■ 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.
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
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing