■ Indonesia
Official caught buying drug
A top Indonesian religious affairs official was arrested for alleged possession of crystal methamphetamine, police said yesterday. Burhanuddin Mamasta, head of the religious affairs bureau at the ministerial-level state secretariat, was nabbed on Monday for allegedly buying the drug at a Jakarta nightspot, a city police spokesman said. Mamasta was travelling in a car with his 26-year-old date and a male friend when he slammed the vehicle into a police patrol car after trying to elude anti-narcotics policemen, the spokesman said.
■ China
Schooling receives boost
China will spend 218 billion yuan (US$27 billion) on rural education over the next five years, part of a drive to improve schooling in the countryside and narrow the gap with booming coast areas. The fund would be jointly provided by central and local governments, after the decision by China's State Council, a report said. Currently, rural schools owe their teachers more than 10 billion yuan in back pay, and failure to pay teachers salaries has resulted in a severe shortage of qualified teachers in the countryside.
■ South Korea
Indicted by phone
Prosecutors will start telling people they have been indicted via text messages, an official said on Monday. In a country where about 75 percent of the population carries mobile phones, prosecutors felt it was time to move away from sending legal notices on paper and send them electronically instead, said Lee Young-pyo, an administrative official. The indictments by text messages are not intended to take people by surprise. "People will receive a text message of a legal notice only after they apply for the service," he said.
■ Italy
Man sues train company
A commuter who says that repeated delays on the Italian rail network are making his life a misery is planning to sue the train company for allegedly causing him "existential damage." Mauro Brunetti, a teacher who travels by rail every day to his job in a school in Savona, says he is so exasperated by the constant uncertainty of whether his train will arrive on time that he sometimes wonders if his life has any value or meaning. The failings of local train services have been making his life impossible and affecting his sense of self, he said. While researching recent court cases, he found references to people sustaining "existential damage" as a result of the behavior of another person or legal entity and he decided he could apply the same arguments to Trenitalia, the national rail group.
■ Germany
Thief busted at police party
Police in Berlin made their easiest arrest of the year at their annual Christmas party, after spotting a man rummaging through the pockets of their coats in the cloakroom. Officers of the Federal Police criminal investigations unit said the unlucky pickpocket had not known that the revelers in a Berlin brewery were law enforcers. "He was definitely surprised," said a police spokesman in Berlin. "He did not realize who he was dealing with." Confronted with 35 officers, the 45-year-old Albanian, who police said held a forged passport and was wanted for other offences, offered no resistance.
■ United Kingdom
Ambassador goofs again
The US embassy in London was forced to issue a correction on Monday to an interview given by the ambassador, Robert Tuttle, in which he claimed the US would not fly suspected terrorists to Syria, which has one of the worst torture records in the Middle East. A statement acknowledged media reports of a suspect taken from the US to Syria. Torture is banned in the US but the CIA has been engaged in a policy of rendition, flying terrorist suspects to countries in the Middle East and other parts of the world where torture is commonplace.
■ France
Village inherits fortune
Inhabitants of a small village in northwest France were on Monday debating how to spend a fortune left to it by one of its sons who made his money on the other side of the world. Jean Kerfers died earlier this year at Noumea in the Pacific Ocean archipelago of New Caledonia. He had left the village after World War II to work in Australia. He was 80 and childless and his remains were buried in Noumea. He bequeathed to his native village of Mael-Crahaix, population 1,580, in the middle of Brittany a legacy of 1.4 million euros (US$1.65 million).
■ France
Army faces genocide probe
The French army has been put under official investigation on charges of having taken part in the Rwandan genocide. Despite official attempts to block the move, a military court is to look into claims that soldiers serving as part of Operation Turquoise in Rwanda not only failed to stop the killing but participated in the slaughter of about 800,000 people. Six Rwandans who survived the 1994 genocide have brought the claim of "complicity to genocide and/or crimes against humanity" against French forces. The military court dismissed four of them but is focusing on the cases of two Rwandans.
■ United States
Surfer's punch deters shark
A surfer saved his leg -- and possibly his life -- when he punched a great white shark that had latched onto him in the nose, ABC news reported on Monday. Brian Anderson, 31, was surfing on Saturday off the coast of the northwestern state of Oregon when he felt something grab his leg. Anderson turned around and punched the shark in the nose. "I acted on instinct," Anderson told ABC news. The shark let go, and despite losing blood Anderson made it back to shore, where he tied his wound as he waited for an ambulance. "I wanted to get to shore as soon as I could. The thought crossed my mind that I might not make it back in," he told ABC. Anderson, who is in the hospital and is expected to fully recover, said he learned about sharks from television shows. "I'll go back out, eventually," he said, adding: "It probably will be awhile."
■ United States
Thieves take man for a ride
Two women suspected of shoplifting at a Kmart store had their getaway foiled by a man who clung to their car's windshield wipers as they sped away. Michael Cornwell, 30, his fiancee and his mother were going into a Kmart about 10:30pm on Friday when two women ran from the store chased by employees. Cornwell stepped in front of their car and told the women to stop. After he ignored the driver's demand to move, the driver bumped Cornwell twice with the car before he jumped on the hood and she accelerated, according to police. "I was just hanging on for dear life," Cornwall said. He said he hung on for about 1.6km -- at what he estimated to be 113kph-129 kph -- before the driver pulled into a mobile home park and the women fled. The suspects were arrested and charged with aggravated robbery, felonious assault and theft.
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