The world mourns Francis, but in Gaza people continue to die

Today's news: Vance in New Delhi negotiate tariff exemptions with Modi; China executes the murderer of the Japanese child killed in September; eleven months in prison for the human rights lawyer arrested and deported from Laos; A Chinese executive is among those arrested in Bangkok for the collapse of the tower in the earthquake; St. Petersburg and Volgograd will return to being called Stalingrad and Leningrad for three days to mark the ‘80th anniversary of Victory’.

GAZA-ISRAEL-YEMEN

While the world mourns Pope Francis, his cry for peace goes unheard. At least 18 Palestinians, including two women and two children, were killed in new bombings at dawn today in southern Khan Younis. US forces continue to attack Yemen after the Houthis claimed responsibility for further attacks against Israel and American aircraft carriers in the Red Sea.

CHINA-LAOS

Lawyer Lu Siwei, known for his human rights activism in China, has been sentenced to 11 months in prison in a closed-door trial in Chengdu. Despite holding a US visa and a Chinese passport, Lu was arrested in the Laotian capital Vientiane in July 2023 while travelling to join his family in America. He was detained in the Southeast Asian country for more than a month before being forcibly repatriated to China.

THAILAND

Thai authorities have said they have arrested a Chinese executive of a company that was building the Bangkok skyscraper that collapsed in the powerful earthquake on 28 March, killing dozens of people. A Thai court issued arrest warrants for four people, including a Chinese representative of China Railway No. 10, identified as Zhang. According to the indictment, the three Thais held shares in the company on behalf of other foreigners. Thai company law stipulates that foreigners cannot hold more than 49% of the shares in a company.

INDIA-UNITED STATES

At a meeting held yesterday in New Delhi between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Vice President J.D. Vance, India and the United States said they had made ‘significant progress’ in advancing trade talks on tariffs only temporarily suspended by Trump. However, there was no public indication that the Indian side had raised concerns about the cancellation of visas for Indian students as part of the US administration's expulsions of international students, which are hitting Indian students particularly hard.

CHINA-JAPAN

A Chinese man convicted of fatally stabbing a 10-year-old Japanese boy on his way to school in Shenzhen, southern China, in September, has been executed. Zhong Changchun was sentenced to death in January for the murder of the boy, who had a Japanese father and a Chinese mother. The Chinese Foreign Ministry informed the Japanese Embassy in Beijing of the execution.

RUSSIA

The city of St. Petersburg, the ‘northern capital’ of Russia and the native homeland of President Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill (Gundjaev), will once again be called ‘Leningrad’ for three days from 8 to 10 May, the Soviet name in memory of the 80th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War. A similar measure will apply to the southern city of Volgograd, which will revert to ‘Stalingrad’ for three days.

BELARUS-PAKISTAN

Aleksandr Lukashenko received a delegation from Pakistan in Minsk, led by Prime Minister Shehbas Sharif, announcing at the final press conference that Belarus intends to invite 150,000 Pakistanis, ‘specialists in various fields’, to work in the country with the help of the Islamabad government, thanks in part to the fact that ‘there are no borders between Russia and Belarus’.

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