NEW DELHI: India’s women’s minister on Friday called for the death penalty for child rapists as nationwide outrage mounted over the brutal gang rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl.
Demonstrations were held in New Delhi and other cities as horrific details emerged of the murder of the Muslim girl, who was repeatedly raped while being held for five days in the city of Kathua in Jammu, including at a Hindu temple.
“I have been deeply, deeply disturbed by the rape case in Kathua and all the recent rape cases that have happened on children,” the women and children’s minister Maneka Gandhi said in a Twitter video message.
Gandhi said her ministry would seek an amendment to India’s Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, “asking for the death penalty for rape on children below 12 years.”
The killing has shaken the country in a way reminiscent of the fatal gang rape of a Delhi student on a bus in 2012 that made headlines around the world.
Rahul Gandhi, Congress Party President, led a candlelight march late Thursday to the India Gate monument in Delhi — the site of mass protests after the 2012 attack — to highlight the “unimaginable brutality” of the latest killing.
“Like millions of Indians my heart hurts,” Gandhi said at the midnight rally. “India simply cannot continue to treat its women the way it does.”
Vikramaditya Singh, who joined protesters at India Gate later Friday, said deep reforms were needed to improve women’s rights in India.
“The women in this country are the victims of these crimes. Besides taking action in this case, we need to look at the... upbringing and education of men in our society,” Singh told AFP.
Eight people have been arrested over the killing, including four police officers and a minor. All are Hindus.
The girl, whose identity was protected by a court order Friday, was murdered in January in the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir.
According to the charge sheet, she was abducted by the minor and an accomplice. The girl was forced to take sedatives and during five days in a shed and then a Hindu temple, she was repeatedly raped by the juvenile and different men, including a police constable.
She was finally strangled and beaten with a stone. According to the charge sheet, one of the attackers raped her just before she died.
Jammu and Kashmir is India’s only Muslim-majority state, but the Jammu region in the south, where the rape and murder took place, is Hindu-dominated.
The case has heightened fears of communal tensions in the region. Muslim activists have demanded action against what they see as a crime against their community.
This week, a crowd of Hindu lawyers tried to stop police from entering a court to file charges against the accused men.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, head of the Hindu nationalist government, has yet to comment on the case, but the Jammu and Kashmir chief minister, whose party is aligned with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, said the murder had “shamed humanity.”
Separately, a senior BJP lawmaker in Uttar Pradesh state faces arrest over the rape of a 17-year-old woman. The alleged attack occurred last year but only started making headlines again after the woman tried to set herself on fire outside the state chief minister’s residence last weekend.
High-profile names from the world of cinema and cricket joined the outrage over the Jammu crime in a country were nearly 40,000 rape cases are reported every year, according to official figures.
“What is happening to the world we live in???” Bollywood star Anushka Sharma, who is married to Indian cricket captain Virat Kohli, wrote on Twitter.
“These people should be given the most severe punishment there is! Where are we heading as humanity? Shaken to my core.”
Cricketer Gautam Gambhir blamed India’s “stinking systems” for what some have described as a rape epidemic.
“Come on ‘Mr System’, show us if you have the balls to punish the perpetrators, I challenge you,” he tweeted.
India outrage mounts over gang rape, murder of 8-year-old
India outrage mounts over gang rape, murder of 8-year-old
- A crowd of Hindu lawyers tried to stop police from entering a court to file charges against the accused men
- Jammu and Kashmir is India’s only Muslim-majority state
Wildfire rages in Los Angeles, forcing 30,000 to evacuate
- Wildfire forces 30,000 evacuations in upscale Los Angeles area
- Evacuations cause traffic jams, residents flee on foot
LOS ANGELES: A rapidly growing wildfire raged across an upscale section of Los Angeles on Tuesday, destroying homes and creating traffic jams as 30,000 people evacuated beneath huge plumes of smoke that covered much of the metropolitan area.
At least 2,921 acres (1,182 hectares) of the Pacific Palisades area between the coastal settlements of Santa Monica and Malibu had burned, officials said, after they had already warned of extreme fire danger from powerful winds that arrived following extended dry weather.
