■ Japan
Girls get more sex than boys
More Japanese high school girls are having sex than boys, even though girls express more regret about losing their virginity, a survey found. Some 39 percent of girls and 30 percent of boys in their final year of high school said they had had sex, according to a survey of some 10,000 high school students by a federation of parent-teacher associations. Among students in their first year of high school, which has three years in Japan, 15 percent of girls and 12 percent of boys had had sex, the survey said. While nearly 60 percent of boys said they were "glad with the experience," only 40 percent of girls responded positively, it said.
■ China
Six die in drug-fiend attack
Two more children have died from their injuries in an attack by a knife-wielding drug addict at an ice skating rink in northwestern China, bringing the death toll to six, a police spokesman and state media said yesterday. An additional eight people were in a hospital recovering from injuries sustained in Sunday's attack, according to the Urumqi Evening News, published in the capital of the Xinjiang region where the attack occurred. Victims were from ages 9 to 15, according to reports and a police spokesman. The attacker committed suicide by jumping from a third-story window at the rink, located in a shopping center in Shanshan County.
■ Hong Kong
License plate fetches millions
A mystery man in a surgical mask and cap bought the most expensive car license plate sold in Hong Kong since 1997, paying HK$7.1 million (US$910,000), a Hong Kong newspaper said yesterday. The winner, who bought the plate number 12 -- which sounds like "certainly easy" in Cantonese -- left immediately after the weekend auction without identifying himself, the South China Morning Post said. The license plate was the third-highest price paid in the city's history. The record for the most expensive plate is held by local tycoon Albert Yeung, who bought number nine -- which sounds like "forever" in Cantonese -- in 1994 for HK$13 million.
■ Japan
Police seize ecstasy stash
Police arrested four men and seized more than 286,000 tablets of ecstasy, a National Police Agency spokesman said yesterday, in what was reported to be the country's single largest haul ever of the popular party drug. Masakazu Saito, 52, Shinji Miyamoto, 44, Toshimi Ito, 54, and Toshiharu Ishibashi, 41, were arrested this month on suspicion of violating drug control laws and led police to the stash. The tablets had an estimated street value of about US$10.83 million. The haul equals more than two-thirds the total quantity of ecstasy seized in Japan last year, when authorities seized a record high 429,000 tablets, mostly smuggled from the Netherlands and France. Separately, police also found 75kg of liquid amphetamine in the drug bust.
■ Hong Kong
Activists plan protests
About 200 anti-globalization activists from around the world will meet in Hong Kong this weekend to plot their strategy for protests at the coming WTO meeting to be held here in December, an activist said yesterday. About 120 people from overseas groups representing labor, peasants, indigenous people and women's rights advocates will join 80 local counterparts for a two-day conference starting on Sunday, said Apo Leong, an officer at the Hong Kong People's Alliance on the WTO.
■ South Africa
Bride, groom bust criminals
A South African couple working in the police force arrived late for their wedding after chasing and arresting three carjackers who they saw en route to church, a daily said yesterday. Inspector Gustav Myburgh, 27, and constable Barbara Boegner, 25, were being driven to their wedding reception on Saturday in northern Johannesburg when they saw three armed men holding up a motorist, The Star said. Police spokesman Eugene Opperman said: "They had to make a difficult decision -- to engage the armed robbers or to carry on what they were supposed to do, get married on time."
■ Portugal
Opposition wins majority
Portugal's opposition Socialists scored their biggest electoral win, giving Prime Minister-elect Jose Socrates an absolute parliamentary majority to implement plans to kick-start growth in Western Europe's poorest country. The Socialists won 120 of the 230 seats in parliament in a general election on Sunday, the first time any party has held an outright majority for a decade, and their victory was endorsed by a large voter turnout. Socrates, who ousted center-right Prime Minister Pedro Santana Lopes, said he wanted Portugal's fourth government in three years to restore confidence to the country, where unemployment hit a seven-year high of 7.1 percent last year.
■ Italy
Four dead in shootout
Four people, two of them police, died early yesterday in a shootout near the northern Italian city of Verona when officers tried to stop an apparent armed robbery, officials said. They said the shooting occurred on the road from Verona to Brescia when a police patrol came to the rescue of a prostitute who was being attacked by an armed robber in an attempt to steal her money. The man opened fire on the two policemen, who returned the shots. All four people involved in the incident died.
