MYANMAR– Aung San Suu Kyi(photo), 70, is barred from becoming president by the junta-scripted constitution but has declared that she will steer the government anyway, taking on a clutch of cabinet positions including that of foreign minister.

However a close aide to Suu Kyi was sworn in as Myanmar’s president on Wednesday, a role that will see him act as a proxy for the pro-democracy figurehead and carry the hopes of a nation emerging from military rule.

Htin Kyaw takes power from former general Thein Sein who has helmed far-reaching reforms since 2011. The handover at the junta-built parliament in the capital Naypyidaw marks the final act of a prolonged transition since Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party swept the November elections.

Wearing a collarless shirt in the NLD’s peach-coloured parliamentary colours, the bespectacled Htin Kyaw pledged to be “faithful to the people of the republic of the union of Myanmar”.

Born in 1946, the 69-year-old is the son of a famous poet and writer, Min Thu Wun, who ran as an NLD candidate in the 1990 elections. 

Htin Kyaw is married to NLD politician Su Su Lwin, whose father U Lwin is one of the party's founding members. 

He studied economics at the University of Yangon and went on to study computer science. 

He had a stint as a government employee while Myanmar was under military rule but was jailed in 2000 after he tested the limits of Suu Kyi's house arrest at the time. 

Until his election, Htin Kyaw was the head of the Daw Khin Kyi Foundation, a charity named after Aung Sang Suu Kyi's mother.

DHAKA, Bangladesh - Bangladesh's High Court on Monday rejected a 28-year-old petition calling for the removal of a constitutional provision recognising Islam as the official religion of the Muslim-majority South Asian nation.

The court ruled that the petitioning organisation, the Committee against Autocracy and Communalism, did not have the right to be heard in the court.

Others, however, were pleased with the decision.

The free concert, billed as the biggest in the country's history, sought to cement the communist-run island's opening to the world. Security was heavy, provided by private guards in yellow jackets and hundreds of Cuban police and black-clad interior ministry officers in black jumpsuits. 

• While no official estimate was immediately available for the crowd size, Cuban state media estimated 500,000 people could fit in the venue, which was nearly full. 

Countries and mega-cities across Asia are highly exposed to natural hazards ranging from cyclones to earthquakes, but people in sub-Saharan Africa are more vulnerable, according to a report released Wednesday.

Nearly 1.4 billion people in South Asia — India, Bangladesh, Pakistan — face at least one major threat from Nature, especially flooding, severe storms boosted by rising seas, and quakes. 

In the case of Bangladesh, 100 percent of its population is exposed, compared to 82 percent for India and 70 percent in Pakistan. China, Indonesia, Japan and the Philippines are also among the nations with the largest numbers of people in harm’s way.

The United States, Mexico and Brazil round out the top ten. When it comes to vulnerability, however, Africa is the continent where people are most likely to suffer injury, disease and death as a result of natural disasters, according to the Natural Hazards Vulnerability Index from risk analysts Verisk Maplecroft.

The capacity to cope with disaster can determine whether a high-magnitude earthquake, for example, will cause hundreds of deaths, as happened in Chile in 2010, or hundreds of thousands, as befell Haiti in the same year. 

South Sudan — plagued by drought and war — heads the list of the countries most defenceless against disaster, followed by Burundi, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Chad, Niger, Sudan, Mali and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

• “The frequency and magnitude of natural hazard events cannot be controlled,” the report noted. “But the development and implementation of disaster risk reduction strategies can help minimise the humanitarian and economic impacts.”
• Among mega-cities, Manila — facing a triple threat from cyclones, superstorms and earthquakes — tops the list of urban areas with the highest number of people exposed. Tokyo and Jakarta and in second and third place, with Dongguan in southern China, Dhaka and Kolkata following close behind.

Mexico City, Delhi and Sao Paulo all have huge populations exposed to major storms. “This analysis shows that governance is key to lower vulnerability,” the report said. 

 

Without major reforms and political stability, “countries such as India and the Philippines are unlikely to see improvements in the near term.”  

HAVANA, Cuba  – Barack Obama on Sunday became the first US president in 88 years to visit Cuba, hailing an “historic opportunity” to cast aside decades of Cold War enmity with the communist state.

Touching down in Havana, Obama began the landmark trip with an overture to Cuba’s citizens — “Que bola Cuba?,” he tweeted, using local slang to ask “what’s up?”

• Obama is not only the first sitting US leader to visit Cuba since Fidel Castro’s guerrillas overthrew the US-backed government of Fulgencio Batista in 1959, but the first since President Calvin Coolidge in 1928.
• “President Coolidge came on a battleship, it took him three days to get here. It only took me three hours,” Obama joked during a meeting with staff from the freshly reopened US embassy.

“This is a historic visit and a historic opportunity,” he said. For Cubans dreaming of escaping isolation and reinvigorating their threadbare economy, the visit has created huge excitement. But just hours before Obama’s arrival there was an ominous reminder of their government’s controlling hand. 

