PAKISTAN
Afghanistan meeting begins
A key gathering opened yesterday in Islamabad in which four countries — Afghanistan, Pakistan, China and the US — hope to lay the roadmap to peace for the war-shattered Afghan nation. The meeting comes as battlefield losses in Afghanistan are mounting and entire swaths of the country that cost hundreds of US-led coalition and Afghan military lives to secure slip back into Taliban hands. Taliban representatives are not invited to the talks, vowing to talk only to the US and not to the Afghan government. As the gathering got under way, Islamabad cautioned of the difficulties ahead. Adviser to the prime minister on foreign affairs Sartaj Aziz warned against prematurely deciding which Taliban factions are ready to talk, urging instead “confidence building” measures to get even the recalcitrant Taliban to the negotiating table.
INDIA
Swallowed gold recovered
Police successfully deployed an unusual technique to retrieve a gold chain that a thief had swallowed while officers were in hot pursuit — they force-fed him more than 40 bananas. The man denied snatching the chain from a woman in the street in Mumbai and swallowed it in a bid to conceal his crime last week, but hospital X-rays suggested otherwise. Police in the western Indian city administered an enema which failed to yield the desired result. “He was fed more than 40 bananas throughout the day,” Mumbai police Senior Inspector Shankar Dhanavade told reporters. “Eventually the chain was found. We made him wash and disinfect it,” the policeman added.
BENIN
Voodoo fans get political
The national voodoo holiday in the west African country of Benin had a distinctively political accent this year as practitioners from Africa and the Americas on Sunday gathered to offer prayers and sacrifices for peace. Hundreds of followers of the traditional religion gathered in the Atlantic coast town of Ouidah, once an important port in the slave trade, to pray for calm during the tiny country’s presidential election scheduled for February. Benin has no history of significant electoral violence. However, well-known priest David Kofi Aza last month said that an oracle named Fa had predicted dozens of deaths in post-electoral violence because the loser would refuse to cede to the winner.
HONDURAS
Six men shot dead
Shooters killed six people on Sunday, the first mass killing of the year in one of the world’s most violent countries, police said. Police spokesman Leonel Sauceda told local media that the attack, in a house in the town of Tejeras in central Comayagua Province, took place in the early hours of the morning, leaving six males dead. Authorities said narcotics trafficking appeared to be involved.
SOUTH KOREA
Pastor jailed in North speaks
A 60-year-old Canadian pastor, jailed for life with hard labor in North Korea, said he spends his days digging holes in an orchard in a prison camp where he is the sole inmate. In an interview in Pyongyang with CNN, Hyeon Soo Lim said it had been tough adapting to the physical rigors of his internment, following his conviction last month on charges of “subversive” acts against the state. “I wasn’t originally a laborer, so the labor was hard at first,” said Lim, his head shaven and wearing a gray prison outfit with the number 036. The interview was conducted in a Pyongyang hotel room.
CHINA
‘Star Wars’ makes US$53m
Star Wars: The Force Awakens broke records in the country with US$53 million in ticket sales on its first weekend, propelling the movie to become the third highest-grossing film globally in history, Walt Disney Co said on Sunday. The China figures represent the highest Saturday or Sunday movie opening in the country in industry history, the Disney film studio said in a statement. Internationally, The Force Awakens, the seventh installment in the science fiction franchise created by George Lucas, brought its worldwide haul to US$1.73 billion, Disney said. It has now shot past Jurassic World’s US$1.67 billion global gross to become the third-biggest movie ever. The country’s box office will help decide if Force Awakens tops Avatar as the highest-grossing film in Hollywood history. Avatar took in US$2.8 billion after its December 2009 debut. The Star Wars film saga that began in 1977 had not been a cultural phenomenon in China like it was in other countries. The original movies were not shown in Chinese theaters until June last year. Disney launched a marketing blitz to build buzz, featuring 500 Stormtroopers on the Great Wall and promotions with a pop star dubbed China’s answer to Justin Bieber.
THAILAND
King has infection, fever
The royal palace has released a vaguely worded health report on the country’s 88-year-old king, the world’s longest-reigning monarch, who has been ailing for years, describing what appears to be a new bout of lung infection and occasional fever with rapid breathing. The statement issued on Sunday said King Bhumibol Adulyadej has battled a fever for the past two weeks and was being looked after by doctors. It said tests found “an infection in the lower part of the lungs” and a blood infection and inflammation in his right knee joint. The king was given oxygen, intravenous antibiotics and other medication, the statement said, adding that “currently, the king’s fever has eased, but his breathing is occasionally faster than normal, while his pulse and blood pressure are normal.”
PHILIPPINES
Military funds sought
Congress on Monday asked the government to study a proposal to issue a 150 billion peso (US$3.2 billion) retail bond to fund a long-term military modernization plan to secure its strategic reserves in the South China Sea. Ariel Try, deputy minority leader at the lower house of Congress, said Congress will ask the Treasury to consider a bond issue to help secure the country’s maritime borders against China’s rapid expansion in the South China Sea. “The bulk of the additional funds raised from the bond offering may be set aside to acquire new warships, like frigates and corvettes, for deployment to the West Philippine Sea [South China Sea],” Ty told reporters. “We have to invest in new warships to secure the potential huge oil and gas deposits in the West Philippine Sea, which are the key to our energy independence.”
CHINA
Dispute angered bus arsonist
A man accused of causing a fire on a bus that killed 17 people and injured 33 last week told prosecutors that he was angered by a financial dispute with a construction contractor, Xinhua news agency reported late on Sunday. Police caught the suspect after mounting a manhunt in Ningxia last week, but initially did not identify a possible motive for the arson attack. Bus fires are not uncommon in China. In 2013, a bus fire blamed on a suicidal man killed 47 people in Xiamen. Regulators have blamed recent blazes on flawed design.
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
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
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
RSS