UNITED STATES
Three indicted for fraud
Three people, including the father of French train hero Spencer Stone, have been indicted in a scheme to set fire to commercial buildings in the Sacramento, California, area in order to collect insurance money. The indictment unsealed on Friday said that Jamal Shehadeh, 57, was the ringleader, setting seven fires at six commercial buildings where he operated businesses then collecting more than US$1.5 million in insurance proceeds from 2009 to 2013. His charges include seven counts of arson and 52 counts of mail and wire fraud. Prosecutors said that Stone’s 57-year-old father, Brian Stone, was a business consultant for Shehadeh and helped with the fraudulent insurance claims. He was charged with 13 counts of mail or wire fraud. A third defendant was charged with three counts of mail fraud.
UNITED KINGDOM
Iain Duncan Smith resigns
Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Iain Duncan Smith on Friday resigned over planned reductions to welfare payments for people with disabilities unveiled by Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne. “Changes to benefits to the disabled and the context in which they’ve been made are a compromise too far,” he wrote in a letter following uproar against the plans, including from lawmakers in his own governing Conservative Party. “While they are defensible in narrow terms, given the continuing deficit, they are not defensible in the way they were placed within a budget that benefits higher-earning taxpayers,” said Duncan Smith, a former party leader and one of six senior ministers supporting a vote for Britain to leave the EU. Osborne on Wednesday told parliament the planned changes would cut about £1.3 billion (US$1.88 billion) per year off the bill for Personal Independence Payments, which aim to help people with long-term ill health or disabilities with extra costs.
UNITED STATES
‘Leaving a Mark’ release set
A children’s book written in part by an eight-year-old Rhode Island boy, whose dying wish to become famous in China echoed around the world, is to be released next week. Dorian Murray died last week after battling a rare form of pediatric cancer. The Boston Globe reported that author Nicole Cannella helped Murray write Leaving a Mark. The book aims to comfort other young cancer patients and fund cancer research. Dorian was given a digital copy of the book days before his death. The boy’s wish in January to be famous in China before he went to heaven took off on social media with the hashtag DStrong. People around the world, including celebrities Justin Bieber and Conan O’Brien, sent him photographs and well wishes.
PERU
Council mulls Fujimori ban
The electoral council said it was considering disqualifying front-runner Keiko Fujimori from next month’s presidential election for improperly distributing cash at a campaign event, just over a week after it tossed her main rival from the race. In a resolution on Friday, the council said there are sufficient grounds to open proceedings against Fujimori and gave her Popular Force party one working day to present counterarguments. The complaint against the daughter of jailed former president Alberto Fujimori stems from a Feb. 14 campaign event, at which the candidate was present and money was awarded to the winners of a hip hop music contest. The law prohibits candidates from giving more than roughly US$6 during campaign events.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency