■ Hong Kong
Abducted boy found
Chinese police have found a 4-year-old Hong Kong boy who was abducted and sold by a kidnapping gang eight months ago, a newspaper reported yesterday. It said he had been returned safely to his parents. Earlier this week, officers tracked down Ng Ko-wan at the house of a family from Puning in neighboring Guangdong province that had bought him from the kidnapping ring, the Chinese-language Apple Daily reported. The family paid 15,600 yuan (US$1,815) for Ng, the report said. Ng's parents picked him up Friday from police in the Chinese border town of Lohu, the report said.
■ Indonesia
Diplomat under scrutiny
A former Australian diplomat currently in Indonesian custody on child sex charges is being investigated for possible links to a suspected pedophile ring on Bali island, news reports said yesterday. William Stuart Brown, 51, was arrested on Jan. 5 and is being questioned over allegations that he had sex with children aged 14 and 16, Australian Broadcasting Corp radio said. Brown told reporters he also hosted Australia's most notorious pedophile, Robert Dunn, at his home in Lombok, Indonesia, after Dunn fled Australia during an investigation, The Canberra Times reported. Dunn was jailed in 2001 for 30 years for child sex offenses. Bali police chief Senior Superintendent Martanto said that before Brown's arrest, he had been under intermittent surveillance and the subject of several major operations in the region over the past two years, the newspaper said.
■ Japan
Kobe quake remembered
Thousands of Japanese mourners yesterday marked the ninth anniversary of the 1995 earthquake that hit the western Japanese city of Kobe, killing 6,433 people and injuring some 43,700. "I pray for the souls of those who passed in the earthquake," said Toshizo Ido, governor of Hyogo Prefecture, of which Kobe is the capital. "And I want to show my respect to those who survived the disaster, who have lived with deep sadness," he said at a memorial event in the city, attended by some 4,500 people. At noon, Ido joined other Kobe residents to observe a moment of silence at the memorial service.
■ Singapore
`Jihad' to be defined
Moderate Muslim community leaders in Southeast Asia are producing a book that will define the concept of jihad in a bid to stop militants from misusing it to justify violence, a newspaper reported yesterday. Media often use jihad to describe a "holy war," but for most Muslims it means "struggle" or "perseverance" -- such as an effort to become more spiritual or avoid temptation in daily life -- the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore told The Straits Times.
■ Japan
Communists launch revamp
Trying to halt a slide into political obscurity, Japan's fading Communist Party abandoned the rhetoric of revolution yesterday in the first comprehensive update of its Marxist manifesto in 40 years. Calls for a "socialist revolution" and the abolition of Japan's emperor system were dropped from a new platform adopted by the Japan Communist Party at its annual convention. The changes were overwhelmingly approved by rank-and-file members of a party struggling to stay relevant to voters in the world's second-richest country. "With this new platform, we can discuss the future of Japan and the world," Chairman Tetsuzo Fuwa said at a resort outside Tokyo.
■ Iraq
Blast kills five US troops
Five US soldiers were killed in a bomb attack north of Baghdad that destroyed a Bradley armored vehicle, CNN said in a report from the Iraqi capital yesterday. US military spokesmen could not immediately confirm the report. The casualty toll would mean that the number of American troops to die in Iraq has now exceeded 500 since US President George W. Bush ordered the invasion on March 20 last year.
■ United States
Actor jailed for teenage sex
American actor Scott Bairstow was sentenced to four months in jail for an attack involving a 12-year-old girl. Bairstow originally was charged with second-degree child rape but entered a modified guilty plea last month to a reduced charge of second-degree assault. Bairstow, who appeared on Fox's Party of Five in 1998 and 1999, also was ordered to undergo a sexual deviancy evaluation and 12 months of supervision after his release. Prosecutors said the girl, a relative of Bairstow's wife, told authorities she had sex with Bairstow in 1998, when she was 12, and three more times outside Washington state, most recently in 2001.
■ Sweden
Official wrecks art piece
Israel's ambassador to Sweden destroyed an artwork depicting a Palestinian suicide bomber in a Stockholm museum on Friday, Swedish radio reported yesterday. The art installation, entitled Snow White and the Madness of Truth, consisted of a rectangular basin filled with red water on which floated a boat carrying a portrait of Hanadi Jaradat, who killed herself and 19 others in an attack in the Israeli port city of Haifa in October. Public service SR radio news said Ambassador Zvi Mazel furiously ripped out electrical wires attached to the art work and threw a spotlight in the basin. "This was not a piece of art," Mazel told SR. "It was a monstrosity. An obscene distortion of reality."
■ Germany
Ustinov wins award
Oscar-winning British actor Peter Ustinov was awarded the 2004 prize of honor at the Bavarian film awards on Friday in recognition of his lifetime body of work.
Ustinov, 82, has won two Oscars and starred in some 40 films. His latest, last year's Luther, was a US film about the German religious reformer. The actor, who is an ambassador for UNICEF, the UN children's fund, was unable to attend the prize ceremony because of illness. The people's choice award went to last year's Good Bye Lenin, a German comedy about the demise of Communist East Germany that was a huge box office hit in both Germany and France.
■ United States
Rumsfeld appeals ruling
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Friday asked the US Supreme Court to overturn an appeals court ruling that a US citizen accused of plotting with al-Qaeda to set off a radioactive "dirty bomb" could not be detained as an enemy combatant. On Friday, a brief filed by the Justice Department with the Supreme Court, listing Rumsfeld as sole petitioner, said the lower court ruling "undermines the constitutional authority of the Commander-in-Chief to protect the United States against additional enemy attacks launched within the nation's borders.
■ Egypt
Divers locate black box
The French navy on Friday recovered one flight recorder from an Egyptian Boeing 737 that crashed into the Red Sea, killing 148 people, a source said. The French navy is using a remote-control robot to locate the flight recorders, or "black boxes," from the wreck. The two flight recorders could contain information to help determine why the Flash Airlines-operated plane crashed near the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh almost two weeks ago, killing all on board.
■ Germany
Butt kicker gets the chop
A German court ruled workers can be sacked for kicking colleagues in the bottom but was unsure if a slap in the face was sufficient grounds for dismissal. The state court of Hesse upheld a company's decision to sack a male employee who kicked a colleague's bottom after a work dispute, an official said on Friday. "The man wanted to give a fellow worker a high-five [greeting], but as this overture was rejected the sacked man slapped him in the face and kicked him in the backside," said the spokeswoman. "However, we cannot say if a slap in the face constitutes grounds for dismissal," she said.
■ United States
Festival for Fab Four
It may seem like only yesterday but the Beatles' much-heralded first visit to the US was 40 years ago, and a group of die-hard fans wants to mark the occasion for Beatles lovers here, there and everywhere. The Fab 40 Committee will kick off the Beatles celebrations with a party and concert at New York's Hard Rock Cafe on Feb. 9, 40 years to the day the British group first performed on The Ed Sullivan Show, organizers said. The city's Lincoln Center arts complex will host a film and TV tribute and the American Film Institute will hold a similar tribute on Feb. 7.
■ Romania
Mothers recover babies
Two Romanian mothers who were told their premature babies had died in hospital were called in four months later to pick up their children who were in fact alive and well. "Everybody told me the little one was dead," Ramona Ionita told the Evenimentul Zilei daily. She said the family was told to come pick up the baby they had "abandoned." Ionita collected her child but the other mother said she did not believe her baby was still alive and demanded a DNA test. The hospital was also fined last week and its director replaced after 18 newborns died in six weeks due to improper hygiene.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the