FRANCE
Man attacks ‘Mona Lisa’
A man seemingly disguised as an old woman in a wheelchair on Sunday threw a piece of cake at the glass protecting the Mona Lisa at the Louvre Museum and shouted at people to think of planet Earth. The Paris prosecutors’ office said Monday that the 36-year-old man was detained following the incident and sent to a police psychiatric unit. An investigation has been opened into the damage of cultural artifacts. Videos posted on social media also showed the man throwing roses in the museum gallery to slack-jawed guests. The cake attack left a conspicuous white creamy smear on the glass, but the famous work by Leonardo da Vinci was not damaged.
UNITED KINGDOM
Rise in abuse of workers
Cases of violence and abuse against retail workers almost tripled during the COVID-19 pandemic to about 1,300 incidents a day, a survey by the British Retail Consortium found. Almost one in 10 daily incidents involved violence against store staff, with only 4 percent of occurrences resulting in prosecution. Three in five respondents said the police response to these incidents was “poor” or “very poor,” said the study, which covered the 12 months through March last year. “These figures make particularly grim reading as they came at the height of the pandemic when the ‘hidden heroes’ of retail were working tirelessly,” consortium CEO Helen Dickinson said.
UNITED STATES
Millionaire gets life term
A North Carolina man who won a US$10 million lottery prize in 2017 has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in the 2020 fatal shooting of his girlfriend. The News & Observer reported that Michael Todd Hill, 54, of Leland, was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced on Friday in the killing of 23-year-old Keonna Graham of Navassa. Graham was reported missing on July 20, 2020. She was later found dead in a hotel with a gunshot wound to the back of the head. Prosecutors said Hill later confessed to shooting Graham after she had been texting with other men while at the hotel.
UNITED STATES
Septuagenarian graduates
For 60 years, Ted Sams regretted missing his high-school graduation. Now 78, Sams can finally call himself a graduate after donning a cap and gown and receiving his diploma on Friday with the class of 2022 at Southern California’s San Gabriel High School. Back in 1962 when he was a high-school senior, Sams got in trouble and was suspended five days before the end of the school year. “When I went back with my grade, they wouldn’t give me my diploma because I owed US$4.80 for a book,” Sams told KABC-TV. “And so I just walked away and said forget it.” Sams beamed as he walked across the graduation stage at the Rose Bowl and received the diploma.
UNITED STATES
Pelosi’s husband arrested
The weekend arrest of Paul Pelosi, the husband of House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, on suspicion of driving under the influence came after the Porsche he was driving was hit by another vehicle in Northern California’s wine country, authorities said. Paul Pelosi, 82, was taken into custody shortly before midnight on Saturday in Napa County, a sheriff’s office online booking report said. He could face misdemeanor charges including driving under the influence and driving with a blood alcohol content level of 0.08 or higher, the police booking report said. He was released early on Sunday on US$5,000 bail, records showed.
HONG KONG
Bar clusters stall reopening
The territory is unlikely to further ease social distancing curbs as planned this month due to a series of COVID-19 clusters stemming from bars, Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) said yesterday. A third round of easing would have expanded venue capacity and allowed live music in bars, but Lam told reporters that her government had to be “prudent.” Bars are currently restricted to 75 percent capacity and seating a maximum of four people per table until closing time at 2am. Customers and staff are required to receive three doses of a COVID-19 vaccine.
FIJI
Wang mocks Biden’s IPEF
Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) mocked US President Joe Biden’s wide-ranging Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) for failing to lower tariffs. “The so-called Indo-Pacific Economic Framework recently rolled out by the US claims to build a free, open and inclusive new order, but how can any economic frame call itself free if it doesn’t lower tariffs?” Wang said on Monday during a visit to the Pacific island nation, according to a statement posted on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Web site. “How can it be called inclusive if it purposefully excludes China, the largest market in the region and in the world?” he said.
