■ China
Workers jailed for protests
A court has sentenced five workers to prison following protests at a Taiwanese-owned factory making name-brand shoes, a court official and labor rights group said yesterday. The five were among 40 arrested after thousands of workers went on strike in April at two factories in Dongguan to protest wages and working conditions, the New York-based China Labor Watch group reported. China Labor Watch and other groups said the factories make shoes for major international brands including Brown, Timber-land and Clark. An official at Dongguan's Municipal People's Court confirmed that the five had been sentenced for "destroying property." China Labor Watch said the jail terms for four of the workers, all men, ranged from three to three and a half years.
■ China
Tibetan author punished
Famous Tibetan author Oser has lost her job, home and freedom of movement because Beijing thought her writings were too favorable to the exiled Dalai Lama, a rights group said yesterday. Oser has been fired from the Tibetan Cultural Association, which has also evicted her from her home and termi-nated her health and retire-ment benefits, it said. She has been prohibited from applying for a passport to leave the country, and has been pressured to abandon her practice of Tibetan Buddhism, according to the New York-based group Human Rights in China. Oser's main crime is to have written the book Tibet Journal, a now-banned collection of essays relating to Tibet's history, personali-ties and way of life, the group said.
■ China
One killed in stampede
A stampede at an elementary and middle school killed one child and injured 25 people, the government reported yesterday. The accident occurred Wednesday after-noon when children at the front of a group of students leaving the school in Lijiahe Township, Hubei Province, suddenly fell, causing stu-dents behind them to lose balance and trample them, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. It said a 10-year-old was killed. The injured children included students from grades two through six, it said. The reason the children fell was not given.
■ The Philippines
Three busted for cybersex
Three men, including two foreigners, have been arrested for operating a cyber-sex operation that victimized women and children, police said yester-day. Roland Thys and Dean Arthur were arrested along with Filipino cohort Ali Bonjoc in a raid on Monday on their home in Angeles City. Police said other suspects, including at least two more foreigners, escaped and were being hunted. Rescued during the raid were 15 women and children used by the group in their cyber-sex operations, police said.
■ Hong Kong
Lawyer nabbed for assault
A Scottish barrister who admitted being "drunk as a monkey" during a court case two months ago has been arrested for assaulting two policemen, police said yes-terday. Roderick Murray, 46, was arrested for assault following a disturbance in a supermarket near his home on Tuesday evening when he allegedly pushed groceries and two bottles of wine on the floor. Murray, who until recently worked as a govern-ment prosecutor, was arrested for assault after being sent to the hospital for a check-up, the police said.
■ Russia
Miners killed in explosion
Thirteen coal miners died after an explosion ripped through a coal mine early yesterday in western Siberia, officials said. The blast in the Listvyazhnaya mine in the town of Belov, in the Kemerovo region 3,000km east of Moscow, was apparently caused by a methane buildup, accord-ing to Lyudmila Krylova, a spokeswoman for the local branch of Russia's Emer-gency Situations Ministry. At the time of the explo-sion, 103 miners were working under the surface, Krylova told reporters.
■ Kenya
Kids use feces in protest
More than 100 jailed Kenyan street children smeared themselves and their Nairobi cells with feces in a protest Wednesday, leading police to call in firefighters to hose them down. The homeless boys had been jailed at the central police station for several weeks, awaiting transfer to government-sponsored homes. But their frustration boiled over Wednesday and the 113 in the jail started riot, attempting to escape and then demanding to be released or charged, police said. "They smeared themselves with shit, smeared everywhere with shit and damaged doors trying to escape," said central police station boss Julius Ndegwa.
■ France
Mayor's office bombed
A small explosion shook the mayor's office in the southwest city of Bordeaux overnight, authorities said. There were no injuries. Regional authorities in the Gironde region said an explosive device placed outside the building detonated shortly after midnight yesterday. Details were not released about the condition of the building. An investigation has been opened. Bordeaux mayor Alain Juppe, a former prime minister, is currently on trial in Paris appealing a conviction in a party financing scandal that derailed his political career.
