World briefs

CHINA Former NBA player Yao Ming, among leading Chinese sports figures to back Beijing’s bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics, says the city’s infrastructure and experience hosting the 2008 Summer Games makes it a prime candidate.

CHINA Deng Liqun, a former conservative propaganda chief known for his criticism of China’s economic reforms, died Tuesday in Beijing of illnesses, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. He was 99.

TAIWAN Six inmates took the warden and several other people hostage at a prison in the southern Taiwanese port city of Kaohsiung yesterday, the official Central News Agency and other news reports said. The six inmates — convicted of burglary, murder and drug crimes — were believed to be armed, CNA said. Witnesses interviewed by private cable news station TVBS said gunshots were heard.

MALAYSIAN police detain a cartoonist and investigate two lawmakers for sedition over tweets and a cartoon condemning the judiciary for dismissing opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim’s final appeal against a sodomy conviction. Anwar began a 5-year prison sentence Tuesday in a case widely seen as politically motivated to eliminate any threats to the ruling coalition. More on p12

THAILAND Police have arrested a man accused of masterminding a conspiracy to slander the country’s monarchy on the Internet, in the latest move by the military-installed government to protect the palace’s reputation.

VIETNAM A prominent Vietnamese blogger who is partially paralyzed and was jailed two months ago for posting articles that oppose the Communist Party said yesterday he was released from prison on medical parole.

MYANMAR Hundreds of people demonstrate in Yangon, Myanmar’s biggest city, to protest a government decision to allow people without full citizenship, including members of the Rohingya ethnic minority, to vote in an upcoming constitutional referendum.

PHILIPPINES The Philippine police chief, holding back tears, says Muslim rebels shot to death some of his anti-terror commandos as they lay wounded in a fierce gun battle last month that has stalled the government’s peace deal with the insurgents.

MALDIVES police have accused the former Defense Minister Colonel Mohamed Nazim of plotting to overthrow the government and harm senior government officials, local media reported yesterday. A police statement detailed documents found in a pen drive confiscated from Nazim’s house during a midnight raid on January 18 suggesting he “was plotting to physically harm senior Maldivian state officials.”

BELGIUM A radical Islamic group that recruited youngsters to fight in Syria was a terrorist organization that wanted to violently overthrow democracy and replace it with strict sharia law, a Belgian court ruled yesterday in a case that played out against a backdrop of soaring terror fears. The court in Antwerp sentenced the Sharia4Belgium group’s “charismatic leader,” Fouad Belkacem, to 12 years’ imprisonment and gave dozens of other members lower sentences.

YEMEN The United States, Britain and France said yesterday they were closing their embassies in Yemen following Shiite rebels seizing power there, highlighting the turmoil gripping the country as it marked the fourth anniversary of toppling its longtime autocratic ruler.