Today's news: teenager missing in a West Bank settlement, killed and injured in a nearby Palestinian village due to the settlers' reaction. He collects maxi-collections in Kerala to “redeem” the life of an Indian worker sentenced to death for carelessness that caused the death of a disabled person. An engineer who worked on Pyongyang's missile program, elected deputy in Seoul. Growth of single-parent families in Russia.
PAKISTAN
In the Pakistani province of Balochistan, nine people from Punjab were murdered near Noshki in the early hours of today when armed men forced them off a bus they were traveling on, checked their identity documents and shot them. In another attack against another vehicle, one person died and four were injured. Militant ethnic Baluchi independence groups have been fighting the central Pakistani government for decades, disputing the management of rich mineral resources and Chinese interests in the region.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The search for an Israeli teenager missing in a West Bank settlement turned into a violent raid of settlers in a Palestinian village. Benjamin Achimeir, a 14-year-old boy, disappeared yesterday morning from Malachi Hashalom, a Jewish settlement near Ramallah. The search – in which teams of settlers participated in addition to the army – took a violent turn with an attack on the nearby village of al Mughayyir. The assault left one Palestinian dead and 25 injured, eight of them shot.
INDIA-SAUDI ARABIA
Indian citizens of all religious denominations in Kerala have raised 340 million rupees (3.7 million euros) with the intention of save the life of Machilakath Abdul Rahim, an Indian migrant worker sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia for carelessly causing the death of the disabled child in his care. The boy's family demanded payment of the sum as a “price in blood” (diyah) to stop the execution, already scheduled for April 16.
SOUTH KOREA
A 37-year-old engineer, who had worked on North Korean missile development before fleeing Pyongyang, was elected deputy of the new National Assembly of South Korea. Park Choong-Kwon – elected from the ranks of President Yoon Suk-yeol's People Power Party – fled Pyongyang 15 years ago to Seoul from China. Although there are thousands in the country, he is only the fourth North Korean exile elected in the history of Seoul's parliament.
CHINA
The CNSA -Chinese space agency- declares that it has successfully launched the Queqiao-2 satellite. It will serve as a communication bridge for future missions of its lunar probe to the far side of the Moon, which Beijing will reach for the first time in 2019. While the near side of the Moon is always oriented towards Earth, a route is impossible of direct communication with the hidden face.
RUSSIA
Experts from the Russian Ministry of Labor have published a dossier on the “incomplete family” in Russia, according to which there are 4.85 million “single mothers.” Overall, more than a third of the country's children are raised in single-parent families (almost all female, with 20% lone parents), which has risen from 20% to almost 40% in the last decade.
KAZAKHSTAN
Kazakhstan's Senate approved the long-awaited law on the defense of women and children from violence, called the “Saltanat law” in honor of the murdered wife of former minister Bišimbaev. This law is considered by activists as “a great victory for civil society”, which also adds the condemnation of violence through the Internet and social networks.
