NEWS OF THE DAY
From Around the World
1 Award revoked: The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has revoked a prestigious human rights award it had given to Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, now Myanmar’s civilian leader, faulting her for failing to halt or even acknowledge the violence against her country’s Rohingya Muslim minority. Suu Kyi, who endured 15 years of house arrest for taking on the military dictatorship in Myanmar, was only the second person to receive the award, in 2012. It was named after Elie Wiesel, a fellow recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and a Holocaust survivor who was one of the museum’s founders. Wiesel was the first recipient.
2 Netanyahu’s warning: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned that Israel may face early elections due to a coalition crisis. Netanyahu said Wednesday that he wants his government to complete its term in November 2019. He said “if all parties in this coalition ... agree that’s what we do, and if not then we will go to elections now.” Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon has said his Kulanu party will bolt the coalition if the budget doesn’t pass in the next few weeks. Coalition partners are feuding over whether to include military draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox Jews.
3 Prisoner exchanges: Pakistan has approved India’s proposals for exchanges of civilian detainees, the foreign ministry said Wednesday, a statement believed to also cover some of those held over the Kashmir conflict. Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif said he hopes such initiatives would help Pakistan and India make efforts to de-escalate the situation in the disputed Himalayan region. India proposed that the exchanges on “humanitarian grounds” would include women, mentally ill or disabled people, and the elderly held by either side. lslamabad and New Delhi have tense relations, largely over Kashmir, which each claims in its entirety. The nuclear-armed rivals have gone to war over the region twice since they gained independence from Britain in 1947.
4 Prison terms: A German court on Wednesday sentenced eight Germans to between four and 10 years in prison for forming a far-right terrorist organization, attempted murder and carrying out bomb attacks on asylum-seeker facilities and left-wing political targets. The Dresden regional court said in its verdict all seven men and one woman, aged between 20 and 40, were guilty of forming the so-called terrorist “Freital Group,” named after a Dresden suburb that has seen a number of antirefugee protests and attacks. The group carried out several attacks in 2015, including blowing up the car of a Left party politician and a Left party office in Freital, as well as two bombings of refugee homes in which windows were blown out and one asylum-seeker suffered facial cuts.
5 Deadly quake: A powerful earthquake that struck Papua New Guinea last week has left at least 55 people dead and authorities fear the toll could exceed 100, as survivors faced more shaking early Wednesday from the strongest aftershock so far. The latest large temblor was a magnitude 6.7 quake that struck just after midnight Tuesday. It was the strongest shake since the Feb. 26 deadly magnitude 7.5 quake that destroyed homes, triggered landslides and halted work at four oil and gas fields. The central region where last week’s quake struck is remote and undeveloped, and assessments about the scale of the damage and injuries have been slow to filter out. Papua New Guinea is home to 7 million people on the eastern half of the island of New Guinea.