■ China
Editors to stay in jail
International media-rights groups yesterday voiced outrage at a decision by a Chinese appeal court to maintain long prison terms for two former executives of the liberal Southern Metropolitan Daily newspaper. The Guangzhou Intermediate People's Court on Tuesday completed the appeal case of Yu Huafeng (喻華峰), the former vice chief editor of the paper, reducing his sentence for corruption to eight years from 12. Li Minying (李民英), the former deputy Communist Party head of the paper, had his sentence reduced from 11 years to six years. The two were jailed on corruption charges linked to the routine distribution of bonuses at the paper.
■ Hong Kong
Mass arrests in brothels
Officers have arrested 107 people in three days of raids on brothels suspected to have ties to Chinese crime gangs, police said yesterday. The raids occurred in Mongkok, a popular tourist area notorious for prostitution, police spokeswoman Kelly Chan said. Five men, aged 33 to 50, were charged with conspiracy to manage a vice establishment. A 33-year-old man was charged with conspiracy to traffic women to Hong Kong for prostitution, a police statement said. Thirty-three women from China, aged 15 to 45, were charged with violating their visitor visas. The remaining 68 suspects were still being detained for questioning, Chan said.
■ Australia
Insanity for shooter
An honors student who went on a shooting spree that killed two people and wounded five at an Australian university was declared innocent Thursday of murder and attempted murder on the grounds of insanity. The shooting spree at Monash University in Melbourne in 2002 shocked this nation, where violence at schools and university campuses are rare. Despite clearing 38-year-old Huan Xiang of two counts of murder and five of attempted murder, Victorian Supreme Court judge justice Bernard Teague ordered that he be detained in a secure psychiatric institution for 25 years.
■ Vietnam
Cross-border bus on track
Vietnam and Thailand have cleared a snag over which side of a bus should have the steering wheel and reached a tentative agreement on launching a cross-border tourist bus service, a Vietnamese tourism official said yesterday. Progress on the bus service held up because of Vietnam's ban on vehicles with steering wheels on the right-hand side -- standard for vehicles from Thailand, where they are driven on the left side of the street. Vietnam, where cars are driven on the right, has now agreed to allow the Thai buses to operate in the communist country.
■ Antarctica
Japanese garbage cleared
Japanese researchers in Antarctica are getting serious about cleaning up the half-century's worth of garbage piled up at their base on the southernmost continent, an official said yesterday. Building materials, cast-off snow vehicles and fuel drums have collected at the research base since the first expedition was launched in 1956. By 1998, the garbage weighed about 500 tonnes and research teams began chipping away at the pile to clear it. Now, those efforts are being accelerated in an international effort to clean up Antarctica. Japan's Science Ministry hopes to send the remaining 337 tonnes of garbage home within four years, a ministry official said.
■ Switzerland
Banks release war records
Swiss banks have agreed to release records of thousands of World War II-era accounts that may belong to victims of the Nazis. A lawyer for Nazi victims who sued the banks said the agreement could allow the victims or their descendants to obtain hundreds of millions of dollars in unclaimed funds. If Swiss authorities approve the agreement, Credit Suisse and UBS AG will publish the names of 3,000 accounts opened during the Nazi era. They will open databases of Nazi-era accounts for comparison with a list of thousands hoping to recover family assets from Swiss banks.
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