JAPAN
Abductor suspect arrested
Police have caught a 23-year-old man wanted for allegedly abducting a teenage girl who escaped a day earlier after being held captive in his apartment for two years. Police yesterday said that the girl, now aged 15, escaped from suspect Kabu Terauchi’s apartment in downtown Tokyo on Sunday while he was out shopping and called home from a pay phone. She disappeared two years ago from her hometown in Saitama, near Tokyo. Saitama police said investigators captured Terauchi near a forest west of Tokyo. He was bleeding from the neck from a minor self-inflicted injury. Police plan to formally arrest him on charges of kidnapping. Terauchi graduated from university this month and even had a job offer while allegedly keeping the girl locked in his apartment.
UNITED STATES
Facebook sorry for glitch
Facebook apologized on Sunday for a bug that sent a “Safety Check” notification to users around the world following a deadly suicide bombing in Lahore. Facebook users from Honolulu to Brussels and Cairo to Hong Kong were baffled by the notification, a feature that lets users signal to friends that they are safe following an event in their area like a terror attack or natural disaster. “We activated ‘Safety Check’ today in Lahore, Pakistan, after a bombing that took place there. Unfortunately, many people not affected by the crisis received a notification asking if they were okay,” Facebook said in a statement. “This kind of bug is counter to our intent. We worked quickly to resolve the issue and we apologize to anyone who mistakenly received the notification,” it added. At least 65 people were killed and hundreds injured when a suicide bomber blew himself up at a crowded park in Lahore, where Christians were celebrating Easter Sunday.
SPAIN
Pilot arrested for hash hauls
Police have detained a helicopter pilot suspected of flying hauls of hashish to the nation from Morocco while on temporary release from prison, they said on Sunday. Officers arrested the pilot on March 6 after he allegedly landed a helicopter loaded with 750kg near Estepona. “The pilot was carrying out a sentence at a correctional center and took advantage of his weekend furloughs to carry out the drug flights,” a police statement said. The pilot was serving a sentence for an undisclosed crime at a jail in the seaside city of San Sebastian in the northern Basque Country. Police seized 1.5 tonnes of hashish as part of the operation along with 1,000 marijuana plants, two helicopters, 15 vehicles and 220,000 euros (US$245,711) in cash.
EL SALVADOR
Gangs offer end to killings
A video purportedly made by the nation’s main street gangs is offering an end to killings in the country, and asks the government not to continue an anti-gang offensive. The nation suffered growing gang violence since a 2012 gang truce fell apart. In the video broadcast by local media on Saturday, a masked man claimed to make the offer on behalf of the Mara Salvatrucha gang and two factions of the Barrio 18 gang. The video said killings were ordered stopped as of Saturday, to show the government it did not have to implement get-tough policies. The government has been considering a kind of limited state of emergency in some areas and is planning to release some non-gang inmates to free up prison space and liberate police to fight the gangs.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
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