■ Afghanistan
Doctors help India, Sri Lanka
Afghanistan plans to send a team of doctors and a planeload of supplies to India and Sri Lanka to help victims of last week's devastating tsunami, officials said yesterday. About a dozen military medics as well as medicine and equipment will leave for the disaster zone as soon as possible, ministry spokesman General Zaher Mohammed Azimi said. He said that the supplies would be enough to help about 5,000 people. The relief team is to be led by former health minister General Suhaila Siddiq, a military surgeon whose skills were so valued that the former ruling Taliban allowed her to continue to work despite their opposition to women working.
■ Thailand
Martial arts writer rescued
An alert hotel manager woke up martial arts novelist Louis Cha and helped him evacuate his hotel room in Thailand as the tsunami hit the building, a magazine reported yesterday. The Hong Kong author -- whose pen name is Jin Yong or Kam Yung -- was staying at a beach-front hotel on the hard-hit resort island of Phuket, Eastweek magazine reported. He and his wife were asleep in their sixth-floor room when the tsunami struck, but the hotel's manager woke them up by beating on their door. He led them to a higher floor as the hotel became flooded, according to the report. Cha's daughter and two grand-children had to flee killer waves while enjoying breakfast on the hotel's first floor, the report said.
■ North Korea
Relief funds donated
North Korea, one of the world's poorest countries, which depends on foreign aid to help feed about a quarter of its people, is donating US$150,000 in emergency relief to countries devastated by the Indian Ocean tsunami. The communist state is no stranger to natural disaster and a famine in the late 1990s is estimated to have killed more than 1 million people and prompted up to 300,000 people to seek refuge in China. "The government and people of the DPRK [North Korea] express condolences and sympathy to the governments and peoples of the afflicted countries and hope the aftermath of the quake and tsunami will be eradicated," the official KCNA news agency said yesterday.
■ China
Activist gets longer sentence
Authorities have added three more months to the sentence of a Shanghai woman serving one-and-a-half years in a labor camp for her campaign to abolish China's family planning policies, a human rights organization said yesterday. Mao Hengfeng's original sentence was handed down by the Shanghai Public Security Bureau in April 2003. She was informed last month of the extension, according to a statement from New York-based Human Rights in China.
■ Vietnam
Boy dies of bird flu
Bird flu has killed a 9-year-old boy, a health official said yesterday, marking the first reported death this year from a virus that killed more than 30 people last year and ravaged the poultry industry as it swept across Asia. The death comes a week after the World Health Organization warned Vietnam may face new bird flu outbreaks this month, as poultry is transported around the country ahead of the Lunar New Year celebrations. Preliminary tests showed the H5N1 bird flu virus killed the boy on Tuesday night in the Mekong Delta province of Tra Vinh, said Luong Van Minh, deputy director of the provincial hospital.
■ South Africa
Mbeki attacks Churchill
President Thabo Mbeki has made a withering attack on Winston Churchill and other historic British figures, branding them racists who ravaged Africa and blighted its post-colonial development. The South African president made the remarks to the Sudanese assembly, in a speech which critics faulted for not dealing with the Sudanese government's human rights violations in Darfur. Mbeki said British imperialists in the 19th and 20th centuries treated Africans as savages and left a "terrible legacy" of countries divided by race, color, culture and religion. He singled out Churchill as a progenitor of vicious prejudice who justified British atrocities by depicting the continent's inhabitants as inferior races who needed to be subdued.
■ ItalY
Nuclear waste off to UK
Italy is hoping to export 99 percent of its nuclear waste to the UK after public demonstrations made it impossible to find a suitable site on Italian soil. The Italian government has 235 tonnes of spent fuel from the country's long decommissioned reactors in deteriorating stores. Contracts worth US$375 million are on offer to British Nuclear Fuels at Cumbria, northern England, to reprocess the nuclear fuel, provided the UK keeps the waste and the recovered plutonium and uranium.