NIGERIA
Abducted prelate released
The head of the Methodist Church Nigeria regained his freedom a day after being abducted at gunpoint by unknown kidnappers in the country’s southeast, police said on Monday. Samuel Kanu Uche and two other senior clerics were kidnapped on Sunday along a highway in the Umunneochi area. Police spokesman Geoffrey Ogbonna said all three clerics were freed. “If a great servant of God of Uche’s caliber could be kidnapped like a three-year-old baby on a major road without any resistance from the police, it speaks volumes of what our security architecture has become,” the leadership of the Christian Association of Nigeria said.
NAMIBIA
Berlin lends looted artifacts
The government on Monday took delivery of 23 ancient pieces of jewelry, tools and other objects pillaged during colonial rule, and returned as an indefinite loan from Germany. The return of the artifacts is part of a project to encourage rapprochement between the two nations. “All the artifacts were collected during the Germany colonial era from different Namibian communities,” Museum Association of Namibia chairwoman Hilma Kautondokwa said. Hundreds of objects remain in Germany. Advocates have rejected the offer as insufficient for the atrocities that have poisoned relations between the country and Germany for decades.
CHINA
US school shootings decried
Beijing has called for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to investigate mass shootings in the US. The Global Times made the suggestion in an editorial yesterday, a day after Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian (趙立堅) told a briefing in Beijing that the UN office should produce a report on problems in the US. Beijing ramped up criticism of the US’ human rights record around a trip that UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet took to the Xinjiang region. The fault-finding has escalated since killings at a school in Uvalde, Texas. The commentaries appear to be an effort to hit back at the US, which has accused Beijing of carrying out genocide in Xinjiang.
Two medieval fortresses face each other across the Narva River separating Estonia from Russia on Europe’s eastern edge. Once a symbol of cooperation, the “Friendship Bridge” connecting the two snow-covered banks has been reinforced with rows of razor wire and “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank obstacles on the Estonian side. “The name is kind of ironic,” regional border chief Eerik Purgel said. Some fear the border town of more than 50,0000 people — a mixture of Estonians, Russians and people left stateless after the fall of the Soviet Union — could be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next target. On the Estonian side of the bridge,
Jeremiah Kithinji had never touched a computer before he finished high school. A decade later, he is teaching robotics, and even took a team of rural Kenyans to the World Robotics Olympiad in Singapore. In a classroom in Laikipia County — a sparsely populated grasslands region of northern Kenya known for its rhinos and cheetahs — pupils are busy snapping together wheels, motors and sensors to assemble a robot. Guiding them is Kithinji, 27, who runs a string of robotics clubs in the area that have taken some of his pupils far beyond the rural landscapes outside. In November, he took a team
DIPLOMATIC THAW: The Canadian prime minister’s China visit and improved Beijing-Ottawa ties raised lawyer Zhang Dongshuo’s hopes for a positive outcome in the retrial China has overturned the death sentence of Canadian Robert Schellenberg, a Canadian official said on Friday, in a possible sign of a diplomatic thaw as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney seeks to boost trade ties with Beijing. Schellenberg’s lawyer, Zhang Dongshuo (張東碩), yesterday confirmed China’s Supreme People’s Court struck down the sentence. Schellenberg was detained on drug charges in 2014 before China-Canada ties nosedived following the 2018 arrest in Vancouver of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟). That arrest infuriated Beijing, which detained two Canadians — Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig — on espionage charges that Ottawa condemned as retaliatory. In January
SHOW OF SUPPORT: The move showed that aggression toward Greenland is a question for Europe and Canada, and the consequences are global, not just Danish, experts said Canada and France, which adamantly oppose US President Donald Trump’s wish to control Greenland, were to open consulates in the Danish autonomous territory’s capital yesterday, in a strong show of support for the local government. Since returning to the White House last year, Trump has repeatedly insisted that Washington needs to control the strategic, mineral-rich Arctic island for security reasons. Trump last month backed off his threats to seize Greenland after saying he had struck a “framework” deal with NATO chief Mark Rutte to ensure greater US influence. A US-Denmark-Greenland working group has been established to discuss ways to meet Washington’s security concerns
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