CHINA
Freeze upsets travel plans
Tens of thousands of Lunar New Year travelers yesterday were stranded at train stations in Guangzhou after snow and ice elsewhere disrupted schedules. Many trains to Guangzhou were delayed after the north and center of the country were hit by the big freeze, leaving no transport available for those waiting to leave. Police said the numbers stuck at two of the city’s stations totaled nearly 100,000 on Monday afternoon, prompting the mobilization of almost 4,000 police and security guards. By noon yesterday, there were still more than 50,000 people waiting, as 24 trains were behind schedule, Xinhua news agency said. The freeze also delayed 55 trains at a station in Shanghai on Monday, delaying about 30,000 travelers.
CHINA
Legal aid center closed
The Zhongze Women’s Legal Counseling and Service Center in Beijing was probably ordered to close because it took money from overseas donors, the state-run Global Times said yesterday. Beijing police ordered the closure of the center, which represented low-income women free of charge, the paper said. “The request may have resulted from funds that came from overseas organizations,” it said, adding that the center received funding from the US-based Ford Foundation. In an opinion piece attributed to Shan Renping (單仁平), a penname for the paper’s editor Hu Xijin (胡錫進), the paper said the center’s willingness to “take on sensitive cases and take foreign funds provides a perspective on this issue.”
AUSTRALIA
Threat calls are hoaxes
Threatening telephone messages that prompted school evacuations and lockdowns yesterday appeared to be hoaxes from overseas designed to cause disruption, police said. It was the second such scare in days after thousands of students were released from schools in New South Wales and Victoria states on Friday last week. “There is no evidence these are anything other than hoaxes designed to cause unnecessary disruption and inconvenience,” New South Wales police said in a statement. Media said eight New South Wales schools were affected and about 20 schools in Victoria.
INDIA
Mandatory fetal tests urged
Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi on Monday proposed the introduction of mandatory tests to determine the sex of fetuses in a bid to counter the high levels of female feticide. Gandhi said the sex of a fetus should be recorded at the outset of the pregnancy and its progress monitored. “Every pregnant woman should be compulsorily told whether it is a boy or girl,” Gandhi said.
CHINA
Washington protest rebuffed
Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Lu Kang (陸慷) yesterday said that it was “not proper” for the US to comment on the nation’s domestic affairs, after Washington called on Beijing to explain the disappearance of five men who own or work for a Hong Kong publishing house and its bookstore. US Department of State spokesman John Kirby on Monday said that the incidents “raise serious questions about China’s commitment to Hong Kong’s autonomy”
EL SALVADOR
Funeral held for Flores
Politicians, diplomats and business leaders on Monday bid farewell to former president Francisco Flores, who died over the weekend aged 56 while awaiting trial on graft charges. No government representative turned out for a funeral mass in his honor. Flores, who led the country from 1999 to 2004, was to have been tried of charges of embezzling US$15 million donated by Taiwan for victims of a 2001 earthquake, but he died on Saturday while in a coma brought on by a massive stroke suffered a week earlier.
GUINEA-BISSAU
Politician’s home robbed
Heavily armed assailants on Sunday stormed the home of a politician, attacked his guards and made off with about 3 million euros (US$3.3 million) and pieces of jewelry, police sources said on Monday. The assailants broke in at about 10pm to the home of Secretary of State for Transport and Communications Joao Bernardo Vieira II, officials said. The minister was not at his residence at the time of the break-in, the sources said. Vieira’s wife was at home, but unharmed in the break-in, while four of the family’s personal guards were seriously hurt and hospitalized.
GUATEMALA
War crimes trial begins
A retired military officer and a former paramilitary fighter on Monday went on trial for alleged abuses against women during the nation’s long and bloody civil war. Former second lieutenant Esteelmer Francisco Reyes Giron and Heriberto Valdez Asij are accused of crimes against humanity for the alleged rape, sexual enslavement, killing and disappearance of at least 15 women. Prosecutor Hilda Pineda said Reyes Giron authorized and permitted soldiers under his command to commit sexual violence and other “inhuman treatment” against indigenous Mayan women.
UNITED STATES
Prisoner trade challenged
A federal judge has challenged the federal government’s move to drop charges against an Iranian man accused of sanctions violations as part of a prisoner trade agreed with Iran last month. Federal prosecutors filed a motion on Jan. 16 to drop the case against Alireza Moazami Goudarzi, an Iranian man accused in 2012 of trying to buy aircraft parts for Tehran. New York District Judge P. Kevin Castel last week threatened in a court order to deny the government’s dismissal of charges against Goudarzi unless prosecutors could justify the “significant foreign policy interests” they had cited to drop the case. Assistant Attorney John Cronan on Monday said that the prisoner swap was a “one-time, unique agreement based on extraordinary circumstances” that had been reached in order to obtain the release of US prisoners held in Iran.
FRANCE
Authorities avert ship crash
Maritime experts on Monday successfully managed to tow a stricken South Korean cargo ship and prevent it from crashing into the country’s picturesque Atlantic coast. Local maritime authorities spokesman Louis-Xavier Renaux said a tugboat had successfully connected to the ship, which is tilting heavily, “and managed to pivot it, point it towards the open sea and begin towing it.” The Modern Express was carrying diggers and 3,600 tonnes of timber from Gabon to the port of Le Havre in Normandy. After seven days adrift in rough seas, the Panamanian-registered ship was 44km from the coast when authorities launched a final bid to attach a tow line and stop it from hitting the coast.
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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