■ ChinaExtra child costs a house
A court in Shenzhen has fined a couple 780,000 yuan (US$94,250) and sealed off their house for having more than one child, the Beijing Morning Post said yesterday. The pair were among nine couples who were fined "social fostering fees" for their extra children, the newspaper said. They had their first boy in 1997 and last year had twin boys, the newspaper said. The couple's house had been sealed up "according to the law," the paper said, or until they pay the fine which was unusually large. A house is sealed with a white paper bearing the stamp of a local court pasted across the front door.
■ India
God improves train safety
India's disaster-prone train network may be the world's largest employer, but the country's railways minister says he believes the credit for a respite in accidents lies with the Hindu god of machines. Laloo Prasad Yadav said the number of train accidents had declined since he installed a "bright new photo" of the god Vishwakarma in his New Delhi office. "Now I pray to Him daily," the maverick minister told reporters in Madras on Saturday. "`You direct me [in running the railways],' I tell Vishwa-karma, and so now there are no rail accidents," Yadav said. India has the world's busiest railway system, shuttling 13 million people daily on 108,700km of track.
■ Australia
Bird-smuggling ring broken
Customs officials said yes-terday they had severely disrupted an international wildlife trafficking ring linking Australia to Africa and Southeast Asia. More than 1,000 birds had been seized in raids across the country in what customs said was its biggest ever operation to identify and prosecute smugglers of wildlife. "This was a major operation aimed at dis-rupting an organized trade in wildlife between Australia, Africa and Southeast Asia in particular," customs official Richard Janeczko said. "These co-ordinated raids have sent a strong signal to anyone involved in the international wildlife trade that their actions are under heavy scrutiny."
■ India
`Right' prizes awarded
The Right Livelihood prize, dubbed the "alternative" to the Nobel Peace Prize, was awarded yesterday to human rights campaigner Bianca Jagger, an Argentinian anti-nuclear activist and a Rus-sian group documenting Soviet-era abuses. The prize, established in 1980, was announced in Hyderabad instead of the usual base of Sweden to stress it focuses on the developing world. The prize of two million Swedish kronor (US$268,000) will be shared among Jagger, Argentinian scientist Raul Montenegro and the Moscow-based Memorial society.
■ Sri Lanka
Coffin put before embassy
About 150 supporters of the Eelam People's Democratic Party (EPDP) placed the coffin of a slain party leader in front of the Norwegian Embassy to protest some 115 murders, including 35 political assassinations, by Tamil rebels since Norway brokered a ceasefire between the rebels and the government. The protesters marched to the embassy with the coffin of Thambit-hurai Sivakumar, a regional party leader who was killed on Saturday in Puttalam, north of the Colombo. Sivakumar was out cycling with his eight-year-old daughter when the killing took place, his party said on its Web site.
■ PakistanMusharraf, Singh to meet
A much-anticipated first meeting between Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will be held on Friday in New York, a Pakistani official said yesterday. After sluggish progress in peace talks between the nuclear-armed foes in the past eight months, analysts are hoping the two leaders can inject some momentum into the process when they meet on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. The meeting would take place two days later than initially envisaged, but the Pakistani foreign ministry official gave no reason for the delay until Friday.
RSS