SRI LANKA
Kandy rocked by protests
Demonstrations by several thousand people yesterday gripped the city of Kandy as Buddhist monks demanded the sacking of three top Muslim politicians over the Easter suicide bombings. Even as shops and offices were closed in the city 115km east of Colombo, two of the Muslim leaders stepped down from their posts as provincial governors, President Maithripala Sirisena’s office said. The governors of the Eastern and Western provinces, both Sirisena appointees, tendered their resignations which were accepted, the president’s office said in a brief statement. The third Muslim leader is Minister of Commerce Rishad Bathiudeen, and political sources said all Muslim ministers were expected to step down from the government if he was forced out.
HONG KONG
Extradition bill to be altered
The government says it is willing to raise the threshold for extraditing criminal suspects amid concerns over proposed amendments to the territory’s extradition law. A government news release yesterday said additional safeguards include a requirement that extradition be permitted only for offenses punishable with prison sentences of seven years or more, rather than three as before. Governments requesting extradition would also have to provide assurances that the suspects would receive protections such as the presumption of innocence, the right to open trial, legal representation, the right to cross-examine witnesses, freedom from coerced confessions, the right to appeal and others.
SUDAN
Gunmen attack protest site
Gunmen yesterday moved to crush a long-running sit-in protest demanding the military surrender power to a civilian government, with reports of at least nine deaths and many people wounded. Gunfire and explosions rocked the site outside army headquarters in Khartoum as forces assaulted from all directions, protester Adel Ahmed said by telephone. Hundreds of people were seen fleeing the location. Protesters “are facing a massacre,” the Sudanese Professionals Association said. “The mask of the military council has fallen, revealing its face.” However, a spokesman for the ruling military council denied trying to break up the sit-in “by force” and said security forces were pursuing a group of “violators.” Opposition and protest groups said they were cutting off all contact and negotiations with the military council as a result of yesterday’s actions.
ZIMBABWE
Amnesty branch closed
Amnesty International has shut down its local branch over alleged abuse of donor funds and fraud by staff. The rights group says it has launched further investigations with the help of police into suspected graft and misconduct involving millions of dollars and the local branch has indefinitely been placed under administration. The alleged fraud was exposed in a forensic audit conducted last year.
THAILAND
Chatuchak blaze probed
Authorities yesterday began investigating a fire that roared through Bangkok’s Chatuchak weekend market on Sunday night, destroying scores of small shops. The fire emergency service said the blaze started after 9pm and affected more than 100 stalls. No injuries were reported. “The fire was just too big. People were evacuating their shops,” said eyewitness Younes Parvin, a university student who shot cellphone video of the blaze from about 20m away. “It was quite terrifying.”
HUNGARY
S Koreans start test dives
South Korean rescue divers yesterday performed test dives in the Danube River in Budapest as they prepared an attempt to reach the wreckage of a pleasure boat that had been carrying mostly South Korean tourists when it sank in an accident last week. The Viking Sigyn cruise liner struck a smaller boat, the Mermaid, in heavy rain on Wednesday. The smaller vessel, which was carrying a group of South Koreans on a pleasure cruise, capsized and sank in the worst accident on the Danube in more than half a century. Seven South Koreans were rescued alive and seven bodies recovered on the night of the disaster. A further 21 people — 19 South Koreans and two Hungarians — are missing and presumed dead.
GREECE
Opposition sweeps elections
The conservative opposition New Democracy party on Sunday swept local elections, winning in nearly all regions and the cities of Athens and Thessaloniki, routing Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’ ruling left five weeks before they face off in general elections. New Democracy candidates have won 12 of the nation’s 13 regions, party leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis said, according to almost complete results. Mitsotakis is Tsipras’ main rival in the July 7 snap parliamentary elections, called after New Democracy took 33 percent of the vote in last month’s European elections — 9 points more than the ruling SYRIZA party. Sunday’s vote was a second-round runoff for city mayors and regional governors.
UNITED STATES
Pompeo skeptical of plan
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is worried that the administration of President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plan would be considered “unworkable” and might not gain traction, media reported on Sunday. Pompeo’s remarks to a private meeting of Jewish leaders, first reported by the Washington Post, showed that even the plan’s own backers expect the latest blueprint for ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be met with deep skepticism. “It may be rejected. Could be in the end, folks will say: ‘It’s not particularly original, it doesn’t particularly work for me,’ that is, ‘It’s got two good things and nine bad things, I’m out,’” the Post reported, citing an audio recording of the meeting it had obtained. In the remarks delivered on Tuesday last week to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Pompeo acknowledged the plan’s perceived favoritism to Israel, but hoped it would nonetheless be given a fair hearing. “I understand the perception of that. I hope everyone will just give the space to listen and let it settle in a little bit,” he said, according to the Post.
UNITED STATES
Man quit before shooting
The engineer who shot dead 12 people in Virginia Beach, Virginia, had submitted his resignation hours before the killings, a city official said on Sunday. DeWayne Craddock, 40, had worked as an engineer for the public works department for about 15 years before carrying out the Friday rampage at his workplace that also left four people wounded. Virginia Beach city manager Dave Hansen confirmed at a news conference that Craddock had given his superiors two weeks’ notice of his resignation the day of the shooting. “He was not terminated and he was not in the process of being terminated,” Hansen said. “To my knowledge, the perpetrator’s performance was satisfactory... there were no issues of discipline ongoing.”
Tens of thousands of Filipino Catholics yesterday twirled white cloths and chanted “Viva, viva,” as a centuries-old statue of Jesus Christ was paraded through the streets of Manila in the nation’s biggest annual religious event. The day-long procession began before dawn, with barefoot volunteers pulling the heavy carriage through narrow streets where the devout waited in hopes of touching the icon, believed to hold miraculous powers. Thousands of police were deployed to manage crowds that officials believe could number in the millions by the time the statue reaches its home in central Manila’s Quiapo church around midnight. More than 800 people had sought
DENIAL: Pyongyang said a South Korean drone filmed unspecified areas in a North Korean border town, but Seoul said it did not operate drones on the dates it cited North Korea’s military accused South Korea of flying drones across the border between the nations this week, yesterday warning that the South would face consequences for its “unpardonable hysteria.” Seoul quickly denied the accusation, but the development is likely to further dim prospects for its efforts to restore ties with Pyongyang. North Korean forces used special electronic warfare assets on Sunday to bring down a South Korean drone flying over North Korea’s border town. The drone was equipped with two cameras that filmed unspecified areas, the General Staff of the North Korean People’s Army said in a statement. South Korea infiltrated another drone
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
Indonesia and Malaysia have become the first countries to block Grok, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, after authorities said it was being misused to generate sexually explicit and nonconsensual images. The moves reflect growing global concern over generative AI tools that can produce realistic images, sound and text, while existing safeguards fail to prevent their abuse. The Grok chatbot, which is accessed through Musk’s social media platform X, has been criticized for generating manipulated images, including depictions of women in bikinis or sexually explicit poses, as well as images involving children. Regulators in the two Southeast Asian
RSS