QUOTE OF THE DAY
“I want to send a message that if we don’t stop China today, tomorrow it will be too late.”
Dao Minh Chu,
a Vietnamese demonstrator who was pushed away from a park in Ho Chi Minh City near the Chinese Embassy
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3 arrested in Turkey mining disaster
ISTANBUL — Three people were arrested on charges of negligence in the Turkish mining disaster that killed 301 people, a prosecutor said Sunday. The suspects are among 19 people still in custody.
Prosecutor Bekir Sahiner said the three were also accused of causing the death of more than one person, a charge that doesn’t imply intent. In a news conference in Soma, where the disaster took place, he said that one of those arrested was the company’s operations manager. The manager is Akin Celik, though Sahiner didn’t name him.
A total of 25 people were initially detained and six of them have been released, Sahiner said.
The charges can lead to sentences of between three and 15 years in prison, according to the Turkish penal code.
Government and company officials have insisted that the mine was inspected regularly and negligence wasn’t a factor in Tuesday’s tragedy. But reacting to widespread public anger, government officials promised to investigate and pledged that any mine officials found to be negligent would be punished
Swiss voters reject $24.65 minimum wage
BERLIN — Swiss voters resoundingly rejected Sunday a proposed minimum wage that would have been the world’s highest, a move widely seen as reflecting an aversion to state intervention in the country’s liberal economic policies.
Trade unions had sought a minimum hourly wage of $24.65 in what they said was an effort to ensure fair salaries for workers in the country’s lowest-paid sectors. Switzerland currently has no national minimum wage.
The proposed rate — considerably higher than elsewhere in Europe and well above the $10.10 sought by President Barack Obama in the United States — found little support in a national referendum, with 76.3 percent opposed, according to initial results released by the government.
Switzerland, as one of the world’s most prosperous countries and home to major international banks and hedge funds, seems an unlikely venue for a debate on wage disparity. But unions argued that many people in the lowest-paying sectors of the economy struggle to make ends meet because their wages have not kept up with a cost of living that is one of the highest in the world.
170 Morsi supporters convicted in Egypt
CAIRO — A pair of Egyptian courts Sunday convicted 170 suspected supporters of toppled President Mohammed Morsi on charges related to violent attacks last year, the country’s latest mass trials ahead of this month’s presidential elections.
The convictions are the latest in a series othat saw hundreds of people who prosecutors identified as Morsi supporters sentenced to death or imprisonment.
In some cases, the verdicts came after no more than two hearings, drawing criticism from human-rights activists and foreign governments.
The Kafr el-Sheikh court convicted 127 people of storming and torching a church, a police station and a sports stadium to avenge the killing of hundreds of Islamists when security forces ended two sit-in protests in Cairo by Morsi supporters in August, according to a statement by the office of Egypt’s top prosecutor. They were sentenced to 10 years in prison each. Five minors, all 17 years old, each received a one-year suspended sentence in the same case, the statement said.
The second court in Cairo sentenced 37 people to 15 years in prison each for their part in an attempt to blow up a subway station in Cairo last year, in addition to charges of vandalism; illegal possession of explosives, arms and ammunition; disrupting public and private transport, said the statement from the chief prosecutor’s office.
S. Korea leader to disband coast guard
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s president said today that she will push to disband the coast guard in the wake of last month’s ferry disaster that left more than 300 people dead or missing, calling its rescue operations after the disaster a failure.
The coast guard has been under growing public criticism over its reportedly poor search-and-rescue work after the ferry Sewol sank April 16. Most of the victims were students from a single high school near Seoul who were traveling to the southern tourist island of Jeju.
“The coast guard’s rescue operations were virtually a failure,” President Park Geun-hye said in a nationally televised speech.
Park said she will push for legislation that would transfer the coast guard’s responsibilities to the National Police Agency and a new government body she plans to establish.