■ United Kingdom
Pedophile confesses
A seaside face-painter who served as a school governor and foster parent led a double life as one of Britain's most prolific pedophiles. Glyn Martin, 53, kept a secret room full of images, cuttings and other material at his home in Bridlington against material from unsolved child murders because of the violence of some of his images. Martin initially refused to enter a plea, but then started shouting "I want to plead guilty, I'm sorry for wasting your time," after the case began. He then admitted to 57 counts of indecent assault, child abduction, indecency with children, administering a noxious substance, and taking indecent photographs.
■ United Kingdom
Toenails block appearance
Radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri failed to appear before a British court, complaining his toe nails were too long and he could not walk. Hamza, who is also wanted by the US over 11 alleged offenses, was charged by British police last year on 16 counts including one terror-related offense. He was to make an appearance via video-link from the high-security Belmarsh jail in London where he is being held. "Hamza has physical difficulties. He is unable to walk. He has been perambulating barefoot around the prison," said defense lawyer Peter Hynes. Prosecutor Adina Ekiel added: "He is complaining that his toenails are too long."
■ Jordan
Plot against tourists foiled
Jordan's General Intelligence Department has broken up a four-member terror cell that planned attacks against Israeli and US tourists visiting historical sites in the country. The four men, all of them Jordanians, were charged with "plotting to carry out acts of terrorism and the possession of automatic weapons." The four defendants, who embrace the Takfir thought, "talked about the need to kill Jews and US citizens who visit ancient places in the Jordan Valley, including the Baptism site."
■ United States
Freighter's salvage begins
Salvagers have begun removing oil from tanks on a freighter that broke apart last month off Alaska, spilling most of its estimated 1,673,103 liters of fuel onto the shoreline. A salvage team on Monday used a heavy-lift helicopter to remove three steel "retrieving cubes" loaded with diesel from the stern section of the Selendang Ayu. The 221m freighter ran aground and split in two Dec. 8 off Unalaska Island in the Aleutian chain. Cleanup crews on the island have collected more than 2,660 bags of oily waste so far. More than 600 oiled birds have been observed and 22 live birds captured for rehabilitation.
■ United States
Carter asked to stop fishing
A prominent US-based animal rights group urged former President Jimmy Carter on Monday to give up fishing on the grounds that the activity was inconsistent with the Nobel peace laureate's humanitarian efforts. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals made its appeal in a letter faxed to Carter's non-profit Carter Center on Monday. The group said the letter was prompted by Carter's recent appearance on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno. Carter, who served as president from 1977 to 1981 and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, told Leno of the pain he suffered when he accidentally hooked himself through the face on a fishing trip. "We're asking President Carter to ... grant fish peace by leaving them in the water where they belong," PETA said in a press release.
■ United States
HIV man charged for biting
A man who has said he is infected with HIV was charged with attempted murder Tuesday after the authorities said he bit officers and spit blood at them. The man, Robert Murray, 32, was found unfit to assist in his own defense, so the judge entered a plea of not guilty on his behalf. It was not clear whether Murray actually has the virus, and state laws prevented prosecutors from disclosing whether he had been tested, prosecutors said on Tuesday. The case began in April 2003, when Murray was arrested in East Harlem on charges of promoting prostitution.
■ United States
Sanctions for Syria mulled
The Bush administration is considering imposing new sanctions on Syria to prod it to crack down on Iraqis in Syria providing financial and logistical support to insurgents in Iraq, the New York Times reported yesterday. Citing senior anonymous US counter-terrorism officials, the newspaper said the Syrian government has not taken action against what the officials called a network of Iraqis, despite months of quiet US protests. The report said one step being considered is a treasury department action that could essentially isolate the Syrian banking system.
■ United States
Texan killed for killing
A condemned killer was executed for the fatal prison beating of a convicted child molester. James Porter, who dropped his appeals and ordered nothing be done to stop the first execution of the year in the nation's most active capital punishment state, apologized to relatives of his victims and expressed love for his family. Porter, 33, was sentenced to die for using a smuggled rock wrapped in a pillowcase to fatally beat prisoner Rudy Delgado, 40. Porter already was serving a 45-year term for the 1995 shooting death of a transient when he attacked Delgado in May 2000 at a prison near Texarkana.
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