An Indonesian court sentenced a French citizen to death for smuggling drugs on Monday in a surprisingly draconian verdict that outstripped the prosecutors’ requests for a long prison sentence.

Felix Dorfin, 35, was arrested in September at an airport in the tourist island of Lombok with methylenedioxy methamphetamine worth $220,600 and 22 ecstasy pills in his suitcase, according to the Associated Press.

Despite Dorfin’s eligibility for capital punishment, prosecutors had asked for a 20-year jail term plus another year unless he paid a fine of about $700,000, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).

The strict sentence came as a surprise.

“Dorfin was shocked,” the defendant’s lawyer, Deny Nur Indra, told AFP. “He didn’t expect this at all because prosecutors only asked for 20 years.” His lawyer said he would appeal the verdict.

Indonesia has some of the world’s strictest anti-drug laws, and foreigners implicated in drug smuggling cases have been executed before.

The judge, Isnurul Syam..

Reenactments of the Khmer Rouge genocide are annual events in Cambodia. On the grounds of the famous killing fields of Choeung Ek, outside the capital of Phnom Penh, a troupe of young performers will take their positions on an open field. The loudspeakers will blare haunting music and words of hate. Actors carrying wooden machine guns will simulate the mass murder of civilians. Children aren’t spared and neither are the elderly. It is May 20, the National Day of Remembrance.

The annual observance marks the day in 1975 when the communist regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge began the mass killings of the Cambodian genocide. Such national days of remembrance are often a key part of confronting and acknowledging a troubling past; Germany’s decision to create a day to remember the Holocaust, for example, has been seen as an important step forward. But Cambodia’s version is complicated by the purpose the day has served for the governments that followed the Khmer Rouge — and the questions ..

(PARIS) — The Eiffel Tower was evacuated and closed down Monday after a man scaled nearly to the top of the Paris monument and refused to come down for several hours.

Members of a special firefighter climbing unit and police negotiators eventually persuaded the man to surrender, a Paris police official said. The official said the man was “under control and out of danger” Monday night.

Managers said the tower would reopen Tuesday morning as usual and promised to reimburse people with reserved tickets whose visits were thwarted.

Security agents spotted the man climbing up from the second floor in the early afternoon, triggering an operation to evacuate the 2,500 visitors on the monument, the tower management company said in a statement. That included people dining on the second level.

The man eventually stopped his climb just below the third level, which is the highest level of the 324-meter (1,063-foot) tower, and stayed there. His motives remained unclear, and authorities declined ..

(VIENNA) — Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said Monday he is seeking the removal of the country’s interior minister over a video scandal that has rocked the Alpine nation in recent days.

The move, which must be approved by Austria’s president, is expected to trigger a walk-out of Interior Minister Herbert Kickl’s far-right Freedom Party from the coalition government.

Kurz, who became chancellor with help from the Freedom Party in 2017, said Austrians want clarity on the apparent influence-peddling scandal involving Kickl’s party and a purported Russian investor.

“I’m firmly convinced that what’s necessary now is total transparency and a completely and unbiased investigation,” he told reporters in Vienna.

Pledging to ensure stability over the coming months, Kurz said that if the Freedom Party leaves his government — as it has threatened to do — vacant positions would be filled with civil servants and technocrats until the next national elections, which are expected in September.
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