■ 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.
■ Mexico
Bounty on prosecutor's head
Three major drug cartels in Mexico are offering rewards of more than US$2 million to assassinate Mexican Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha, press reports said Wednesday. Deputy Attorney General Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos told reporters that death threats to Macedo and to himself have been received from the Gulf cartel, led by Osiel Cardenas, who is in prison; from the Tijuana cartel, which is run by the Arellano Felix brothers; and from the so-called Millennium cartel, headed by drug lord Armando Valencia.
■ United States
Chickens get justice
Seven Georgia teenagers who beheaded two chickens because they were curious whether they would run around with their heads cut off will soon learn a lot more about the birds. A judge ordered the five boys and two girls -- ages 17 to 19 -- to clean chicken coops and read a book about animal cruelty as part of their sentence. Last September the seven teens bought machetes, kitchen knives and a hatchet, then drove to a farm and stole eight chickens. They beheaded two of them, videotaping the carnage before the homeowner caught them. The chickens "sort of ran a very short distance and they sort of flopped over," defense attorney Garland Moore said.
■ United States
El Paso sweatiest US city
El Paso, Texas, with average summer temperatures above 34?C and relative humidity over 70 percent, is the sweatiest city in the US, according to a study released on Tuesday. Research scientist Tim Long calculated heat indexes and relative humidity levels to come up with his top 100 sweatiest cities in the US list. By Long's calculations, in just four hours, El Paso's residents produce enough sweat to fill an Olympic swimming pool, with individuals shedding more than 1 liter of perspiration an hour. "The driving force is heat, but humidity is a key factor," Long said.
■ United Kingdom
Monogamy gene found
A single gene inserted into the brain can change promiscuous male rodents into faithful, monogamous partners, scientists said on Wednesday. It may not be quite that simple to rein in human philanderers -- many genes as well as other factors are probably involved in relationships among people. But researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University and Atlanta's Center for Behavioral Neuroscience (CBN) in the US said their results could help to explain the neurobiology of romantic love. The study suggests that "changes in the activity of a single gene profoundly can change a fundamental social behavior of animals within a species," said Larry Young, a researcher at the university.
■ Russia
US, Russia work together
A Russian Proton-M booster rocket blasted into space early yesterday, carrying a US satellite, Russian space officials said. The rocket was launched from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on schedule at 2:27am Moscow time, said Alexander Bobrinyov of the Khrunichev space company.
The Intelsat-10 satellite, when in orbit around the Earth, will be used to provide live television broadcasting, telephone communications and Internet connections to Intelsat's customers in South America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.
■ United States
Cow manure pollutes
Air quality regulators are proposing what they say would be the first attempt in America to regulate smog-forming emissions from cow manure. Cows in southern California dairies, especially around the farm community of Chino, produce 1 million tonnes of manure every year, according to the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which is proposing the new rules. As it decomposes, the manure releases more than 20 tonnes of pollutants daily -- mostly ammonia -- and combines with pollution blown downwind from Los Angeles and Orange counties, aggravating Southern California's worst-in-the-nation smog problem.
■ Portugal
Irishman steals ambulance
An Irish man was to appear in court in southern Portugal on Wednesday after he stole an ambulance and briefly drove it while drunk, police said. Paramedics left their keys in the ignition of the ambulance while they attended to a patient in a house in Portimao, 250km south of Lisbon, police spokesman Alexandre Coimbra said. The Irish man then made off with the ambulance but was stopped by police after having driven just 200m, he added. No one was hurt in the incident. The man was found to have 2.8 grams of alcohol per liter in his blood, far in excess of the national drink-drive limit of 0.5 grams. He was charged with automobile theft and drink driving, Coimbra said.
■ Zimbabwe
Mugabe admits HIV in family
The Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe, admitted for the first time on Wednesday that members of his family had been affected by HIV/Aids. Mugabe told a conference on Aids that unnamed members of his family had become ill from the disease. Describing HIV/Aids as "one of the greatest challenges facing our nation," he said that most people had been affected "and that includes the extended family of the president himself." The admission came after years of official neglect of a virus that has infected almost a quarter of adults in Zimbabwe, one of the highest prevalence rates in the world. Last year, 1.8 million Zimbabweans were infected and a recent survey found that 51 percent of prisoners were HIV-positive.
■ Congo
Refugees escape to Burundi
More than 22,000 refugees have fled into neighboring Burundi to escape heightened tensions in eastern Congo, officials said, after weeks of strife between loyalists and former rebels that have rattled the peace process in Africa's third-largest nation. UN investigators gave their first detailed accounts Wednesday of the violence, saying doctors registered 143 civilian casualties -- including 66 dead -- in a takeover of the eastern city of Bukavu by renegade ex-rebel military forces that sparked the fighting.
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