging generals behind a 1980 military takeover, the bloodiest in the country’s coup-ridden history. Kenan Evren, 96, and Tahsin Sahinkaya, 89, were found guilty of setting the stage for a military intervention, ousting the government by force and committing acts against the forces of the state. Prosecutors had demanded so-called aggravated life sentences for Evren, who became president after the coup, and Sahinkaya, the former air force commander — which would have placed harsher conditions on their detention. The ruling sparked cheers and applause from the public gallery inside the courtroom, who chanted: “This is just the beginning, the coup authors will pay the price.”
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RUSSIAN INPUT: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov called Washington’s actions in Asia ‘destructive,’ accusing it of being the reason for the ‘militarization’ of Japan The US is concerned about China’s “increasingly dangerous and unlawful” activities in the disputed South China Sea, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ASEAN leaders yesterday during an annual summit, and pledged that Washington would continue to uphold freedom of navigation in the region. The 10-member ASEAN meeting with Blinken followed a series of confrontations at sea between China and ASEAN members Philippines and Vietnam. “We are very concerned about China’s increasingly dangerous and unlawful activities in the South China Sea which have injured people, harm vessels from ASEAN nations and contradict commitments to peaceful resolutions of disputes,” said Blinken, who
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