■ India
Separatists call for ceasefire
Kashmiri separatists will ask India to declare a ceasefire in the troubled Himalayan region when unprecedented talks with the government begin, a top separatist said yesterday. "A ceasefire will help a lot," said Moulana Abbas Ansari, who heads the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, a legal alliance of political and Islamic religious groups. The talks are to begin Thursday in New Delhi. Ansari heads the five-person Hurriyat team that is to meet with representatives of the Indian government lead by Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani. The talks are the first with any one of that level in the Indian government.
■ Hong Kong
Chinese gobble up Viagra
Sales of the impotency drug Viagra have risen by 10 percent in the past year as Chinese buyers pour into the territory to buy the pills, a news report said yesterday. Frustrated at the flood of fake pills on the market in China, men have been taking advantage of relaxed travel restrictions to buy the real thing in Hong Kong. Viagra manufacturers Pfizer told the South China Morning Post the decision last year to let millions more mainland Chinese people visit Hong Kong had sent it sales up strongly. "The majority of Viagra tablets being offered for sale in mainland sex shops and drugstores are fake," Pfizer country manager Stephen Leung told the newspaper. "This is the reason why mainlanders buy a large number of these pills for their own use or as a gift when they visit Hong Kong."
■ Afghanistan
NATO asked to expand force
Military experts will press NATO envoys this week to quicken the drive for an expansion of the international peacekeeping operation in Afghanistan ahead of elections in June, an alliance official said on Tuesday. A resurgence of attacks by Taliban militia in lawless provinces beyond the capital, Kabul -- where NATO runs a peacekeeping force of 5,700 troops -- has cast doubt over plans for the country's first free presidential poll. To widen the security net, NATO wants to take command of military teams in 12 urban areas by the middle of the year, but it is faced with reluctance from militarily stretched member states to offer troops and costly resources such as helicopters.
■ Malaysia
Lawmakers moot whipping
Malaysia is considering publicly whipping child rapists amid public anger over the rape and murder of two 10-year-old girls in a fortnight. Minister in the Prime Minister's Department and de facto law minister Rais Yatim will propose whipping and setting up a sex offenders register at the next Cabinet meeting, the New Straits Times said yesterday. Rais said the idea of public whipping had been mooted by former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad in 2002 but had been rejected.
■ India
Tiger population stable
Preliminary results of a census in one of the world's biggest natural habitats for tigers shows that the animals' population is stable, a top wildlife official said yesterday. The census in the Sunderbans Forest in eastern India, bordering Bangladesh, was completed Tuesday and found some 1,000 paw prints or pugmarks that will now be analyzed to determine the number of tigers roaming the swampy jungles, said Pradeep Vyas, field director of the government-run Project Tiger. Each tiger has a separate paw print, just as humans have different fingerprints.
■ Norway
Ship rescue called off
Rescuers called off a search for 15 missing Filipino crew members of a freighter that capsized a day earlier in a shallow, icy Norwegian inlet, believing they have died. Three others have been confirmed dead and 12 people were rescued. "The rescue is called off. There is no hope of finding survivors in the water," rescue leader Trygve Sveen said by telephone Tuesday from the Rescue Coordination Center. He doubted any survivors would be found inside the overturned ship, but "we can't know because we have not been inside."
■ Morocco
Women's rights boosted
Morocco has approved one of the most progressive laws on women's and family rights in the Arab world, which will see polygamy almost completely eradicated from the north African country. Last-ditch attempts by Islamist deputies in the Rabat parliament failed to derail a law which had the backing of King Mohammed VI. "There are men who, for physical reasons, cannot satisfy themselves with only one wife," one Islamist deputy was reported as arguing during a month of parliamentary debate that ended at the weekend. "In that case they should seek treatment," the religious affairs minister, Ahmed Toufiq, reportedly replied. The changes to the family code make polygamy acceptable only in rare circumstances.
■ United States
Porn fiends get Booble
Online pornography aficionados got a boost Tuesday when a US entrepreneur launched a new search engine for raunchy Internet material dubbed "Booble.com." An unnamed New York-based former Internet executive has pumped his own money into the new Web site that has styled itself as a light-hearted parody of the world's largest and best-known search engine, Google.com. The new service, which its founder said was intended to be "fun, but useful too," allows porn fiends to filter through more than 6,000 hand-selected listings of Internet adult content.
■ United States
Bomb joke ends in arrest
A British student could face up to 15 years in jail after allegedly making a joke about having a bomb in her rucksack at a US airport. Samantha Marson, 21, from Bridgnorth, central England, was arrested before boarding a London-bound British Airways flight from Miami on Saturday. She is alleged to have placed her hand luggage on an X-ray machine before telling a Transportation Security Administration screener: "Hey, be careful, I have three bombs in here." Asked to repeat herself, she allegedly made the same statement twice more, sparking a full-scale terrorist alert and landing herself in jail. Marson had been in the US for three months.
■ United Kingdom
Ice Age mammal skull found
An unusually well-preserved skull of an Ice Age mammal estimated to be 50,000 years old has been discovered in a gravel pit in southern England, an official said Tuesday. The skull was found Jan. 11 in a pit in the Cotswold Water Park by Neville Hollingworth, a paleontologist who works at the Natural Environment Research Council in Swindon. "The skull is exquisite. It is very finely preserved and almost looks like modern bone," said Hollingworth, calling it his best find in 20 years of collecting fossils.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese