CHINA
Internet governance urged
Facebook founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg held a rare meeting on Saturday with China’s propaganda chief, at a time when Chinese authorities are tightening control over their cyberspace. Politburo Standing Committee member Liu Yunshan (劉雲山) told Zuckerberg that he hopes Facebook can share its experience with Chinese companies to help “Internet development better benefit the people of all countries,” the official Xinhua news agency reported. Zuckerberg was in Beijing to attend an economic forum. China has called for the creation of a global Internet “governance system” and cooperation between countries to regulate Internet use, stepping up efforts to promote controls that activists complain stifle free expression. Facebook and other Western social media Web sites including Twitter are banned in China. Zuckerberg has long been courting China’s leaders in a so far futile attempt to access the country with the world’s largest number of Internet users — 668 million as of last year.
GREECE
Two refugees found dead
Two refugees were yesterday found dead on a boat that arrived on the island of Lesbos on the first day of the implementation of an agreement between the EU and Turkey on handling new refugee arrivals. Medical personnel performed CPR on the two men, but failed to revive them. The overcrowded boat was carrying dozens of refugees from nearby Turkey yesterday, the first day for the implementation of a refugee agreement between the EU and Turkey. It stipulates how the new arrivals from Turkey are to be processed and returned. About 2,500 refugees currently on Lesbos and other islands are being taken to mainland Greece where they are placed in shelters before EU-wide relocation.
SPAIN
Bus crash claims 14 lives
Fourteen people were killed and 43 injured yesterday when a bus carrying foreign students crashed, regional authorities in Catalonia said. The students were enrolled at Barcelona University as part of the European Erasmus exchange program, said Jordi Jane, who heads interior matters for the Catalonia region, adding the nationalities had not yet been established. The accident occurred just before 6am near the small town of Freginals, about 150km south of Barcelona, as the bus was returning from a traditional festival in Valencia. The driver “hit the railing on the right and swerved to the left so violently that the bus veered onto the other side of the highway,” Jane said. The bus then hit a car coming in the opposite direction, injuring two people inside, he added.
ISRAEL
Arson attack suspected
Police yesterday said that a Palestinian home had been set on fire near the site of an arson attack that killed three Palestinians last year. Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said the suspected arson attack took place earlier yesterday in the West Bank village of Duma. Palestinian officials said attackers broke Ibrahim Dawabsheh’s bedroom window and set his house on fire. Dawabsheh is a relative of last year’s victims and a key witness to the attack. He is testifying before an Israeli court in the suspected perpetrators’ trial. He was unharmed, but his wife suffered from smoke inhalation. In July last year, suspected Jewish settlers hurled firebombs into a home, killing 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh. His mother, Riham, and father, Saad, later died of their wounds. Ali’s four-year-old brother Ahmad survived.
Two medieval fortresses face each other across the Narva River separating Estonia from Russia on Europe’s eastern edge. Once a symbol of cooperation, the “Friendship Bridge” connecting the two snow-covered banks has been reinforced with rows of razor wire and “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank obstacles on the Estonian side. “The name is kind of ironic,” regional border chief Eerik Purgel said. Some fear the border town of more than 50,0000 people — a mixture of Estonians, Russians and people left stateless after the fall of the Soviet Union — could be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next target. On the Estonian side of the bridge,
DIPLOMATIC THAW: The Canadian prime minister’s China visit and improved Beijing-Ottawa ties raised lawyer Zhang Dongshuo’s hopes for a positive outcome in the retrial China has overturned the death sentence of Canadian Robert Schellenberg, a Canadian official said on Friday, in a possible sign of a diplomatic thaw as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney seeks to boost trade ties with Beijing. Schellenberg’s lawyer, Zhang Dongshuo (張東碩), yesterday confirmed China’s Supreme People’s Court struck down the sentence. Schellenberg was detained on drug charges in 2014 before China-Canada ties nosedived following the 2018 arrest in Vancouver of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟). That arrest infuriated Beijing, which detained two Canadians — Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig — on espionage charges that Ottawa condemned as retaliatory. In January
Jeremiah Kithinji had never touched a computer before he finished high school. A decade later, he is teaching robotics, and even took a team of rural Kenyans to the World Robotics Olympiad in Singapore. In a classroom in Laikipia County — a sparsely populated grasslands region of northern Kenya known for its rhinos and cheetahs — pupils are busy snapping together wheels, motors and sensors to assemble a robot. Guiding them is Kithinji, 27, who runs a string of robotics clubs in the area that have taken some of his pupils far beyond the rural landscapes outside. In November, he took a team
SHOW OF SUPPORT: The move showed that aggression toward Greenland is a question for Europe and Canada, and the consequences are global, not just Danish, experts said Canada and France, which adamantly oppose US President Donald Trump’s wish to control Greenland, were to open consulates in the Danish autonomous territory’s capital yesterday, in a strong show of support for the local government. Since returning to the White House last year, Trump has repeatedly insisted that Washington needs to control the strategic, mineral-rich Arctic island for security reasons. Trump last month backed off his threats to seize Greenland after saying he had struck a “framework” deal with NATO chief Mark Rutte to ensure greater US influence. A US-Denmark-Greenland working group has been established to discuss ways to meet Washington’s security concerns
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