ANN/THE STRAITS TIMES – A man’s intention to help an accident victim ended tragically when he was fatally hit by a car along the Kuala Lumpur-Karak Highway towards Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Bentong district police chief superintendent Zaiham Mohd Kahar told Malay language daily Sinar Harian that the victim, Tan Wing Foo, 47, died at 7pm the same day while receiving treatment at Bentong Hospital.
He said the police received information about the incident at 5.30pm.
“Initial investigations found that a car that was travelling from Kuantan towards Kuala Lumpur had skidded and landed in a ditch,” he told Sinar Harian.
Zaiham said that several drivers passing by the area had stopped to assist with the skidded car.
He explained that while they were controlling traffic, another car lost control and hit two of the victims at the scene.
“As a result of the accident, four victims were sent to Bentong Hospital for treatment. One of the victims died while receiving treatment,” he said.
In the meantime, he requested anyone who witnessed the incident to come forward to assist in the investigation.
“We advise all road users to be cautious when assisting accident victims. Contact the emergency line if involved or witnessing an accident,” he added.
PHOP PHRA (AFP) – At a scam compound in Myanmar, Filipina worker Pieta had just days to romance strangers online and trick them into investing in a fake business – failing which she would be beaten or tortured with electric shocks.
Pieta was one of 260 people – many visibly injured or bruised – rescued from an illicit centre along the Myanmar border this week and handed over to Thailand, following a series of crackdowns on the illegal operations.
Scam compounds have mushroomed in Myanmar’s borderlands and are staffed by foreigners, sometimes trafficked and forced to work, swindling people around the world in an industry analysts said is worth billions of dollars.
Pieta, a pseudonym to protect her identity, thought she was accepting a job in Thailand that paid USD1,500 a month when she left the Philippines six months ago.
Instead, she was forced to work gruelling shifts for no pay at the compound in Kyauk Khet, a village in Myanmar’s Karen state, scamming people in Europe and living in constant fear of punishment.
“If we didn’t reach the target, we were beaten up… (or given) electric shocks,” she told AFP from a holding centre in Phop Phra, about 30 kilometres south of Thailand’s Mae Sot after the rescuees were taken by boat across a small border river recently.
Alleged victims of scam centres board a boat to cross the river on the Myanmar-Thai border to be met by Thai Army soldiers as they are repatriated from Kyauk Khet in Myanmar’s Myawaddy township. PHOTO: AFPAn alleged victim shows a cut above the eye. PHOTO: AFPAlleged victims wait to cross the border to Thailand to be repatriated. PHOTO: AFPAn alleged victim shows an injury on the arm. PHOTO: AFP
“I’m just going to cry. Oh my goodness. I’m so happy… that I left that place,” she said, adding that enforced squats – sometimes up to 1,000 – were also meted out as punishment.
The 260 foreign nationals – among thousands allegedly lured into the notorious cyberscam centres with promises of high-paying jobs before they are effectively held hostage – came from over a dozen countries including Ethiopia, Brazil and Nepal.
AFP spoke to some of them under the condition of anonymity. Many bore signs of physical abuse, including one woman who had huge bruises on her left arm and thigh and said she had been electrocuted.
Liu, one of 10 Chinese nationals rescued, described gory methods his bosses inflicted as punishment.
He told AFP that he saw one worker having his face rubbed into a metal grate on the floor until he bled to death – a claim AFP is unable to verify.
“So many were beaten to death, it was so bloody,” he said.
Scam centres have proliferated across Southeast Asia in recent years, including the Philippines, where police this week rescued 34 Indonesians from a Manila compound.
Supervisors there had allegedly stripped them of their passports and said they would be moved to a new site in Cambodia against their will.
Philippines’ anti-organised crime commission Gilberto Cruz told AFP that about 21,000 people who had worked for now-banned offshore gaming centres continued to operate smaller-scale scam operations in the country.
Thai officials said the Kyauk Khet centre first appeared on the other side of the Moei River in 2019, although it is still under construction.
None of the returnees – exhausted and overwhelmed – told how they travelled, or were trafficked into the compound.
Other victims in the past have said that after arriving in Thailand, they were whisked across the border and forced to commit online fraud.