Police in Havana arrested dozens of people from a banned group demanding greater human rights,AFP reporters witnessed.

A Kurdish father whose daughter was shot dead at a wedding in Germany has posted a picture of her lying in a pool of blood on his Facebook page and is demanding justice.

He wrote that his beloved 21-year-old daughter Shilan had rejected an arranged marriage to her cousin and had paid for it with her life during a wedding ceremony in Hanover, Germany.

• She told her father that she did not love the man she was supposed to marry, and rejected the suggestion. He said that he had left his brother looking after his family including his daughter while he was working on a project in Iraq. 
• He said that behind his back, his brother had decided to marry his son off to Shilan, and had already started to make the arrangements. 
• When he returned, he said: ‘She begged me to do something and so I cancelled the engagement.’ The shooting took place at about 10pm on March 13. Police have a warrant for the arrest of Sefin, Bild reports. 

New Delhi – An Indian student from the lowest Dalit caste was hacked to death and his wife critically injured in southern India in a suspected “honour killing” by relatives angered by their marriage, police said Monday.

Three men armed with sickles and sharp weapons attacked the 22-year-old student and his wife, who is from a higher caste, on a crowded street in Tamil Nadu state on Sunday.

“They married some eight months ago and the woman’s family was unhappy. She is an upper Thevar Hindu caste and the man was a Dalit,” Manjunatha told AFP.

• CCTV footage of the incident broadcast on Indian television showed the couple walking along the street when three men on a motorbike stop and attack them.
• Thevars are a dominant community in Tamil Nadu while Dalits, formerly known as untouchables, are a historically marginalised community.
• India has long witnessed so-called honour killings, where couples are targeted because their families or communities disapprove of their relationships over caste or religion. Most occur in rural pockets of the north. 
• They are carried out by relatives or caste groups to protect what is seen as the family’s reputation and pride.

There are no India-specific figures available, but United Nations statistics say 1,000 out of the 5,000 such killings every year are in India.

KUCHING, Sarawak, Malaysia - Two Australian journalists were detained and barred from leaving Malaysia after they had tried to "aggressively" question Prime Minister Najib Razak about a corruption scandal, police said Sunday. 

The duo were detained after they crossed a "security line and aggressively tried to approach the prime minister" who was visiting a mosque in Kuching on the island of Borneo, according to a police statement. 

The journalists, who work for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Four Corners investigative programme, were detained on Saturday night after the incident but were released Sunday without charge. 

• Reporter Linton Besser and camera operator Louie Eroglu had approached Najib on the street before their arrest, the broadcaster added.
• Neighbour said their passports, which were initially seized, had been returned to them but they "can't leave Malaysia". ?We will discuss with the Attorney General's Chambers [whether] to charge them," 
• Malaysia's national police chief Khalid Abu Bakar was quoted as saying by local news agency Bernama. "Police are responsible for the prime minister's security. So we do not want anything untoward happening to him," he said, adding that the journalists were barred from leaving the state while investigations were underway. 
• Two of Najib's bodyguards were convicted of the murder and sentenced to death. Najib, who was defence minister at the time, has strongly denied any involvement in the murder and has said he did not know the woman. 
• But government critics have long alleged that the two bodyguards, members of an elite unit that guards top ministers, were scapegoats in the killing of Altantuya, who was at the centre of allegations of massive kickbacks in the $1.1 billion 2002 purchase of French Scorpene submarines. 
• Najib, 62, has also been under fire over allegations that billions of dollars were stolen from a state firm he founded, and over his own acceptance of a murky $681 million overseas payment.
• He and the state firm have vehemently denied any wrongdoing. 
• In the allegation's wake, the prime minister has curbed investigations into the scandals and purged his ruling United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) of critics, essentially shutting off internal party challenges.

ZAGREB – A Croatian man in a wheelchair robbed a bank after passers-by helped him to enter the premises, local media reported today. 

• The crime occurred on Wednesday evening only a few seconds after the man had politely thanked passers-by for helping him to enter the bank in his wheelchair, the paper said. 
• After employees handed over 50,000 kunas (RM30,000) the robber wheeled himself to a nearby taxi station where a cab driver helped him get into the car and put his wheelchair in the trunk
• Unaware of his client’s recent activities, the driver took the man towards the northern town of Bjelovar, where he was eventually arrested. 

WILKINSBURG - Four women and one man were  shot,  killed and several injured on Wednesday in a residential neighborhood in Wilkinsburg, about 8 miles (13 km) east of the city, news station WPXI said, adding that the suspects were at large. 

Other regional media said seven or eight people were shot and Police were not immediately available for comments. 

Several reporters in the area Tweeted photographs of ambulancesand police cars. 

Dozens of shell casings littered the pavement of an alleyway at the scene, media reports 

said.

Wilkinsburg is a borough of about 16,000 people. The population are mostly people with lower and middle income residents, demographic data showed.