ISRAEL
Two killed after car attack
Israeli forces yesterday shot and killed two Palestinians who carried out a car-ramming attack in the occupied West Bank, injuring a soldier and a policeman, police and the army said. The army said that forces opened fire at three Palestinian assailants, “neutralizing two of them and lightly injuring a third,” while police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said two of the Palestinians were killed. The policeman injured in the pre-dawn attack had already been released from hospital, Rosenfeld said. The Palestinian health ministry named the two men killed as Amir Mahmoud Darraj and Yussef Anqawi, both 20. Kafr Nama’s mayor said that troops were leaving the village on foot after a raid to arrest a Palestinian suspect there when the incident occurred. The Israeli army said its troops had arrested 11 alleged Hamas operatives in the Ramallah area overnight.
BANGLADESH
Envoy’s killer hanged
A Bangladeshi man was hanged in a jail outside Dhaka over the murder of a Saudi diplomat in 2012, an official said Monday. Khalaf al-Ali, 45, who worked in the consular section of the Saudi Arabian embassy, was shot in the capital’s diplomatic zone in front of his rented apartment. He later died in hospital. Police at that time said 30-year-old Saiful Islam, who was hanged on Sunday, led the gang who tried to rob the diplomat. The Supreme Court in August last year upheld Islam’s death sentence. He was originally sentenced to death in 2013 by a trial court which described him as the main perpetrator of the killing.
AUSTRALIA
Man kills Airbnb guest
A man has admitted in court to choking to death an Airbnb guest over an unpaid A$210 (US$149) bill. Jason Colton yesterday pleaded not guilty to a murder charge in the Victoria Supreme Court, but admitted to manslaughter in Ramis Jonuzi’s death in 2017. Colton would face a potential life sentence if a jury convicts him of murder, or 20 years if the jury accepts Jonuzi’s death was manslaughter. Jonuzi had been renting a room in a Melbourne home where Colton was also a tenant. Jonuzi first rented a room for three nights on Airbnb, but agreed to stay another week for A$210. The trial continues today.
KENYA
Helicopter crash kills five
Four Americans and their Kenyan pilot were killed when their helicopter crashed on a remote island in Lake Turkana in a national park in the northwest, police said yesterday. The aircraft came down in Central Island National Park at about 8pm on Sunday, police said, killing all on board. The cause of the crash had yet to be determined. Police did not identify the victims, saying next of kin had to be notified first.
INDONESIA
Dam to proceed: court
Environmental advocates have lost a court challenge to a Chinese-backed dam that would rip through the habitat of the most critically endangered orangutan species. A court in North Sumatra Province’s capital, Medan, yesterday ruled that construction could continue, despite critics of the 510-megawatt hydro dam providing evidence that its environmental impact assessment was deeply flawed. Experts said the dam would flood and in other ways alter the habitat of an orangutan species numbering only about 800 primates and likely make it impossible to take a crucial step toward ensuring the species survives.
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
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