■ The Philippines
Journalist toll rises to 13
A journalist was bludgeoned to death in the north, making him the 13th member of
the press to be killed this year, police said yesterday. Stephen Omaois, 24, a reporter for the provincial news weekly Guru Press
and for government-run radio DZRK, was found dead by police on the outskirts
of Tabuk town on Saturday, police investigators said.
He had head injuries, appa-rently from rocks that were found beside the body, said
a provincial police official. No arrests have been made and the motive is unknown. Arthur Alad-iw, vice chair-man of the National Union
of Journalists in the Philip-pines, claimed Omaois had been abducted last Friday. Family members only identified his body yesterday after it had been lying at a local mortuary for five days.
■ China
Rich-poor gap widening
The gap between rich and poor, triggered by 20 years of economic reforms, is getting wider, the official Economic Information Daily said yesterday. The annual dis-posable per capita income of a high-income family grew
13 percent last year to 17,472 yuan (US$2,111), while that of a low-income family rose 8.7 percent to just 329.5 yuan, the paper said, quoting the National Bureau of Statistics. It did not detail how many Chinese families fall into the high-income bracket. Government leaders, wary of the potential for social unrest, have declared war on poverty and pledged to narrow the yawning gap between the rich and the poor.
■ Japan
Jizo helps town stay clean
The town of Nagato in the mountains of central Nagano prefecture has found divine help in ridding its car parks and roadsides of litter dis-carded by tourists passing through on their way to nearby ski resorts. Nagato authorities placed statues
of Jizo, whose role in Bud-dhism is to help others find enlightenment, at parking spots on a main road through the town. In the four months since the appearance of the statues, carved by local residents, litter has almost disappeared, public broad-caster NHK said yesterday.
"I can't drop litter now, not with the statue looking at me," NHK quoted one driver as saying.
■ Japan
Crime-fighters wear kimonos
Bar hostesses clad in ki-monos have joined forces with police in a symbolic move to crack down on rising crime in Tokyo's fashionable Ginza enter-tainment and shopping district. Complaining of
what they say are rising rates of pick-pocketing and mug-ging, several kimono-clad hostesses have started to patrol the district once a month. "Men patrol the streets too, but we feel it's our duty to help out to take care of our town and return it to a place of safe streets like it used to be," said Kie Kittaka, a bar owner, wear-ing a kimono with a green sash reading: "Protect our town." The women visit bars in the evening to hand out flyers aimed at raising awareness of crime in the district.
■ Hong Kong
Tougher air-rage law sought
The government is seeking a legal amendment enabling it to prosecute unruly pas-sengers on all planes bound for the territory. The law allows authorities to pro-secute crimes committed on Hong Kong-controlled air-craft regardless of where they are located. But the government wants to expand its jurisdiction over crimes that involve unruly behavior to all planes that are destined for Hong Kong.
■ United States
Lava lamp kills man
A Washington state man who placed a lava lamp on a hot stove died when the lamp exploded and a glass shard pierced his heart, police said on Tuesday. Phillip Quinn, 24, was found dead in his trailer home on Sunday night in Kent. "There appeared to have been an explosion that was centered on the stove top. There were glass fragments all over, embedded in the walls," said Paul Petersen, a Kent police spokesman. A lava lamp features blobs of wax in liquid that rise and fall in a container when heated by a bulb at the base of the lamp. Quinn was probably standing in front of the lamp when it exploded, then stumbled into his bedroom and died.
■ Mexico
Cancun officials nabbed
The federal Attorney General's office fired its representative in Cancun on Wednesday and took a top city police official and a number of other suspects into custody in connection with the killings of nine people, including three federal agents. The firing of Miguel Angel Hernandez came a day after soldiers surrounded the headquarters of federal investigators in this resort city and Mexico's top drug and organized crime prosecutor, Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, said everyone who worked there was under suspicion for protecting or working for drug smugglers.
■ Bosnia
Steel mine plan hits snag
Survivors of a concentration camp in Omarska, and relatives of the hundreds killed there, are pleading with Britain's richest resident, Lakshmi Mittal, not to convert the site back to a mine without preserving some installations in commemoration of what happened there. The mine was the site of the infamous concentration camp of Omarska, operated by the Bosnian Serbs for the internment, torture and mass murder of Muslim and Croat prisoners during the summer of 1992. Mittal, who last month became the biggest steel producer in the world, aims to restart the Omarska iron ore mine.
■ France
Juppe gets light sentence
Former French Prime Minister Alain Juppe got a new lease on his political life on Wednesday when appeals judges reduced his sentence in a party financing scandal, opening the door for his possible return to office in elections in 2007. The court sentenced Juppe to a 14-month suspended prison sentence, down from the original 18 months, and barred him from elected office for just one year, instead of the potentially career-ending 10-year ban handed down in January in his first trial. The shorter ban could allow Juppe to run for office in 2007, when presidential and legislative elections are scheduled.
■ Germany
Einstein had booze fridge
He is best known as the last century's most famous genius. But as well as coming up with his theory of relativity, German scientist Albert Einstein was also responsible, it emerged Wednesday, for a less celebrated discovery -- a fridge. Nearly 80 years after he invented it, a group of German physicists are now building Einstein's unique alcohol-powered fridge for the first time. According to historians, the fridge reveals the great scientist was not merely a romantic theoretician but also a down-to-earth practical inventor. Jurgen Renn, director of the Max-Plank-Institute in Berlin said: "He came from a merchant family, he had to worry about money, and he was supposed to take over the family business."
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
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
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