The fire spread as officials warned the worst wind conditions were expected to come overnight, leading to concerns that more neighborhoods could be forced to flee. The city of Santa Monica later ordered evacuations in the northern fringe of town.
Witnesses reported a number homes on fire with flames nearly scorching their cars when people fled the hills of Topanga Canyon, as the fire spread from there down to the Pacific Ocean.
“We feel very blessed at this point that there’s no injuries that are reported,” Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley told a press conference, adding that more than 25,000 people in 10,000 homes were threatened.
Firefighters in aircraft scooped water from the sea to drop it on the nearby flames. Flames engulfed homes and bulldozers cleared abandoned vehicles from roads so emergency vehicles could pass, television images showed.
As the sun set over Los Angeles, towering orange flames illuminated the hills leading to Topanga Canyon.
The fire singed some trees on the grounds of the Getty Villa, a museum loaded with priceless works of art, but the collection remained safe largely because of preventive efforts to trim brush surrounding the buildings, the museum said.
With only one major road leading from the canyon to the coast, and only one coastal highway leading to safety, traffic crawled to a halt, leading people to flee on foot.
Cindy Festa, a Pacific Palisades resident, said that as she evacuated out of the canyon, fires were “this close to the cars,” demonstrating with her thumb and forefinger.
“People left their cars on Palisades Drive. Burning up the hillside. The palm trees — everything is going,” Festa said from her car.
Before the fire started, the National Weather Service had issued its highest alert for extreme fire conditions for much of Los Angeles County from Tuesday through Thursday, predicting wind gusts of 50 to 80 mph (80 to 130 kph).
With low humidity and dry vegetation due to a lack of rain, the conditions were “about as bad as it gets in terms of fire weather,” the Los Angeles office of the National Weather Service said on X.
Governor Gavin Newsom, who declared a state of emergency, said the state positioned personnel, firetrucks and aircraft elsewhere in Southern California because of the fire danger to the wider region, he added.
“Hopefully, we’re wrong, but we’re anticipating other fires happening concurrently,” Newsom told the press conference.
A second blaze dubbed the Eaton Fire later broke out some 30 miles (50 km) inland in the foothills above Pasadena, consuming 200 acres (80 hectares), Cal Fire said.
The powerful winds changed President Joe Biden’s travel plans, grounding Air Force One in Los Angeles. He had planned to make a short flight inland to the Coachella Valley for a ceremony to create two new national monuments in California but the event was rescheduled for a later date at the White House.
“I have offered any federal assistance that is needed to help suppress the terrible Pacific Palisades fire,” Biden said in statement. A federal grant had already been approved to help reimburse the state of California for its fire response, Biden said.
Pacific Palisades is home to several Hollywood stars. Actor James Woods said on X he was able to evacuate but added, “I do not know at this moment if our home is still standing.”
Actor Steve Guttenberg told KTLA television that friends of his were impeded from evacuating because others had abandoned their cars in the road.
“It’s really important for everybody to band together and don’t worry about your personal property. Just get out,” Guttenberg said. “Get your loved ones and get out.”
Wild weather halted ferries between New Zealand’s main islands again. Why isn’t there a tunnel?
WELLINGTON: Wild weather during New Zealand ‘s peak summer holiday period has disrupted travel for thousands of passengers on ferries that cross the sea between the country’s main islands.
The havoc wrought by huge swells and gales in the deep and turbulent Cook Strait between the North and South Islands is a recurring feature of the country’s roughest weather. Breakdowns of New Zealand’s aging ferries have also caused delays.
But unlike in Britain and Japan, New Zealand has not seriously considered an undersea tunnel beneath the strait that more than 1 million people cross by sea each year. Although every New Zealander has an opinion on the idea, the last time a prime minister was known to have suggested building one was in 1904.
A tunnel or bridge crossing the approximately 25-30 kilometers (15-18 miles) of volatile sea is so unlikely for the same reason that regularly vexes the country’s planners — solutions for traversing New Zealand’s remote, rugged and hazard-prone terrain are logistically fraught, analysts said.
Why isn’t a tunnel practical?
A Cook Strait tunnel would dramatically reduce the three- to four-hour sailing time between the North Island, home to 75 percent of the population, and the South.