But a senior police official, Thatchai Pitaneelaboot, told local news outlet The Standard recently that in many instances, victims come to work in the centres voluntarily.
“The majority are aware of what to expect, although some are deceived while still in their countries of origin,” he said.
For those who come out of choice, it is unlikely they fully understand the horror awaiting them.
Kokeb from Ethiopia said he and his fellow were workers were forced to toil for 17 to 18 hours a day, and many had their phones confiscated to prevent escape.
Still, two other Kenyans – who said they had been forced to defraud Internet users in “rich countries” such as the United States (US) – staged an escape with several others days before the handover, and were caught by a local militia.
The Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) which controls the Kyauk Khet area – where the compound is located – claimed responsibility for extracting the workers.
DKBA’s Second Commander-in-Chief General Saw Shwe Wah said he was “relieved to have safely handed them over” to Thai authorities.
They and another Myanmar military group have said they will be releasing thousands more scam centre workers into Thailand in the coming weeks.
The returnees told how thousands were still being held in Kyauk Khet, but they are overjoyed to finally be returning home.
Liu left behind his wife in his hometown in Yunnan province when she was pregnant with his second child.
JABALIYA (AP) – The Nassar family managed to assemble a semblance of their home’s old living room. A sofa and some chairs survived, along with a small table they can gather around to eat. The room’s wall had been almost entirely blown away, so they hung sheets over the gaping hole, hiding the mound of wreckage outside.
Buried somewhere under that rubble, Khalid Nassar knows, is the body of his son Mahmoud. It has lain there unretrievable for the past four months since he was killed in an Israeli airstrike.
This has been the struggle for displaced Palestinians returning to their homes in Gaza under the nearly month-old ceasefire: To re-create some bit of normal lives amid the death and destruction left by 16 months of Israeli bombardment and ground offensives against Hamas fighters.
FINDING WAYS TO SETTLE IN
Coming home after months – or more than a year – of living in tents or other shelters, families have no means to do any serious rebuilding. So they find little ways to settle in.
Apartment buildings that were reduced to hollowed-out skeletons have been draped with colourful bed linens serving as walls – as if the houses have been turned inside-out.
Khalid Nassar sits with his wife, Khadra Abu Libda, and his grandchildren for lunch, with fabric covering the hole in a wall of their destroyed house in the Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip. PHOTO: APThe damaged Odeh house stands amid the devastation in the Jabaliya refugee camp. PHOTO: APHanan Okal feeds her children in a classroom inside the Jabaliya Girls Preparatory School which displaced people use as a shelter. PHOTO: APMariam Odeh with her husband, Ahmed Odeh, sitting next to a small fire in the Jabaliya refugee camp. PHOTO: APChildren inside a shelter. PHOTO: AP
Families dig chunks of concrete and mangled metal out of the interior to make them semi-habitable. Rooms look like fragmented movie sets, with furniture arranged in any intact corner, while the remaining walls are shattered.
The Nassars fled their home in Jabaliya refugee camp early last year, moving around northern Gaza. Khalid Nassar’s son Mahmoud was killed in October when he tried to go back home to retrieve some clothes in the neighbouring building, which they also owned, and a strike hit it, Nassar said. His daughter was also killed in a separate airstrike on her home in Jabaliya, where her body too remains buried under rubble.
The family returned in January, as soon as Israeli troops withdrew from Jabaliya, which had been the scene of some of the fiercest fighting of the war in the previous four months.
They found the top floor of their three-storey building was wiped away. One of Nassar’s sons settled with his wife and kids on the second floor. The 61-year-old Nassar, his wife Khadra Abu Libda, 59, and the five children of another son, who was imprisoned by Israel, moved into what remains of the ground floor.
Miraculously, their living room furniture remained. Other rooms were trashed, littered with debris.
For water, they have to walk three kilometres to wait in line for hours at a well – when the pump there is working. For food, they have collected some humanitarian aid supplies, some bread, and a green called khobeiza in Arabic that grows in empty lots.
But the wreckage next door where his son is buried haunts Nassar. “Every minute I think about how to get my son out from under the rubble,” he said. “I can’t describe the torment so long as my son is not properly buried.”
