WASHINGTON: US authorities have moved to start tracking hate crimes against Sikh, Hindu and Arab Americans after calls for more rigorous action following a massacre by a white supremacist at a Sikh temple. The Federal Bureau of Investigation already compiles statistics on violence against Muslims, Jews, atheists and several other religious affiliations but did not specifically list crimes against Sikh, Hindu or Arab Americans. An FBI policy board, at a meeting in Virginia, voted to start listing all groups that appeared in two major recent studies of religion in the United States, agency spokesman Stephen Fischer said late on Wednesday. The updated list will include Buddhists, Catholics, Hindus, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews, Mormons, Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Protestant Christians and Sikhs and also start a category for anti-Arab crimes, he said. The FBI anticipates that it will start compiling the statistics in 2015, although the decision needs formal approval by FBI director Robert Mueller, Fischer said.
Activist dies after skinhead fight
PARIS: A teenaged far-left French activist died yesterday after a fight with skinheads in Paris, sparking concern over the rise of extreme-right groups, as police grilled four people over the tragedy. Clement Meric, 18, a student at the city’s prestigious Sciences-Po university, had been left brain dead after Wednesday’s attack near the city’s central Saint-Lazare railway station. A police source who confirmed his death said three men and a woman had been held for questioning, adding that the attacker thought to have dealt the fatal blow said the intention had not been to kill.
12 on trial over anti-Putin rally
MOSCOW: Twelve Russians went on trial in Moscow yesterday accused of violence at a rally on the eve of President Vladimir Putin’s inauguration last year, in a process condemned by critics as a show trial aimed at suffocating dissent. Ten defendants were participating in the hearing from inside a glass-walled cage known as an “aquarium” while two more, who are not under arrest, were seated on a bench. The participants are being tried over what the Kremlin calls “mass riots” on Bolotnaya Square in central Moscow during a peaceful rally on May 6, 2012 which suddenly descended into violence one day before Putin was inaugurated for his presidential term.
Coulson denies phone hacking charges
LONDON: Andy Coulson, British Prime Minister David Cameron’s former media chief and ex-editor of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid, pleaded not guilty to charges related to phone hacking yesterday. The 45-year-old Coulson resigned from his job as director of communications in Downing Street in January 2011 and was arrested in July that year over allegations of criminal behaviour at the tabloid he edited from 2003 to 2007. Coulson, looking relaxed in a dark suit, stood for less than five minutes in the dock at London’s Southwark Crown Court to deny charges of unlawful interception of voicemail messages and illegal payments to public officials. He was bailed to return to court at a later date. The trial is expected to begin in September.
Six killed in Philadelphia crash
PHILADELPHIA: Rescue crews clawed through rubble yesterday searching for more survivors the day after a building collapsed in downtown Philadelphia, killing six people and injuring 14 others. Investigators, meanwhile, tried to determine what caused a four-storey building that was being demolished to collapse onto a neighbouring Salvation Army Thrift Store. Mayor Michael Nutter suggested that the number of casualties could rise. Shortly after, a 61-year-old woman was pulled from the rubble alive.
British author Tom Sharpe dies
LONDON: British comic novelist Tom Sharpe, known for his Wilt series about a harrassed and hen-pecked university lecturer, has died aged 85, his publisher said yesterday. The London-born author, whose last and 16th novel The Wilt Inheritance was published in 2010, died in Spain where he had a home in the northeastern coastal town of Llafranc. Sharpe was educated at Cambridge University’s Pembroke College and spent his national service during the Second World War in the Royal Marines.
Agencies
