TAXILA – A man was allegedly stoned to death apparently for honour in Ghourgushti area in Hazro police limits on Wednesday.

Police sources said that some passerby spotted a body with multiple injuries lying around a pile of stones under Barazai bridge and informed the police, who shifted the body to THQ hospital. The doctors at the hospital also recovered a stone from his neck.

Later, the man was identified as Aurangzaib, 43, a native of Mian Dehri village of Ghazi town.

A police official on condition of anonymity claimed that the evidence collected from the crime scene suggested that the motive behind the murder was honour.

When contacted Sub-divisional Police officer (SDPO) DSP Raja Fayyazul Haq confirmed that the man was stoned to death.

Responding to a question, he said with the help of data collected from the victim’s mobile phone would help trace the murderer.

A man has been charged with sexually abusing his daughter, 17, and niece, 10, on live Skype conference calls with international groups.

The man was arrested by the Jakarta Police in Kutai Kertanegara, East Kalimantan, on May 6 as a part of their Operation Candy 2, an operation conducted by the city police’s special crimes directorate to combat child pornography.

“Before doing it, he informed his Skype group by saying ‘we will start the show’,” the special crimes directorate head Wahyu Hadiningrat said on Wednesday.

He is alleged to have molested his daughter since she was 2 years old. He had also allegedly abused his disabled niece since she was 7 years old and screened his actions on Skype.

Wahyu said the suspect, who had been monitored by the police for a month, was a member of seven Skype groups that consisted of people from countries including the US, Mexico and Argentina, who sought child pornography.

He also spread child pornography via Whatsapp and Telegraph messenger groups.

Wahyu said the man committed the alleged crimes purely for pleasure.

He has been charged with violating pornography, child protection and electronic information and communication laws.

The North Jakarta Police have garnered protests and backlash from various public groups for their recent raid on an alleged gay sex party at a gym in Kelapa Gading, North Jakarta, where men were allegedly stripped naked and photographs taken of them during the raid went viral.

The National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) on Wednesday called the raid, in which 141 men were arrested, “inhumane.”

According to those arrested, the police had forced them to get into public vehicles naked and took pictures of them, Komnas HAM commissioner Muhammad Nurkhoiron said as quoted by kompas.com.

“The police action was an extensive abuse of power disrespecting human rights, as well as taking away the presumption of innocence,” he said.

Separately, the Jakarta Police denied the allegations, saying that its officers had not taken pictures of the men.

“We do not know who took the pictures and shared them,” said Jakarta Police spokesman Sr. Comr. Argo Yuwono.

On Tuesday, the police released 126 of the arrested men.

National Police chief Gen. Tito Karnavian has instructed his officers to investigate the reports of shared pictures.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis had a miraculous escape on Thursday after his chopper crash landed in Latur district of the state.

The CM and the officials with him escaped unhurt.

“Our helicopter did meet with an accident in Latur but me and my team is absolutely safe and ok. Nothing to worry,” tweeted Fadnavis shortly after the accident.

SEOUL – North Korea on Thursday accused the South of unleashing more than 450 machine gun rounds at a flock of birds in an “armed provocation” at the tense Demilitarized Zone, after Seoul’s forces fired warning shots at an object flying over the border.

Seoul military officials initially suggested the item was a drone from North following the incident on Tuesday, before saying Wednesday that balloons carrying propaganda leaflets had blown in across the frontier, one of the most fortified locations in the world.

Pyongyang weighed in on the issue Thursday, with a spokesman for its military telling the official Korean Central News Agency that the mysterious flying shape was simply “a flock of birds flying in the sky”.

The South was “caught by mental derangement” and “confrontation hysteria”, it said, describing the DMZ as “the most acute hotspot where huge troops of both sides constantly level their guns at each other”.

Tensions have spiked in the region over the nuclear-armed North’s weapons ambitions and a series of missile launches.

Seoul has repeatedly accused the North of flying suspected spy drones across the border, and both Koreas – plus anti-Pyongyang activists based in the South – send leaflets across the border tied to gas-filled balloons.

South Korean reports said only 90 rounds were fired on Tuesday, and a military spokesman told AFP Thursday that it stood by its conclusion that balloons were involved.

Seoul’s forces have previously opened fire at feathered flyers.

Hours after the Cheonan corvette was sunk in 2010 by what Seoul later said was a North Korean torpedo attack, killing 46 sailors, the patrol boat Sokcho “spotted unidentified objects which were moving north at a great speed and she opened up with 76 mm cannon”, Yonhap news agency reported.

The military later concluded from radar images – showing the objects split into two and merge back into one, before disappearing after reaching land – that “such a movement is typical for a flock of birds”.

“The military baptised innocent birds flying peacefully on their course with 135 rounds of formidable cannon fire,” Yonhap said.

JAKARTA – Indonesia’s president urged people to remain calm on Thursday, a day after suspected suicide bombers killed three police officers on duty at a Jakarta bus terminal in an attack authorities said bore the hallmarks of globally inspired Islamist militants.

Ten people, including five police officers and five civilians, were also wounded in the twin blasts that were detonated five minutes apart by the two suspected attackers in the Indonesia capital late on Wednesday evening, police said.

The attack was the deadliest in Indonesia since January 2016, when seven people were killed, five of them attackers, after suicide bombers and gunmen attacked the capital.

“We must continue to keep calm (and) keep cool. Because … we Muslims are preparing to enter the month of Ramadan for fasting,” President Joko Widodo said in a statement.

Authorities in the world’s biggest Muslim-majority nation are increasingly worried about a surge in radicalism, driven in part by a new generation of militants inspired by the Islamic State group.

National police spokesman Awi Setyono described the Jakarta blasts as a “global terrorist attack”, but said police were still investigating whether the attackers had direct orders from Syria or elsewhere.

Police have not yet named the two dead suspects but a law enforcement source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they may have been linked to Jemaah Ansharut Daulah, an umbrella organisation on a US State Department “terrorist” list that is estimated to have drawn hundreds of Islamic State sympathisers in Indonesia.

Indonesia has suffered a series of mostly low-level attacks by Islamic State sympathisers in the past 17 months.

Residents helped clean up debris at the bus terminal in East Jakarta on Thursday, where splattered blood stains and broken glass remained after the attacks.

“After what happened in Manchester, in Marawi in the Philippines, maybe the cells here were triggered by the bombs and that lifted their passion to start bombing again,” Setyono told television station TVOne.

He was referring to the suicide bombing that killed 22 people in a crowded concert hall in the British city of Manchester this week.

In the southern Philippines, thousands of civilians in Marawi City fled their homes this week after Islamist militants took over large parts of the city, leading to a declaration of martial law.

While most recent attacks in Indonesia have been poorly organised, authorities believe about 400 Indonesians have joined Islamic State in Syria and could pose a more lethal threat if they come home.

Police said Wednesday’s attackers had used pressure cookers packed with explosives.

A similar type of bomb was used by a lone attacker in the Indonesian city of Bandung in February. Authorities suspect the attacker, killed by police, had links to a radical network sympathetic to Islamic State.

BEIJING – Taiwan’s giant step towards allowing same-sex marriage has reverberated across Asia, but activists warn the fight for equality isn’t over in a region where gay sex remains illegal in some countries.

Challenges to an Asia-wide embrace of same-sex unions were highlighted by this week’s caning of two Indonesian men as punishment for gay sex and a South Korean military court’s jailing of a soldier for having intercourse with another man.

In mainland China, two men lost a court battle to get married last year.

But activists are hopeful that the push for marriage rights will be reinvigorated by Taiwan’s constitutional court decision, which paves the way for the island to become the first place in Asia to allow same-sex couples to tie the knot.

The court ruled Wednesday that laws preventing same-sex unions violated the constitution’s guarantees of freedom of marriage and gave the government two years to implement the decision.

“We’re very happy,” said Vuong Kha Phong, a rights assistant at iSEE advocacy group in Vietnam. “This is a historic victory for the LGBT groups in Asia.”

The first domino?

Gay marriage is currently legal in only around 20 countries around the world, 13 of which are in Europe. New Zealand also allows same-sex couples to legally marry.

Taiwan is seen as one of the most progressive societies in Asia when it comes to gay rights.

“While I think it is still a long way to the equality dominos falling all over Asia, I think a few East Asian countries, such as Japan and Vietnam, may be more ready to consider equality legislation,” Ray Chan, Hong Kong’s first openly gay lawmaker, told AFP.

“I can foresee many couples in Hong Kong will try to get married in Taiwan. When they return home, they will press the government and even the private sector for recognising them because the current laws, policies, and rules are blatantly discriminatory.”

In Vietnam, which is seen as socially progressive on LGBT issues and where a vibrant gay scene flourishes online and in some big cities, hopes for marriage reform have stalled.

But iSEE’s Phong said the Taiwan ruling “will give us momentum to mobilise the community to take action – to do something so that gay marriage can be considered when lawmakers discuss changing the marriage law in 2020.”

Gay activists in China expressed optimism that their country’s cultural connections with Taiwan could help their efforts to change the law on same-sex nuptials.

Homosexuality was officially decriminalised in 1997 but only taken off the list of psychiatric disorders four years later.

“Taiwan and mainland China have the same roots and culture so it suggests that Chinese society could also accept the idea of gay marriage,” said Li Yinhe, a renowned Chinese sexologist who has pressed Beijing policymakers on the issue.

There have been small signs of progress. While a Chinese court last year ruled against two men seeking to marry, the fact the case even made it into the judicial system was seen by many as an achievement.

“I am very happy and very excited that homosexual marriage is legalised in Taiwan. It’s a pity that the mainland has not taken this step,” said Sun Wenlin, one of the men in the case.

“But I’m optimistic about the legalisation of same-sex marriage in China.” Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen, a senior lecturer at the University of Oslo’s Centre for Gender Research, said Taiwan’s court ruling “creates a momentum for putting this on the table as a political issue” in Asia.

Gay sex illegal

South Korea allows homosexual acts between civilians but not military personnel and a high-profile legal challenge to the country’s ban on same-sex marriage in 2015 by movie director Kim Jho Gwang-Soo and his long-time partner Kim Seung-Hwan failed.

“People say that it’s too early for our society to handle but I think if there is an open debate about the troubles of sexual minorities then I hope South Korean society can also walk a similar path,” said Lee Na-Ra from Solidarity for LGBT Human Rights of Korea.

Before they can consider marriage, activists must win other battles in places such as India, Singapore and Indonesia’s Aceh province, where gay sex is still outlawed.

“Legally we are not even pressing for gay marriage now. We are being denied our fundamental right,” said Manvendra Singh Gohil, one of India’s most vocal gay rights activists. “We have to go step by step.”