He said he digs every day, but the only tool he has is a shovel, so he can’t lift the large slabs of concrete. “This morning, I was digging and searching, but I found nothing but some papers and clothes,” he said.
After the ceasefire in January, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians flooded back to homes across Gaza that they had fled. Not everyone has been able to return. Hanan Okal said her family’s building in Jabaliya was flattened. So they are staying in the nearby school-turned-shelter where they have been taking refuge.
Nearby in Jabaliya, the Odeh family returned to find their building’s ground floor gutted. They had to set up a ladder to climb in and out of the second floor, where Yousef and his brother Mohammed Oudeh settled in with their families.
Their parents, Ahmed and Mariam, stay in a tent of wood and plastic sheets outside. The shell of their building does no better than the tent to protect from the cold, they said.
With the surrounding neighbourhood flattened, there’s nothing to shield them from the cold February wind. At one point, the wind blew away and tore the sheets they had set up in the holes in the walls. So they scrounged for new sheets and blankets among the rubble of other houses.
READY FOR THE FAMILY’S RETURN
Youssef Issa returned to his family home in Jabaliya to prepare it ahead of his parents and siblings, who remain in their shelter in central Gaza. He found it in relatively good shape. It was partially damaged by nearby collapsed buildings, but apparently, it was used by Israeli troops as a position at some point in the fighting, so it wasn’t bombarded.
Issa said he, his cousin and his friends swept out the debris and spent ammunition casings.
Like many houses, his had been scavenged and looted for anything of value.
Clothes, blankets and any food left behind was taken.
But his flat-screen TV was not touched: Without electricity, it was useless to steal it.
But Issa was able to reassemble an almost cozy-looking sitting room. The family’s plush purple sofa was still intact.
He draped thick red fabric over the hole in the wall behind it. And he arranged the cushions on the sofa just right – ready for his family’s return. – Abdel-Kareem Hana
UPI – The Odessa Zoo in Ukraine announced an unusual duo won its annual ‘Couple of the Year’ contest: a cat and a sheep.
The zoo said on social media that Masazhik the cat and Bagel the lamb were chosen as this year’s Couple of the Year, beating several same-species pairs including lemurs, tigers and porcupines.
The finalists were revealed in a YouTube video earlier in the week, and the winning pair were unveiled on Thursday on Facebook.
Masazhik, whose name translates to “massage therapist”, can often be seen perched on Bagel’s back.
The duo was officially presented with their Couple of the Year title at a public ceremony on February 14.
The Couple of the Year award is an annual tradition at the zoo. Last year’s winners were a pair of mated sheep.
MILAN (AP) – Photographer Gérard Uféras was granted full access to the La Scala ballet corps’ backstage over six years to produce a series of emotional, candid portraits at the heart of a new exhibition at the theatre’s museum and a soon-to-be published book.
The opera house’s general manager Dominique Meyer conceded that an exhibition on ballet at the theatre most associated with opera was “rare.”
Yet the show titled The Hidden Gaze, Dance Behind the Curtain also emphasises that ballet has been part of the theatre’s mission since its inception. A timeline in the exhibition’s first room recounts that La Scala’s inaugural performance of Antonio Salieri’s L’Europa riconosciuta, on August 3, 1778, was accompanied by two ballets.
Head of La Scala’s ballet corps Manuel Legris said that he gave Uféras “complete freedom” to roam backstage and rehearsal halls to “find these special moments”.
They include La Scala’s star principal dancer Nicoletta Manni caught in a backstage embrace with her husband, principal dancer Timofej Andrijashenko, her face showing complete surrender after giving it all on stage.
Pictures are displayed during the unveiling of the photo exhibition ‘Lo sguardo nascosto’ (The hidden gaze) by photographer Gerard Uferas at the La Scala Opera House in Milan, Italy. PHOTO: AP
The fetching title photograph shows a young ballerina in a white tutu from behind as she peeks from behind the curtain on the stage, recalling the work of French impressionist Edgar Degas.
Dancers are photographed from above the stage lights, collapsed with legs splayed backstage, backlit as they prepare to make their entrance.
“Your work brings our art to life,” Legris told Uféras in a video that accompanies the exhibition.