■ United Kingdom
Gibraltar talks rekindled
Spain and Britain have agreed to restart consultations on Gibraltar to try to resolve the 300-year-old sovereignty dispute over the British colony on Spain's southern coast. British Foreign Minister Jack Straw and his Spanish counterpart Miguel Angel Moratinos said on Wednesday the two countries would discuss setting up a new forum that would give Gibraltar a say in talks on its future. Gibraltar's Chief Minister Peter Caruana welcomed the new talks after having boycotted the previous round of Spanish-British negotiations in 2001 and 2002, when Gibraltar was only offered a seat as part of the British delegation.
■ Spain
Separatists open to talks
Armed Basque separatist group ETA said it was open to negotiations with the Spanish government to try to end more than three decades of violence, as long as talks were without conditions. Spain has ruled out talks under virtually any circumstances short of ETA laying down its arms. In a letter sent to a Basque television channel on Wednesday, ETA called for a dialogue "without hurry, with seriousness and without putting conditions on anyone." "It is the time to try another type of solution," said ETA, which recently renewed a campaign of economic sabotage but has not carried out a fatal attack for nearly a year and a half during an intense police crackdown.
■ Brazil
Indians awarded land
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva signed a decree on Wednesday creating 14 new Indian reservations across Brazil. The decree declares some 2,500km2 of Brazilian territory as ancestral Indian lands mostly in the Amazon rainforest. Eleven of the reservations were in the state of Amazonas. Reservations were also declared in the Amazon states of Acre and Maranhao as well as in the central western state of Mato Grosso do Sul. Moura said several reservations were declared for isolated tribes, whose lands were demarcated without the tribes being contacted by anthropologists.
■ Chile
Terror law targets indigenes
The center-left government is using a draconian anti-terror law inherited from former dictator Augusto Pinochet to repress Indian protesters battling for land rights, rights groups said on Wednesday. Mapuche Indian activists face unfair trials with anonymous witnesses and excessive prison sentences under a 1984 law originally targeted at leftist guerrillas, according to a report by the US-based Human Rights Watch and Chile's Indigenous People's Rights Watch. The Mapuches, a small minority of Chile's 15 million people, are fighting expanding commercial tree plantations on their ancestral lands in the south of Chile.
■ Colombia
Mayors under pressure
Twelve former mayors have been killed by rebels in Colombia this year and another six have fled the country, undermining President Alvaro Uribe's attempts to bring security to the nation. Gilberto Toro, director of the Colombian Association of Municipalities, said another 30 former mayors have applied for asylum abroad after being threatened by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, which has been battling the government for 40 years. In an interview on Tuesday, Toro said former officials in rural areas are being increasingly targeted by the rebels after the government provided better protection, including armored cars, for many sitting mayors.
■ Haiti
Students reportedly killed
Police raided a slum building in Haiti's capital and executed at least 10 people, mostly students, neighbors told a human rights lawyer on Wednesday, the second day of an ineffective strike called by loyalists who want the return of ousted former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Police denied the report. Lawyer Judy Delacruz said she saw trails of blood where neighbors told her police had dragged the bodies of those killed along an alley behind Ruelle Estime in the Fort National neighborhood of Port-au-Prince.
■ United States
Motorist scares politician
A Florida motorist was arrested on Wednesday on charges of trying to run down US Representative Katherine Harris at an intersection where the controversial former state elections chief was campaigning for re-election to Congress. Harris was campaigning alongside a street corner in her hometown of Sarasota on Tuesday evening. A silver Cadillac sped toward them, drove up onto the sidewalk, then swerved away at the last minute, police said. No one was hurt. Barry Seltzer, 46, of Sarasota, was jailed early on Wednesday for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. He said he was annoyed because Harris' supporters were blocking traffic, police said. "I was exercising my political expression," police quoted him as saying. "I did not run them down, I scared them a little."
SEEKING CHANGE: A hospital worker said she did not vote in previous elections, but ‘now I can see that maybe my vote can change the system and the country’ Voting closed yesterday across the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific nation’s first general election since the government switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing and struck a secret security pact that has raised fears of the Chinese navy gaining a foothold in the region. The Solomon Islands’ closer relationship with China and a troubled domestic economy weighed on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots. As many as 420,000 registered voters had their say across 50 national seats. For the first time, the national vote also coincided with elections for eight of the 10 local governments. Esther Maeluma cast her vote in 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
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