■ Singapore
Tsunami survivor dies in fall
A British expatriate who escaped the killer tsunami while holidaying in Thailand was killed in a rock-climbing accident in Singapore three weeks later, news reports said yesterday. James Richard Creffield, 39, was climbing with friends at a quarry when he fell, suffering injuries to the back of his head and bleeding heavily, The Straits Times reported. He was taken to the National University Hospital after the fall on Saturday but died later. Creffield and his wife, Singaporean Geetha Creffield, spent the Christmas holidays in Krabi, Thailand, and were at the resort when the Dec. 26 tsunami hit.
■ Hong Kong
Nude colony planned
Nudists in Hong Kong are asking for permission to take over a deserted outlying island to open the territory's first naturist colony, a news report said yesterday. The nudists want to use one of the tiny deserted islands off the east coast of Hong Kong's rural New Territories to set up the colony to avoid upsetting residents. A holiday villa and areas for barbecues, swimming, hiking, yoga, boating and photography would be set up on the island, according to the South China Morning Post. The president of one nudist group, the Body Arts Association, Simon Cheung, told the newspaper: "Anyone who comes to the island has to strip off completely."
■ Thailand
Death row show nixed
The justice ministry has pulled the plug on a project by the corrections department to broadcast the daily lives of inmates on death row, media reports said yesterday. Natthee Jitsawang of the Corrections Department recently proposed installing Web cams in the cells of 65 inmates currently on death row and broadcasting their somewhat dreary daily lives on the department's Web site as a means of deterring crime. Natthee said the Web site would stop short of broadcasting live executions. But the Justice Ministry on Monday scotched Natthee's death row reality show on the grounds that it would violate prisoners' rights.
■ Australia
Police probing Nazi claims
Police are investigating claims that an Australian retiree was a Hungarian Nazi soldier during World War II who murdered a Jewish man in Budapest in 1944, the government said Tuesday. Charles Zentai, who is 86 and lives in Perth, is already the subject of an investigation by Hungary's Foreign Ministry. Also, the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, which tracks down suspected Holocaust war criminals, says it has extensive evidence against him. Australia's Federal Police, which evaluated details of the allegation last month, decided they warranted formal investigation, said Attorney General Philip Ruddock.
■ New Zealand
Runaway dad surrenders
A man who has been on the run for 10 days with his five-month-old baby daughter in a custody battle with her mother gave himself up to police yesterday. Stephen Jelicich, 39, who had defied a court order to return baby Caitlin to his estranged wife, surrendered to two plainclothes officers at Kumeu, near Auckland, but was not charged with any offence, the TV3 channel reported. Jelicich's ageing father told the channel he and his wife were looking after the baby, who was safe and well. Jelicich, who has told local media that he took the baby because he did not think his wife Diane, 40, was a fit parent, said earlier he wanted a new court hearing to rule who should look after Caitlin.
■ Germany
Nazis killed Hitler relative
A second cousin of Adolf Hitler was one of the victims of the Nazi euthanasia program, new research revealed on Monday has shown. Aloisia V, who had spent many years in a secure psychiatric center, was murdered in the gas chambers of the Hartheim Institute near Linz in Austria in December 1940. She was 49 at the time, only two years younger than Hitler. The fate of Hitler's second cousin has come to light after study of previously unknown Nazi documents by the Institute for Forensic Medicine in Munich and the Ober-salzberg Institute for contemporary history at Berchtesgaden.
■ United States
Bush honors Powell
US President George W. Bush paid tribute to outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell on Monday to mark the annual holiday cele-brating civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr King, the minister widely credited with leading the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, was gunned down in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968, when Powell was an up-and-coming officer in the US Army. Powell, whose immigrant parents were born in Jamaica and who grew up in New York's tough inner city, rose through the US military to become the country's top general and eventually the first black secretary of state. Bush credited Powell for his drive to be the best at his profession regardless of race and for helping rally the world in the war on terrorism. In his decades of service, Powell has worked "tirelessly" to confronting poverty, hunger and disease, Bush said. "I appreciate all he has done for our wonderful country," Bush said.
■ Australia
Bad year for journalists
The war in Iraq and lawlessness in the Philippines helped make 2004 the deadliest year on record for media profes-sionals, an industry association said yesterday. The International Fede-ration of Journalists (IFJ) said last year saw 129 journalists and media staff were killed in the course of reporting. IFJ president Christopher Warren said Iraq was the most dangerous country for journalists with 19 media staff losing their lives there. The Philippines recorded 13 casualties, most related to investigations into drug trafficking, corruption and organized crime. Warren, who is also the federal secretary of Australia's Media Enter-tainment and Arts Alliance, said that for all the journalists that had died there had been hundreds of journalists put in dangerous situations.
■ Iraq
Expats register to vote
Expatriate Iraqis across the world on Monday began registering for their country's first democratic elections in 35 years, due to be held on Jan. 30. Tens of thousands signed at about 150 registration offices in 14 countries, among them Australia, the UK, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Iran, Jordan, Holland, Sweden, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, the US and Turkey. Iraqis in Eastern Europe were planning on travelling to Germany to cast ballots. A total of 1.2 million Iraqis abroad were expected to register for the polls, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which was asked to coordinate the expatriate vote. But the total number of planned absentee ballots could only be known with certainty once the seven-day period for registration is over on Sunday, the IOM said.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not