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.”
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is in “excellent health” and fit for the presidency, according to a medical report published by the White House on Saturday as she challenged her rival, former US president Donald Trump, to publish his own health records. “Vice President Harris remains in excellent health,” her physician Joshua Simmons said in the report, adding that she “possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.” Speaking to reporters ahead of a trip to North Carolina, Harris called Trump’s unwillingness to publish his records “a further example
RUSSIAN INPUT: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov called Washington’s actions in Asia ‘destructive,’ accusing it of being the reason for the ‘militarization’ of Japan The US is concerned about China’s “increasingly dangerous and unlawful” activities in the disputed South China Sea, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ASEAN leaders yesterday during an annual summit, and pledged that Washington would continue to uphold freedom of navigation in the region. The 10-member ASEAN meeting with Blinken followed a series of confrontations at sea between China and ASEAN members Philippines and Vietnam. “We are very concerned about China’s increasingly dangerous and unlawful activities in the South China Sea which have injured people, harm vessels from ASEAN nations and contradict commitments to peaceful resolutions of disputes,” said Blinken, who
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