World in brief: Arrest extended for Nobel winner
Myanmar’s military junta on Tuesday extended the house arrest of Nobel Peace Prize-winning democracy advocate Aung San Suu Kyi for another year, drawing softer criticism than usual from foreign governments that are now focused on aiding survivors of Tropical Cyclone Nargis.
Suu Kyi is the daughter of Myanmar’s revered independence hero, Aung San, and leader of the opposition National League for Democracy, which won a landslide election victory in 1990 but has not been permitted to take power.
A symbol of hope for millions, she has spent approximately 12 of the past 18 years under house arrest, including an unbroken stretch since May 2003, after her convoy was violently attacked during a political tour that drew rapturous crowds.
Mexico City
Two agents killed in shootout
Seven Mexican federal agents looking for an arms cache died early Tuesday in a shootout with gunmen in the northern state of Sinaloa, officials said.
The agents came under fire when they went to search a home in Culiacan, the state capital. Four other agents were wounded.
At least one gunman was reported killed during the confrontation, which came as a wave of drug-related violence has washed over Mexico. Two suspects were arrested, the federal Public Security Ministry said in a statement.
The state has registered more than 200 killings this year, mainly as a result of a power struggle within one of Mexico’s biggest drug gangs, the so-called Sinaloa cartel.
Berlin
Memorial honors Nazis’ gay victims
Germany unveiled a memorial Tuesday to the Nazis’ long-ignored gay victims, a monument that also aims to address ongoing discrimination by confronting visitors with an image of a same-sex couple kissing.
The memorial – a sloping gray concrete slab on the edge of Berlin’s Tiergarten park – echoes the vast field of smaller slabs that make up Germany’s memorial to Jewish victims of the Holocaust, opened three years ago just across the road.
The pavilion-sized slab includes a small window where visitors can view a video clip of two men kissing. Berlin’s openly gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit, said the monument was a reminder of the ongoing struggles that still confront gays.
Nazi Germany declared homosexuality a threat to the German race and convicted some 50,000 homosexuals as criminals. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men were deported to concentration camps, where few survived.