The photographs – some in black and white, others in colour – are interspersed with white paper sculptures of ballet costumes by Caterina Crepax, from flowing Romantic-era skirts to more contemporary short dresses. A dragonfly-inspired ballet dress was dedicated to the late La Scala star and principal dancer Carla Fracci.
The exhibition in Teatro alla Scala’s museum runs from Wednesday through September 14. The book accompanying the exhibition will be published later this month.
SYDNEY (AFP) – Rights groups yesterday denounced an Australian plan to send three violent foreign criminals – including a murderer – to live on the tiny Pacific nation of Nauru.
Canberra said it had paid an undisclosed sum to Nauru – population about 13,000 – in return for it issuing 30-year visas to the trio, who lost their Australian visas due to criminal activity.
“There has to be consideration of the lawfulness of banishing people offshore when they’ve been living as part of our community,” said deputy chief executive of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre Jane Favero.
“It’s a complete disregard of people’s human rights.”
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said the three would be held in immigration detention until they are put on a flight to Nauru or a legal challenge is lodged. “When somebody has come and treated Australia in a way that has shown appalling character their visas do get cancelled, and when their visas are cancelled they should leave,” Burke told reporters.
“All three, though, are violent offenders. One is a murderer,” he said.
Once in Nauru, they would live in individual dwellings with a shared kitchen space and be allowed to work and move freely, Burke added.
Authorities have not disclosed the identities, gender or nationalities of the trio, or said whether they had served sentences for their crimes.
Nauru is one of the world’s smallest countries with a mainland measuring just 20 square kilometres.
Phosphate mining once made Nauru one of the world’s richest countries per capita, but that boon has long dried up, leaving much of the mainland a barren moonscape and its people facing high unemployment and health issues.
Australia’s government has been searching for a way to deal with migrants who have no other country to go to when their visas are cancelled.
The High Court ruled in 2023 that indefinite detention was “unlawful” if deportation was not an option, leading to the release of 220 people in that situation, including the three now destined for Nauru.
Burke said any decision to transfer others to the Pacific island would depend on the Nauru government.
Refugee Council of Australia head Paul Power said the government had a duty to ensure any solution was humane and ensured people’s rights and dignity.
“History has shown us the deep mental and physical damage indefinite detention on Nauru has caused,” he said.
Under a hardline policy introduced in 2012, Australia sent thousands of migrants attempting to reach the country by boat to “offshore processing” centres.
They were held in two detention centres – one on Nauru and another, since shuttered, on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island.
The scheme was gradually scaled back following 14 detainee deaths, multiple suicide attempts, and at least six referrals to the International Criminal Court.
Nauru still held 87 people as of August 31, 2024, according to latest Australian government figures.
Nauru President David Adeang and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese shake hands. PHOTO: AP
NEW DELHI (AP) – A court in India’s western Goa state yesterday sentenced a 31-year-old man to life in prison for raping and murdering an Irish woman at a popular tourist resort nearly eight years ago.
The body of 28-year-old Danielle McLaughlin was found by a farmer on a beach popular with holidaymakers in Goa in March 2017. An autopsy showed that cerebral damage and constriction of the neck caused her death.
Vikat Bhagat was found guilty of the crime on Friday. McLaughlin’s family in a statement had said they and her friends were “thankful to the public prosecutor and the investigating officer for justice”.
Usually, rape victims cannot be named under Indian law. In this case, the victim’s family spoke to the media to raise awareness of her case.
The crime highlighted persistent violence against women in India despite tougher laws against sexual assault imposed after the 2012 death of a young woman who was gang-raped on a bus in New Delhi.
Goa is a popular backpacking destination in India. Millions of tourists visit its numerous beach resorts every year.
Family members of an Irish woman who was raped and murdered in Goa react after the court’s verdict. PHOTO: AP
KABUL (AFP) – A Taleban government delegation visited Japan for the first time yesterday, in a rare diplomatic visit outside of the region.
The Afghan delegation left Kabul on Saturday, in a visit that local media said would last one week and included officials from the higher education, foreign affairs and economy ministries.
“We seek dignified interaction with the world for a strong, united, advanced, prosperous, developed Afghanistan and to be an active member of the international community,” Deputy Minister at the Ministry of Economy Latif Nazari, who is part of the delegation, tweeted on Saturday.
