HONG KONG
Court hears yoga ball killing
An anesthetist allegedly gassed his wife and daughter to death using a yoga ball filled with carbon monoxide, the High Court heard on Wednesday. Prosecutors told the court that Khaw Kim-sun (許金山) left the inflatable ball in the trunk of a car, where the gas leaked out, according to court reports. Khaw’s wife and 16-year-old daughter were found on a roadside in a locked yellow Mini Cooper in 2015. Police found a deflated yoga ball in the back of the car. Prosecutors said that Khaw, a 53-year-old Malaysian, was having an affair with a student and his wife would not grant him a divorce. Prosecutors said it was likely that Khaw had not intended to kill his daughter, as Khaw had said he had urged his daughter to stay at home and finish her homework on the day of the deaths, Apple Daily reported. Khaw had been seen filling two balls with carbon monoxide at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he was an associate professor, reports said.
JAPAN
Typhoon threatens west
Typhoon Cimaron yesterday was expected to make landfall in the west of the nation, raising the risk of more hardship for a region battered by floods and prompting authorities to issue evacuation advisories for more than 60,000 people. Cimaron was likely to cut across the western region yesterday evening, the Japan Meteorological Agency said. “There will be heavy rain in areas that have yet to fully recover,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said at a meeting at the government’s disaster response headquarters. Shikoku would likely see as much as 800mm of rain in the 24 hours to noon today. At least three municipalities on Shikoku issued evacuation advisories for their 65,000 residents. Meanwhile, Typhoon Soulik has whipped up strong winds, waves and heavy rain in southern South Korea, leaving one person missing and one injured. It is forecast to make landfall at the southwestern town of Seocheon at 3am today, dumping 7cm to 15cm of rain and gusts of up to 160kph.
INDONESIA
Blasphemy ruling criticized
The nation’s largest Muslim organization has criticized the blasphemy conviction and imprisonment of a Buddhist woman who complained that the call to prayer from her neighborhood mosque was too loud. Officials from Nahdlatul Ulama yesterday said that the woman’s complaint about mosque loudspeakers does not constitute blasphemy under the law. The ethnic Chinese woman, Meiliana, on Tuesday was sentenced to 18 months in prison by a court in Medan, the capital of North Sumatra. “We believe that Meiliana did not commit blasphemy,” Nahdlatul Ulama deputy chairman Robikin Emhas said, adding that there was no hatred against any religion in her complaint. Another prominent Nahdlatul Ulama official, Rumadi Ahmad, who was an expert witness Meiliana’s trial, said his testimony was ignored.
UNITED STATES
Airline stops China service
Hawaiian Airlines is to suspend its only route to China after four years of offering the service. The airline on Tuesday announced that the nonstop service that flew three days a week between Honolulu and Beijing is to end in October, citing low demand, Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported. Airline spokeswoman Ann Botticelli said the company was optimistic that the number of Chinese visitors would increase, but the market has been slow to mature.
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
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