■ United Kingdom
Robot sub lost in Antarctica
Lost: much loved robot submarine, last seen under 200m of Antarctic ice last Wednesday, answers to the name Autosub -- reward. The ?1.5 million (US$2.8 million) British unmanned research sub was investigating the waters below the Fimbul ice shelf when it became trapped. Scientists don't know what went wrong, but say the submarine is stuck and unlikely to be recovered. Gwyn Griffiths, an ocean engineer at the UK's Southampton Oceanography Center who helped to design Autosub, said: "It isn't going to come back. We've lived with this vehicle for eight years and it's done 382 missions. But every time we put it out there's a chance it isn't going to return. It was sort of inevitable."
■ Poland
Coptic books found
A team of Polish archaeologists has unearthed two ancient Coptic Christian tomes, made of leather-bound papyrus which could prove to be the oldest-known Coptic texts. Warsaw University archaeologist Tomasz Gorecki discovered the tomes in an ancient rubbish tip of a 5th to 9th Century AD Coptic seminary near Luxor, Egypt, the Polish PAP news agency reported Sunday. According to leading Polish archaeologist Zbigniew Szafranski the tomes are a "major discovery" and are most likely among the most ancient existing Coptic artefacts.
■ United States
Muon may replace X-rays
Cosmic ray detectors, already used to look into the great Cheops pyramid in Egypt, may be enlisted to peer into cargo holds in a bid to prevent possible terror attacks as well as other uses, scientists said. The detectors read muon particles, which are more powerful than gamma or so-called X-rays. They would peek into the millions of shipping containers entering the US by air, ship and land, to detect even nuclear materials wrapped in lead, physicist Chris Morris of Los Alamos National Laboratory said. And, he said, the muon rays represent no additional risk.
■ Venezuela
Chavez threatens oil cut
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez threatened Sunday to suspend oil exports to the US if someone tries to assassinate him, adding that US President George W. Bush would be to blame. "If they kill me, there will be a really guilty party on this planet whose name is the president of the United States, George Bush," Chavez said on his weekly radio program, Hello, Mr. President. "If, by the hand of the devil, those perverse plans succeed ... forget about Venezuelan oil, Mr. Bush," he said. Venezuela is the only Latin American member of OPEC, and sells about 1.5 million barrels daily to the US, nearly as much as Saudi Arabia.
■ Mexico
PRI likely to win
Early election results strongly favored Mexico's former ruling party as it battled to hold on to the governor's seat in the small, central state of Hidalgo on Sunday. With 42 percent of votes counted in Hidalgo, Miguel Angel Osorio, a candidate supported both by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and Mexico's small Green Party, had 53 percent of the vote. He was trailed by Jose Guadarrama, a professor, former senator and member of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, with 28 percent, and Jose Antonio Haghenbeck, a surgeon and member of President Vicente Fox's conservative National Action Party, with 11 percent.
■ United States
Man kills family, self
A man burst into a trailer home and shot to death his two children, his estranged wife and her boyfriend before killing himself along a road in southern Indiana. Arthur Lee Smith, 36, entered the home his estranged wife shared with her boyfriend and shot both of them in the head, police said. Smith then entered a bedroom and shot his and his wife's two children, ages 4 and 5. Minutes after a neighbor reported the gunfire to police, an officer confronted Smith, who was walking along a roadway, telling him to stop. "He just kept on walking and then pulled out a 9mm Luger pistol, put it to his head and killed himself," said police.
■ United States
Man survives crash
Rescuers trudging through waist-deep snow to the site of a plane crash in a Colorado canyon found the pilot sitting outside a snow shelter he had built and named "Motel 6" after the motel chain. Scott Thurner, 57, was the only person aboard the Cessna when it crashed, and survived the accident with only minor bruises. Thurner dug a shelter in a snow bank and used a door from the twisted wreckage of his plane for a roof. He started a fire with papers from his briefcase and donned all the ski clothes in his suitcase. The team located Thurner by following signals from the plane's emergency beacon, for which Thurner fashioned a makeshift antenna. A military satellite picked up the signals; then the Montrose County sheriff launched a search and rescue team.
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