“But it would chew up, off the top of my head, about 20 years of the country’s entire transport infrastructure development budget in one project,” said Nicolas Reid, transport planner at MRCagney.
He estimated a cost for a tunnel of 50 billion New Zealand dollars ($28 billion), comparable in today’s terms to the price of the undersea tunnel that connects Britain and Europe by rail. New Zealand is the same size as the United Kingdom — but the UK has a population of 69 million, more than 13 times New Zealand’s.
It’s also about the same size as Japan, which is home to the Seikan undersea rail tunnel connecting the islands of Honshu and Hokkaido — and has a population of 124 million.
“We have a large infrastructure burden if we want to reach out across the country,” said Reid. “And we’ve only got 5 million people to pay for it.”
New Zealand’s volatile ground could also prove a problem. Perched on the boundary between tectonic plates, fault lines run under both the North and South Islands and earthquakes are sometimes centered in the strait, said seismologist John Risteau of GNS.
Opposing tides and winds make journeys unpredictable
Sailing on both Cook Strait ferry services — which have five ships transporting people, vehicles and freight — resumed Tuesday after two days of dangerous waves. Clearing the backlog meant more waiting and some passengers on one carrier said they could not book a new berth for a fortnight.
The Cook Strait is less calm than many worldwide because it features opposing tides at each end — one where it joins the Tasman Sea and the other where it meets the Pacific Ocean.
“We tend to have the prevailing, dominating wind funnel through Cook Strait, northerlies or southerlies, and that’s why they’re stronger there,” said Gerard Bellam, a forecaster for the weather agency MetService. Swells in the strait this week reached 9 meters (30 feet), he said.
Julia Rufey, an English tourist waiting at the Wellington terminal, said she had flown between North Island and South Island on previous trips, but “adventure” had prompted her to choose the ferry.
“We thought, come to Wellington, try the ferry, which is already 3 1/2 hours late,” she said.
No clear plans on what to do about aging ferries
The ferries themselves, prone to breakdowns and more than half of them state-owned, have long been a political hot potato. The current government scrapped their predecessors’ plan to replace the vessels before they become defunct in 2029 as too costly. The opposition has criticized the government for only partly revealing its new ferry replacement plan in December and for not divulging the cost.
Still, some delayed on Tuesday said they would choose the ferry even if they had alternatives. Laurie Perino, an Australian tourist, said the pristine and scenic ocean views had prompted her to book.
“It would be more convenient,” she said, referring to a Cook Strait tunnel. “But I think a lot of people would still like to travel on the ferry.”
Tents arrive for survivors of earthquake in high-altitude, wintry Tibet that killed 126
- The confirmed death toll stood at 126 with another 188 injured as of Tuesday evening
- The earthquake struck about 75 kilometers (50 miles) from Mount Everest and the border with Nepal
BEIJING: Rescue workers in the cold, high-altitude Tibet region in western China searched for more survivors and victims Wednesday, one day after a strong earthquake leveled thousands of houses and killed at least 126 people.
Tents, quilts and other relief items were being delivered to provide shelter for those whose homes are uninhabitable or unsafe. Temperatures fell well below freezing overnight in an area with an average altitude of about 4,200 meters (13,800 feet).
The confirmed death toll stood at 126 with another 188 injured as of Tuesday evening. The earthquake struck about 75 kilometers (50 miles) from Mount Everest and the border with Nepal, where the shaking sent people running out of their homes in the capital Katmandu.
The dead included at least 22 of the 222 residents of Gurum, the village’s Communist Party chief Tsering Phuntsog told the official Xinhua News Agency on Tuesday. The victims included his 74-year-old mother, and several other of his relatives remained buried in the debris.
“Even young people couldn’t run out of the houses when the earthquake hit, let alone old people and children,” Tsering Phuntsog said.
More than 3,600 houses collapsed, according to a preliminary survey and 30,000 residents had been relocated, Xinhua said, citing the city government in Shigatse, which is called Xigaze in Chinese.
The Ministry of Emergency Management has 1,850 rescuers on the ground, state broadcaster CCTV said, along with firefighters and others.
More than 500 aftershocks were recorded after the earthquake, which the US Geological Survey said was magnitude 7.1. China’s earthquake center recorded a magnitude of 6.8.
