■ Sri Lanka
Troops enforce curfew
The government deployed the military to impose a curfew in a Sri Lankan town yesterday after a police shooting killed two people during a night of ethnic violence. Over 1,000 majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils clashed Wednesday over a road accident between a Sinhalese-owned bus and a Tamil-owned three-wheeler motorcycle taxi, police spokesman Rienzie Perera said. Police were "compelled to open fire to quell mobs who torched shops and houses and attacked our people," Perera said, adding that the shooting left two people dead. He declined to identify the dead men, saying it might fuel tension in the area. The violence broke out in the central Sri Lankan town of Nuwara Eliya, 180km east of the capital, Colombo. Nuwara Eliya is home to tens of thousands of Tamils, whose forebears were brought from neighboring India by the British.
■ China
Bad baby formula rampant
An ongoing investigation into the deaths of babies from consuming substandard milk powder has found the products are widely produced in China, state media said yesterday. Investigators discovered 141 factories in the provinces of Heilongjiang, Zhejiang, Shandong, Hebei, Hubei, Jiangxi and Inner Mongolia making the fake powder, Xinhua news agency reported. Even Beijing and Shanghai had factories churning out the deadly formula, it said. The products were sold in 149 brands. According to the government and media, 16 babies have died and 189 suffered from malnutrition after ingesting formula deficient in protein and other essential nutrients. State-controlled media have reported fake milk products or malnourished babies in 13 of China's 30 provinces or regions.
■ Macedonia
Premier wins poll
Liberal Prime Minister Branko Crvenkovski won Wednesday's presidential election, but his conservative opponent has claimed fraud and demanded the ballot be annulled. With virtually all the ballots counted, Crvenkovski received 62 percent, the state electoral commission said. He replaces Boris Trajkovski, a highly respected politician who died in a February airplane crash. Right-wing opposition candidate Sasko Kedev had 37 percent. The commission said the turnout of 53 percent was enough to make the election valid. Crvenkovski celebrated his victory, saying the country ``passed a huge democratic test.'' But Kedev called the balloting the worst election fraud in his nation's history.
■ United Nationals
No WMDs for terrorists
The Security Council unanimously approved a resolution Wednesday to keep chemical, biological and nuclear weapons out of terrorists' hands. First proposed in a UN General Assembly speech by US President George W. Bush in September, the resolution extends the reach of non-proliferation treaty powers beyond states to "non-state actors" -- diplomatic-speak that includes terror groups. The 15 to 0 vote followed months of redrafting to gain support from several nations. China ended a threat to use its veto when language was dropped that would have allowed the interdiction of ships at sea suspected of carrying banned weapons.
■ United States
LA bans beach smoking
The city of Los Angeles is to ban smoking on its most popular beaches, joining its neighbor Santa Monica to create a 20km stretch of smoke-free waterfront, officials said Wednesday. The city council approved the measure and Mayor James Hahn is expected to sign the legislation. The ban's proponents say smoking on beaches poses health risks, such as second-hand smoke and poisoning from cigarette butts that leach toxins into sand and water. Environmental groups list cigarette butts as the most common litter on beaches. California has led the US in anti-smoking legislation, with many states and cities following its lead in banning smoking in public spaces, workplaces and restaurants.
■ Norway
Eagle snares bear cub
Zoologists were astonished on Wednesday to learn that a golden eagle recently snatched a bear cub from its mother. Two park rangers in the Lierne region of central Norway saw the eagle swoop down on the cub trotting behind its mother and carry it away, one of the rangers told public broadcaster NRK. A golden eagle normally weighs about 6kg, while the bear cub was said to have weighed about half that. Torgeir Nygaard of the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research said the likelihood of an eagle snatching a bear was about as great as the chance of "finding snow in the Sahara."
■ Iran
UFO fever grips Tehran
Flying saucer fever has gripped Iran after dozens of sightings in recent days. Fanciful cartoons of alien spacecraft have adorned newspapers' front pages. State television on Wednesday showed a sparkling white disc it said was filmed over Tehran on Tuesday night. Other UFOs have been spotted emitting green, red, blue and purple rays over the northern cities of Tabriz and Ardebil and in the Caspian Sea province of Golestan, the official IRNA news agency reported.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema