■ Australia
E Timor Peacekeepers leave
The last of Australia's peacekeeping forces departed East Timor yesterday, ending a six-year operation in which up to 5,000 soldiers were deployed to the newly independent nation. The troops were sent as part of a UN peacekeeping force after East Timor voted to break free from Indonesia in 1999, triggering a wave of violence by Indonesian troops and their proxy militias in which about 1,500 people were killed and 300,000 left homeless. East Timorese government officials bid farewell to the remaining 14 Australian troops, who boarded a UN flight in Dili early yesterday. Australia's national commander for East Timor said it was now time for East Timor to turn its focus to nation-building.
■ India
Police, rebels in gun battle
Security forces fought rebels in a fierce, all-night gunbattle ending yesterday near India's border with Nepal, leaving 21 dead in the first coordinated attack involving both Indian and Nepalese communist militants. The gunbattle was triggered when some 400 suspected Maoist rebels attacked a police station and two state-run banks in Bihar state's Madhuban village on Thursday. Surprise assaults are a favorite mode of attack of Nepal's Maoist rebels, who are known to often use villagers as human shields.
■ India
Dancing girls win ban delay
Tens of thousands of dancing girls in India's financial and film capital of Mumbai have won a delay against a government decision to close down bars where they work. The state governor has refused to approve the move for now. The state government wants to close the bars because it says they corrupt local youth and are a front for prostitution and organized crime. About 75,000 women work in the bars, along with another 75,000 waiters, bouncers, cooks and cleaners. The women wear relatively modest saris as they dance to Bollywood hits and customers give them cash. Men are not allowed to touch the dancers. Thousands of dancers and other bar workers took to the streets against the ban, saying they couldn't find other jobs, and have launched a court challenge.
■ Thailand
Energy cutbacks urged
Thai television and radio stations have been asked to stop broadcasting at midnight as part of a series of government-urged energy-saving measures to combat soaring oil prices, rising inflation and falling economic output. Government offices should raise the temperature at which the air conditioning kicks in to 25?C and turn the systems off between 4pm and 9am and for an hour at lunchtime; employees should take jackets off at work; golf courses should switch off unnecessary lights; and people should use their cars less at weekends.
■ Romania
Priest, four nuns defrocked
A priest and four nuns accused of the crucifixion murder of a nun because she was "a spy of the devil" were placed in police custody on Thursday and banished by their religious order. The court of Vaslui issued arrest warrants on Thursday for priest Daniel Corogeanu, 29, and four nuns, who had been detained on Wednesday. The prosecutor told the court the four nuns had claimed full responsibility for the death of Maricica Irina Cornici, 23, and said they had acted of their own free will and without the knowledge of Corogeanu. The five face charges of illegal confinement and murder.
■ Egypt
Police called over exam
An algebra question on the year-end exam for Egyptian secondary students proved so difficult for one Cairo student that his father submitted a complaint against the minister of education to police, a newspaper reported on Thursday. The father contended that the question was outside the curriculum and was posed incorrectly, thereby harming his son's psychological state during the test, said a report published by Al-Gomhouriya. Submitting complaints to police against officials is a common practice in Egypt. Although such complaints are rarely followed up, the channel remains a popular one for people to vent frustration at the government.
■ Aruba
Suspect's father arrested
Police arrested the father of a young Dutch teen already in custody in connection with the disappearance of a young American woman, and said he was considered a suspect in the three-week-old case. Paul van der Sloot, 52, a judge in training, became the fifth person detained, joining Joran van der Sloot, 17, and three other young men. No one has been charged. The elder van der Sloot "is a suspect in the disappearance" of 18-year-old Natalee Holloway, said Mariaine Croes, spokeswoman for the Attorney General's office on the Caribbean island, which is a Dutch protectorate. Paul van der Sloot was arrested after he and his wife left the San Nicolas prison where Joran was being held, his wife said.
■ Germany
Ancient body on display
The remains of a young woman recovered from a peat bog and dated to about 650BC went on display at a German museum on Thursday, five years after they were discovered. The remains were found in 2000 after accidentally being cut into about 100 pieces by a machine harvesting peat from a bog near the western German city of Hanover. Police initially suspected the corpse was that of a woman reported missing in the 1960s, but announced earlier this week that it was in fact an archeological find. Some of the remains of the woman, believed to have died between ages 16 and 20, went on show in a branch of the Lower Saxony State Museum in Hanover for several weeks.
■ Germany
Cash boost for universities
Germany earmarked more than US$2 billion over six years on Thursday to reinvigorate its stagnating university system with a program aimed at creating rivals to top institutions such as Harvard and Oxford. The federal and state governments reached the deal after months of wrangling. The extra funding finally received the backing of the country's powerful state premiers, who are in charge of education.
■ Colombia
Rumors draw cash hunters
Scores of people are flocking to Colombia's southern Caguan jungle region hunting for treasure after rumors that a leftist guerrilla fighter had buried a huge amount of money there before she was captured. The Colombian army has said that Nayibe Rojas, or "Sonia", the suspected finance chief for the southern bloc of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, hid large amounts of Colombian currency and US dollars prior to her capture early last year. Sonia was extradited to the US to face narcotics trafficking charges there. She reportedly hid most of the cash in or around Penas Coloradas, a small community in Caqueta.
■ Lebanon
Thousand march for funeral
Thousands of people marched in Beirut yesterday behind the coffin of a slain anti-Syrian politician whose assassination this week intensified calls for President Emile Lahoud to step down. Some 10,000 people took part in the somber funeral procession for George Hawi, a former leader of the Lebanese Communist Party and long-time critic of Syria's role in Lebanon, who was killed on Tuesday by a car bomb. Nationalist songs and recordings of Hawi speeches blared from loudspeakers as the crowd, holding red-white-and-green Lebanese flags and red Communist flags, walked silently behind the hearse as the cortege headed to a church in central Beirut.
■ United States
`Big Joey' sent to jail
Joseph "Big Joey" Massino, head of the Bonnano crime family and the last of New York's legendary Mafia dons, was sentenced to life imprisonment on Thursday for his role in eight murders. While known for his old-school style of mob management, Massino's most enduring legacy will be as a top-ranking Mafia turncoat. After his conviction last year of seven murders, Massino stunned the organized-crime world by agreeing to co-operate with federal officials -- the first official boss of one of New York's five major crime families to do so. On Thursday, Massino pled guilty to ordering another murder -- that of Bonnano family captain, Gerlando "George from Canada" Sciascia, in 1999.
■ Germany
Nazi suspects in new probe
Authorities reopened investigations into 14 Nazi war-crimes suspects on Thursday, a day after a military court in Italy sentenced 10 of them to life imprisonment in absentia. The defendants, all in their 80s and in Germany, were also sentenced to pay legal costs. The Stuttgart probe involves nine of those 10 convicted men, plus five others. The massacre in Sant'Anna di Stazzema on Aug. 12, 1944, was perpetrated by SS officers of the "Reichsfuhrer" tank division. Most of the victims were women, children and elderly people.
■ Italy
`Playboy' PM irks Finns
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has put his foot in it again, this time with the Finnish President Tarja Halonen over the EU's food-standards agency. Berlusconi said he persuaded Halonen that the agency should be based in Italy, and suggested that he had flirted and charmed her into making the decision. "When you seek a result it is necessary to use all available weapons and therefore I brushed up all my playboy skills and I used a series of tender pleas to the president," Berlusconi said. He then made a derogatory remark about food in Finland, singling out smoked herring.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese