CHINA
CCP boss wants to see love
The different ethnic groups who live in Xinjiang should make friends with each other to improve trust between them, Beijing’s top official there was quoted as saying yesterday. Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Secretary Zhang Chunxian (張春賢) said during a meeting in Urumqi that more effort was needed to boost ethnic harmony. “We must, starting from officials in leadership positions, broadly develop different ethnicities making friends with each other,” he said in comments carried by the Xinjiang Daily. Xinjiang needs a society in which “all ethnicities respect, trust, love and help one another,” he said.
DUBAI
Saudis regret Yemen deaths
A Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen regrets civilian deaths, which it says are unintentional, and is improving its targeting mechanisms with Western help, the alliance said on Sunday. A UN report seen by reporters on Wednesday last week said the Saudi-led coalition has targeted civilians in Yemen, documenting 119 sorties it said related to violations of international humanitarian law. In a news conference in Riyadh on Sunday, Saudi coalition spokesman Brigadier General Ahmed Asseri acknowledged mistakes in air operations, but mostly defended the alliance’s record.
CHINA
Rinpoche’s killers sentenced
Two men have been sentenced to death for stabbing to death a British monk who founded Europe’s first Tibetan monastery over a financial dispute, the state-run China News Service said late on Sunday. Akong Tulku Rinpoche, cofounder of Scotland’s Samye Ling monastery, was found dead with multiple stab wounds at his home in Chengdu in 2013. Tudeng Gusang and Tsering Banjue were convicted of killing Akong and two other men, while an accomplice was sentenced to three years in jail. The killings were linked to a dispute over a 2.7 million yuan (US$410,000) payment.
NIGERIA
Scores killed in raids
More than 50 people were killed in a series of raids on northeastern villages that officials say was the work of Boko Haram. The exact death toll of Saturday’s night attack was uncertain, after the militants stormed several settlements on the outskirts of Maiduguri, the capital of Borno Province. Residents said the gunmen arrived in two cars and a motorbike and set upon the villages. Musa Bawa, a resident of a village that was attacked, said more than 100 people had been killed.
CHINA
an acquitted after decades
A man jailed more than two decades ago for murder was acquitted yesterday. Chen Man was handed a suspended death sentence for killing a man on Hainan Island in November 1994, but the high court of Zhejiang Province, where he was originally convicted, pronounced Chen not guilty due to “lack of evidence,” it said. Chen’s case was re-opened in April last year after he appealed. Chen — who is in his early 50s — was convicted solely on the basis of confessions which were “inconsistent” during two trials which convicted him, the judge said.
MEXICO
Birthday party turns deadly
A teenager’s 15th birthday party became the scene of a ghastly massacre in Guerrero state, where 11 people were fatally shot, officials said on Sunday. The shooting occurred on Friday at a quinceanera coming-of-age celebration.
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
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
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
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
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