World briefs

CHINA Chinese veteran Sun Yibai (pictured) doesn’t have much time for the Communist Party’s claim to have led China to victory against Japan in World War II. “The Communist Party didn’t fight Japan,” said the sprightly 97-year-old, who once served as a translator with the storied Flying Tigers aviation brigade. “They made up a whole bunch of stories afterward, but it was all fabricated.”

MALAYSIA’s prime minister vows he will not quit over a USD700 million financial scandal, and accuses protesters of showing “poor national spirit” by holding a massive rally to demand his resignation on the eve of the country’s National Day.

PHILIPPINES Ligaya Fernando Amilbangsa, 71, was one of the winners yesterday of the Ramon Magsaysay award, regarded as Asia’s version of the Nobel Prize, for “her single-minded crusade in preserving the endangered artistic heritage of the southern Philippines.”

PHILIPPINES Thousands of members of a politically influential Christian sect end five days of street protests that set off huge traffic jams in the Philippine capital and sparked outrage from motorists.

SINGAPORE says it has lifted a two-decade ban on HIV-infected people from entering the country, but will limit their stay to a maximum of three months.  The Health Ministry said the ban was lifted on April 1, “given the current context with more than 5,000 Singapore residents living with HIV and the availability of effective treatment for the disease.”

INDIA Following a knock at his front door, an Indian scholar greeted two unidentified visitors and was shot in the head and the chest, becoming the third critic of religious superstition to be killed in the country in three years.

AUSTRIA stepped up inspections at its Hungarian border after 71 migrants apparently suffocated in one. The inspections created a massive, 30-kilometer traffic jam on the main Budapest-Vienna highway. In neighboring Germany, the state government in Bavaria said it also had launched special traffic checks on highways near the border with Austria.

UKRAINE A grenade exploded outside Ukraine’s parliament during a nationalist protest against a vote to give greater powers to separatist regions in the east, killing one police officer and injuring more than 100, the interior ministry said. The clashes marked the worst outburst of violence in the capital since the new government took power in February 2014.

JAPAN The Hotel Okura, a favored Tokyo lodging for U.S. presidents, movie stars and other celebrities, is closing the doors of its landmark half-century-old main building to make way for a pair of glass towers ahead of the 2020 Olympics. The redo raised an outcry from those who love the Okura’s unique mélange of modernism and traditional Japanese aesthetics. But social media campaigns, a petition and other efforts to “Save the Okura” just underscored the futility of resisting Tokyo’s flood-tide of pre-Olympics urban renewal.