■ 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.
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
CARTEL ARRESTS: The president said that a US government operation to arrest two cartel members made it jointly responsible for the unrest in the state’s capital Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday blamed the US in part for a surge in cartel violence in the northern state of Sinaloa that has left at least 30 people dead in the past week. Two warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel have clashed in the state capital of Culiacan in what appears to be a fight for power after two of its leaders were arrested in the US in late July. Teams of gunmen have shot at each other and the security forces. Meanwhile, dead bodies continued to be found across the city. On one busy street corner, cars drove
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to