Trump refuses to rule out use of military force to take control of Greenland and the Panama Canal
- Greenland, home to a large US military base, is an autonomous territory of Denmark, a longtime US ally
- The US returned the Panama Canal Zone to the country in 1979 and ended its joint partnership in controlling the strategic waterway in 1999
PALM BEACH, Florida: President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday said he would not rule out the use of military force to seize control of the Panama Canal and Greenland, as he declared US control of both to be vital to American national security.
Speaking to reporters less than two weeks before he takes office on Jan. 20 and as a delegation of aides and advisers that includes Donald Trump Jr. is in Greenland, Trump left open the use of the American military to secure both territories. Trump’s intention marks a rejection of decades of US policy that has prioritized self-determination over territorial expansion.
“I’m not going to commit to that,” Trump said, when asked if he would rule out the use of the military. “It might be that you’ll have to do something. The Panama Canal is vital to our country.” He added, “We need Greenland for national security purposes.”
Greenland, home to a large US military base, is an autonomous territory of Denmark, a longtime US ally and a founding member of NATO. Trump cast doubts on the legitimacy of Denmark’s claim to Greenland.
The Panama Canal has been solely controlled by the eponymous country for more than 25 years. The US returned the Panama Canal Zone to the country in 1979 and ended its joint partnership in controlling the strategic waterway in 1999.
Addressing Trump’s comments in an interview with Danish broadcaster TV2, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called the United States Denmark’s “most important and closest ally,” and that she did not believe that the United States will use military or economic power to secure control over Greenland.
Frederiksen repeated that she welcomed the United States taking a greater interest in the Arctic region, but that it would “have to be done in a way that is respectful of the Greenlandic people,” she said.
“At the same time, it must be done in a way that allows Denmark and the United States to still cooperate in, among other things, NATO,” Frederiksen said.
Earlier, Trump posted a video of his private plane landing in Nuuk, the Arctic territory’s capital, in a landscape of snow-capped peaks and fjords.
“Don Jr. and my Reps landing in Greenland,” Trump wrote. “The reception has been great. They, and the Free World, need safety, security, strength, and PEACE! This is a deal that must happen. MAGA. MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN!”
In a statement, Greenland’s government said Donald Trump Jr.’s visit was taking place “as a private individual” and not as an official visit, and Greenlandic representatives would not meet with him.
Trump, a Republican, has also floated having Canada join the United States as the 51st state. He said Tuesday that he would not use military force to invade the country, which is home to more than 40 million people and is a founding NATO partner.
Instead, he said, he would would rely on “economic force” as he cast the US trade deficit with Canada — a natural resource-rich nation that provides the US with commodities like crude oil and petroleum — as a subsidy that would be coming to an end.
Canadian leaders fired back after earlier dismissing Trump’s rhetoric as a joke.
“President-elect Trump’s comments show a complete lack of understanding of what makes Canada a strong country. Our economy is strong. Our people are strong. We will never back down in the face of threats,” Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly said in a post on X.
Justin Trudeau, the country’s outgoing prime minister, was even more blunt.
“There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States,” he wrote.
Promising a “Golden age of America,” Trump also said he would move to try to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” saying that has a “beautiful ring to it.”
He also said he believes that NATO should dramatically increase its spending targets, with members of the trans-Atlantic alliance committing to spend at least 5 percent of their GDPs on defense spending, up from the current 2 percent.
In June, NATO announced a record 23 of its 32 member nations were on track to hit that target as Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine has raised the threat of expanding conflict in Europe.
Trump also used his press conference to complain that President Joe Biden was undermining his transition to power a day after the incumbent moved to ban offshore energy drilling in most federal waters.
Biden, whose term expires in two weeks, used his authority under the federal Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to protect offshore areas along the East and West coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and portions of Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea from future oil and natural gas leasing. All told, about 625 million acres of federal waters were withdrawn from energy exploration by Biden in a move that may require an act of Congress to undo.
“I’m going to put it back on day one,” Trump told reporters. He pledged to take it to the courts “if we need to.”
Trump said Biden’s effort — part of a series of final actions in office by the Democrat’s administration — was undermining his plans for once he’s in office.
“You know, they told me that, we’re going to do everything possible to make this transition to the new administration very smooth,” Trump said. “It’s not smooth.”
But Biden’s team has extended access and courtesies to the Trump team that the Republican former president initially denied Biden after his 2020 election victory. Trump incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles told Axios in an interview published Monday that Biden chief of staff Jeff Zients “has been very helpful.”
In extended remarks, Trump also railed against the work of special counsel Jack Smith, who oversaw now-dropped prosecutions over his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol and possession of classified documents after he left office in 2021. The Justice Department is expected to soon release a report from Smith summarizing his investigation after the criminal cases were forced to an end by Trump’s victory in November.
Bangladesh’s ailing former premier Khaleda Zia leaves country for treatment in London
- Her ailments include liver cirrhosis, cardiac disease and kidney problems, her physician says
- Khaleda Zia was sentenced to 17 years in jail under Hasina’s rule following two corruption cases
DHAKA: Bangladesh’s ailing former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia left the nation’s capital for London on Tuesday for medical treatment, said one of her advisers.
Zahiruddin Swapan, an adviser to Zia, told The Associated Press by phone that the three-time former premier and head of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party left Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport late Tuesday on an air ambulance.
“Our senior leaders left the airport seeing her off,” Swapan said.
Her ailments include liver cirrhosis, cardiac disease and kidney problems, according to her physician.
Zia left behind a South Asian nation grappling with uncertainty over its political future after her archrival, former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, was ousted in a student-led mass uprising in August. Zia and Hasina are the most influential political leaders in Bangladesh.
An interim government headed by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus is running the country and plans to hold elections in December this year or in the first half of 2026.
Zia was sentenced to 17 years in jail under Hasina’s rule following two corruption cases stemming from 2001-2006 when she was prime minister. Her supporters say the charges against her were politically motivated, an allegation Hasina’s administration denied. Under Yunus, Zia was acquitted in one of the cases in November and an appeal in the second case was being heard on Tuesday.
Zia, 79, was freed from prison on bail under Hasina through a government order and had been undergoing medical treatment in Bangladesh. But Hasina’s administration did not allow her to travel abroad for treatment despite requests seeking approval.
The special air ambulance was sent by Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. Hundreds of her supporters gathered outside her residence in the city’s upscale Gulshan area to see her off.
Zia’s motorcade took nearly three hours to cross about a 10-kilometer (6-mile) stretch of road to get to the airport from her residence in Dhaka’s Gulshan area as thousands of her desperate supporters greeted her on the way, creating traffic chaos. Her hours-long journey to the airport was broadcast live by television stations.
Enamul Haque Chowdhury, a close aide of Zia, told reporters that the air ambulance had arrived from Doha to take her to London, where her eldest son and heir apparent Tarique Rahman has been in exile since 2007. Rahman is the acting chairman of Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party and is expected to lead the party toward the election. The country’s dynastic politics have long focused on the families of Hasina and Zia.
Zia is the wife of late President Ziaur Rahman, a former military chief who rose to prominence during years of tumultuous politics after Hasina’s father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country’s independence leader, was assassinated along with most of his family members in a military coup in 1975. Zia’s husband was also killed in 1981 in another military coup after he formed his political party and ruled the country as president for three years. Hasina’s father led Bangladesh’s independence war against Pakistan, aided by India, in 1971.
Zia’s personal physician, A.Z.M. Zahid Hossain, said Qatar’s emir arranged the special aircraft with medical facilities for the former prime minister, whose ailments include liver cirrhosis, cardiac disease and kidney problems.
Her departure follows dramatic political developments since last August, when Hasina’s 15-year rule ended. Hasina fled into exile in India as she and her close aides faced charges of killing hundreds of protesters during a mass protest movement that began in July.
Zia’s departure could create a symbolic vacuum in the country’s politics amid efforts by a student group that led the anti-Hasina protest to form a new political party. In the absence of Hasina and her secular Bangladesh Awami League party, the rise of Islamist political parties and other Islamist groups has been visible in the Muslim-majority country of 170 million people.
Zia’s party has been bargaining with the Yunus-led government for an election sometime this year. Yunus said his government wants to make some major reforms before the election.