The Taleban government makes regular visits to neighbouring and regional countries, including in Central Asia, Russia and China.
However, it has only officially visited Europe for diplomacy summits in Norway in 2022 and 2023.
Japan’s embassy in Kabul temporarily relocated to Qatar after the fall of the previous foreign-backed government and the takeover by the Taleban in 2021.
But it has since reopened and resumed diplomatic and humanitarian activities in the country.
The Afghan delegation plans to “exchange views with Japanese government officials during their stay”, Japan’s public broadcaster NHK reported, citing unnamed Afghan diplomatic sources.
Japan’s Foreign Ministry could not immediately comment on the visit when contacted by AFP.
A general view shows Mt Fuji and skyscrapers in Tokyo’s Shinjuku area. PHOTO: AFP
LOUISVILLE (AP) – Harsh weather moved west yesterday as a polar vortex was expected to grip the Rockies and the northern Plains after winter storms pummeled the eastern United States (US) over the weekend, killing at least 10 people, including nine victims in Kentucky who died during flooding from heavy rains.
The National Weather Service warned of “life-threatening cold” into today, with temperatures in northeastern Montana predicted to dip as low as -42.7 degrees Celsius (oC) with wind chills down to -51oC.
Meteorologists said several states would experience the 10th and coldest polar vortex event this season. Weather forces in the Arctic are combining to push the chilly air that usually stays near the North Pole into the US and Europe.
In Kentucky, Governor Andy Beshear said on Sunday that the death toll rose to nine.
“I am sad to share some more tough news tonight, Kentucky. We just confirmed another weather-related death out of Pike County, bringing our total loss to nine people.”
A person in a snowstorm in Montreal, Canada. PHOTO: AP
Beshear had said that at least 1,000 people stranded by floods had to be rescued. President Donald Trump approved Kentucky’s request for a disaster declaration, authorising the Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate relief efforts throughout the state.
Beshear said most of the deaths, including a mother and seven-year-old child, were caused by cars getting stuck in high water.
“So folks, stay off the roads right now and stay alive,” he said. Parts of Kentucky and Tennessee received up to 15 centimetres of rain, said senior forecaster with the National Weather Service Bob Oravec.
“The effects will continue for awhile, a lot of swollen streams and a lot of flooding going on,” Oravec said.
In Alabama, the weather service in Birmingham said it had confirmed an EF-1 tornado touched down in Hale County.
Storms there and elsewhere in the state destroyed or damaged a handful of mobile homes, downed trees and toppled power lines, but no injuries were immediately reported.
A state of emergency was declared for parts of Obion County, Tennessee, after a levee failed on Saturday, flooding the small community of Rives, home to around 300 people in the western part of the state.
GREEN RIVER (AP) – A third victim was found in the wreckage from a fiery crash inside a Wyoming highway tunnel that involved 26 cars and trucks, officials said.
At least five people were seriously injured in Friday’s accident along Interstate 80 near the small town of Green River, Wyoming.
The crash sparked a fire inside the tunnel that completely destroyed six commercial vehicles and two passenger vehicles.
Most of the wreckage had been removed, with fewer than 10 vehicles still inside the tunnel, said Sargeant Jason Roascio with the Wyoming Highway Patrol.
But snow was slowing the work of federal and state investigators as they went vehicle by vehicle trying to reconstruct the scene and determine what happened, he said.
“We’re hopeful that this is the final fatality,” Roascio said.
Further details on the three victims had yet to be released.
Charred vehicles after an accident and fire in the Green River Tunnel along Interstate 80 in Wyoming, United States. PHOTO: AP
Photos distributed on Sunday showed the charred remains of two vehicles inside the tunnel.
The crash took place in the westbound tube of the twin tunnel under Castle Rock, a sandstone formation that looms over the town of Green River in the state’s southwest region.
The wreck and ensuing fire shut down the interstate, the primary east-west road corridor through Wyoming, and traffic was rerouted through Green River.
The eastbound tunnel was expected to reopen tomorrow and handle traffic in both directions for the time being.
Engineers have been unable to estimate when the westbound tunnel will reopen.
