June 2021

Written by Oscar Holland, CNN A pair of 1,000-year-old religious relics, which US investigators say were illegally taken from Thailand, have been returned after more than five decades. The stone lintels had been housed at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum since the 1960s. But the city formally handed the artifacts back to Thai officials at a ceremony in Los Angeles on Tuesday. Each weighing around 1,500 pounds, the sandstone items date back to the late 10th and 11th centuries, according to the Asian Art Museum. They originated from ancient temples in northeast Thailand, and were acquired by the museum in…

On Friday, the southern city of Cali witnessed new scenes of panic when several people in civilian clothing appeared to open fire against protesters, social media footage shows. Colombia’s Attorney General Francisco Barbosa later confirmed that one of the shooters was an off-duty employee of his office’s investigative unit. Preliminary investigations suggest that the man killed two protesters before the surrounding crowd lynched him, Barbosa said. Footage of the man beaten to death has since gone viral on Colombia social media. In another episode, a civilian was photographed aiming his gun towards protesters while standing next to uniformed police officers…

Murtala Muhammadu, 48, a local businessman in Tegina, a remote town in Niger State’s Rafi district, told CNN on Tuesday that his 5-year-old son and three daughters aged 6 and 7 were among the more than 150 schoolchildren kidnapped from an Islamic evening school by the armed assailants in Niger State. “Four of my children — three girls and a boy — are now in captivity,” Muhammadu said. According to state police officials, at least one person was killed during the raid, the latest in a string of school kidnappings in the country this year. Kidnapping for ransom remains a…

Written by Dan Q. Tham, CNN This feature is part of CNN Style’s new series Hyphenated, which explores the complex issue of identity among minorities in the United States. Andrew Kung was a teenager visiting New York when he was first called a racial slur. The Chinese American photographer grew up in San Francisco’s Sunset District, home to a large Asian population, which “almost felt like a second Chinatown,” he said in a video interview. He was surrounded by people who looked like his parents and grandparents, and who ate the same food as he did. But, on one of…

In a statement Friday, Belgium’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it had “become clear” that Ambassador Peter Lescouhier could not “further carry out his role in a serene way.” Lescouhier’s wife, Xiang Xueqiu, got into a confrontation with two shop assistants in April. Police in Seoul originally said she could not be prosecuted due to diplomatic immunity, but in its statement, Brussels said this had been waived. “Her full cooperation with the police has been guaranteed,” the statement said, adding that Xiang also “took the initiative to meet privately with the two store employees in order to apologize in person…

Sri Lankan environmentalists said it is one of the worst ecological disasters in the country’s history and have warned of a potential threat to marine life and the fishing industry. Members of the Sri Lanka Navy donned protective suits and rubber boots to remove the plastic pellets, chemical waste and debris that have blanketed beaches near the capital Colombo, including the popular tourist spot of Negombo. The Singaporean-registered ship, called the MS X-Press Pearl, was sailing from India’s Gujarat to Colombo when a fire broke out onboard on May 20, as it was nine nautical miles off the Sri Lankan…

The answer might lie in Beijing’s attitudes towards its ethnic minorities, particularly those in Xinjiang. Since 2017, the Chinese government has strictly enforced its family planning policies on minorities in the far-western province, where Beijing is accused of committing genocide against the Muslim-majority Uyghur people. The crackdown caused local birth rates to plunge by a third in 2018. The Chinese government strongly denies allegations of genocide and says that any attempts to limit the Uyghur population fall within the country’s standard birth control policies. Experts said Beijing is reluctant to remove all quotas on the number of children per family…

Rolls-Royce now joins a number of other ultra-luxury carmakers, including Bentley and Porsche, that will work with a limited number of wealthy clients to build very expensive customized cars. (Both Bentley and Porsche are owned by the Volkswagen Group, while Rolls-Royce is owned by BMW.) On Thursday, Rolls-Royce revealed a new program called Rolls-Royce Coachbuild. This department will work with individual clients to help design and build cars specifically for them. The luxury automaker will work on just one of these cars every couple of years, Rolls-Royce executives said. While Rolls-Royce would not say how much the cars will cost,…

That announcement comes shortly after President Joe Biden announced he had directed the US intelligence community to redouble its efforts into the origin of Covid-19. In a statement to CNN Business, a Facebook spokesperson said late Wednesday that, “In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of Covid-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that Covid-19 is man-made from our apps.” “We’re continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge,” the spokesperson added….