■ Hong Kong
Woman jailed over rape
A 29-year-old Hong Kong woman has been jailed for two years for drugging and indecently assaulting another woman and allowing a male friend to rape her, a news report said yesterday. Lau Hiu-kwan befriended the 37-year-old woman and invited her to her flat where she spiked her drink with potent drugs, the Sunday Morning Post reported. She then called a 49-year-old male friend, Leung Hiu-sang, to her apartment and the pair indecently assaulted and raped the woman while she lay unconscious, the newspaper said. Lau was jailed for two years for indecent assault at a hearing in the High Court on Saturday, while Leung was jailed for six years for rape.
■ China
Crackdown on sperm, eggs
Beijing has banned the sale of human eggs and tightened rules for sperm banks to boost control over the nation's rapidly expanding fertility business, state media said yesterday. The health ministry had outlawed "egg donation and supply for commercial purposes," the Xinhua news agency reported. In a circular the ministry had also restricted the use of one donor's sperm to impregnate a maximum of five women and banned the supply of sperm to unauthorized institutions, it said. As of March 31, 64 institutions were authorized to offer fertility treatment for childless couples, while seven institutions had established sperm banks, Xinhua said. Figures were not immediately available but the fertility business seems to be expanding fast and sperm banks have had problems getting supplies that are of sufficient quality. Scientific research shows that overall sperm density among Chinese males has dropped by about 40 percent over the past half century.
■ Kazakhstan
Brazilian astronaut returns
Brazil's first astronaut landed safely in the Kazakh steppe yesterday, returning from a 10-day trip in space with a Russian-US crew that spent six months on board the International Space Station. Marcos Pontes, a 43-year-old Brazilian Air Force pilot, fulfilled a childhood dream in becoming the first Brazilian in space. He returned to Earth with American Bill McArthur and Russian Valery Tokarev on board the Soyuz capsule. The crew were pulled from their cramped capsule and allowed to rest in special chairs, swaddled in animal skins and blankets to fend off the early morning chill as they breathed their first fresh air and sipped hot tea. "I am very happy," Pontes said. "I want to say: thank you for everything."
■ Pakistan
Stampede kills at least 26
At least 26 women and children were suffocated or crushed to death yesterday in a stampede at a religious gathering in Karachi, police and doctors said. More than 70 others were injured. City police chief Niaz Siddiqui said some 50,000 women and children had gathered for a ceremony to commemorate the birth anniversary of the Prophet Mohammad at a Sunni Muslim center. Most of the deaths were caused by internal injuries and suffocation, said Dr. Simi Jamali of the state-run Jinnah Post-Graduate Medical Center, which received seven bodies and more than 30 of the injured.
■ Afghanistan
Bombings wound eleven
Six security forces and five civilians were wounded yesterday in twin roadside bomb attacks aimed at an Afghan army convoy in Kandahar, officials said. A remote-controlled bomb was detonated in the center of the city as five-vehicle army convoy was passing, army officer Khair Mohammad said. One Afghan soldier was wounded, he said. As police and soldiers rushed to the site of the blast, a second bomb went off on the opposite side of the road wounding two more soldiers, two police and two civilians, a district police chief said.
■ Australia
Seeing seer a no-no
A federal police officer has been suspended for consulting a clairvoyant as part of an investigation into a death threat made to Prime Minister John Howard, the Sunday Age reported yesterday. The newspaper reported that the officer reportedly consulted clairvoyant Elizabeth Walker after inquiries into the threat to Howard hit a dead end. An Australian Federal Police spokesman confirmed that the officer was under investigation, the paper said. Details of the threat to Howard were not released.
■ Cambodia
Arms smugglers indicted
Three men have been charged with smuggling shoulder-launched anti-tank missiles, a court official said yesterday. "We charged them and the investigation is underway," a Phnom Penh municipal court prosecutor said after the trio was arrested last week in a village near the capital. The country has been accused of being a major source of illegal arms sold to rebel groups across Asia, including Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers. Prime Minister Hun Sen admitted last year that weapons from the country's vast arsenals were being sold illegally to regional militant groups.
■ Denmark
Cartoon hangover lingers
Violent protests over Prophet Mohammed cartoons have died down in the Muslim world but in Denmark, where the drawings were first printed, debate over the role of Islam has flared again, this time over a TV talk show host who wears a Muslim headscarf. Asmaa Abdol-Hamid, a 24-year-old Dane of Palestinian origin, is the co-host of an eight-part series on the public DR2 network on the fallout of the cartoons affair which led to violent reactions throughout the Muslim world. Asmaa's appearance on television -- the first time a female TV host has worn a headscarf in the country -- has led to a flurry of negative reactions from viewers and feminist groups.
■ Turkey
Hostage takers surrender
Two men armed with air pistols who took an employee and a customer hostage in a fast food outlet in central Istanbul on Saturday have freed their captives and given themselves up peacefully to police, a photographer at the scene reported. The men, aged around 25, were wearing identical T-shirts in the colors of the Turkish flag with "Turkey" blazoned across them. They shouted "We are Turks" and "They are killing our soldiers" before handing themselves over to the large police force that had surrounded the building in the city's Taksim district. They were thought to have been referring to the deaths of several members of the Turkish security forces in recent clashes with Kurdish militants.
■ France
Decision on youth law today
President Jacques Chirac will meet his embattled prime minister and other members of the ruling party today to finalize new proposals to end the political crisis over a youth job law. Opposition and student groups want the government to drop an unpopular "hire and fire" part of the legislation, after leading weeks of protests and strikes that have shut down schools and universities and sometimes ended in violence. Chirac, who signed the measures into law but said they must be changed soon, handed the task of agreeing new proposals with critics to parliamentary members of the ruling UMP party.
■ Djibouti
More bodies found
Rescuers found 37 more bodies on Saturday from an overloaded boat that sank two days ago, bringing the death toll to 109 in one of the Red Sea nation's worst disasters, officials said. The bodies were pulled out of the water near the port, where the wooden boat capsized on Thursday carrying some 250 people to an annual religious pilgrimage. "We got these bodies because the water is calm," said Colonel Zachariah Ahmed Sheikh, a army officer in charge of the rescue. Hospital officials had earlier said 41 bodies had been found, but later revised that down to 37.
■ United Kingdom
Law lax on pedophiles
Ministers are preparing tough new measures against sex tourism to close legal loopholes that pedophiles are exploiting in order to abuse children abroad. The crackdown is intended to combat the growing trend of sexual predators traveling to parts of Europe to prey on young people, rather than established centers of child prostitution such as south east Asia, because they stand less chance of getting caught in Europe. The Home Office, Britain's interior ministry, has privately accepted that existing legislation intended to thwart traveling sex offenders is inadequate.
■ United States
Prison nixes `Brokeback'
A Massachusetts correctional officer is being disciplined for showing the gay cowboy movie Brokeback Mountain to inmates at the state's largest prison because his boss determined that the film includes content inappropriate for a prison setting. Massachusetts Department of Correction spokeswoman Diane Wiffin said on Saturday that the action was not related to the critically acclaimed film's plot involving a gay love affair. "It was not the subject matter. It was the graphic nature of sexually explicit scenes," Wiffin said.
■ Venezuela
Six arrested in slaying case
Venezuelan authorities have arrested six suspects in the killing of an Italian-born businessmen and are investigating whether his kidnappers might have sought to sell him to hostage-takers in Colombia, an official said on Saturday. Filippo Sindoni, 74, was kidnapped on March 28 by men dressed as police officers who stopped his car at a checkpoint. Sindoni was shot in the head, and his body was found a day later. Justice Minister Jesse Chacon said on Saturday that the six arrested in the past several days include a police officer, an ex-police officer, and four others including, a Portuguese man and his two younger Venezuelan brothers-in-law of Portuguese descent.
■ Chile
Fujimori's wife makes visit
Former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori's new Japanese wife visited him in jail here on Saturday, their first reunion since tying the knot by proxy earlier this week, sources close to the bride said. Japanese businesswoman Satomi Kataoka, 39, arrived on Saturday in Chile, where Fujimori, 67, has been jailed since November awaiting extradition to Peru for a list of crimes allegedly committed during his 1990-2000 presidency. Representatives filed marriage registration papers in Japan on behalf of the couple, who met during his five years of exile in Tokyo, Japanese press reports said on Wednesday.
■ Colombia
Second bombing victim dies
A 10-year-old boy who died of severe burns on Saturday became the second fatality of a fire bomb attack on two Bogota buses that is being blamed on Marxist rebels, hospital officials said. Thursday's bombings of the packed buses in a working-class district of the capital also killed an 11-year-old boy and injured more than 20 people, many of them children. The attack has outraged the country. On Friday schoolmates of the dead and wounded children marched in the rain through the Ingles neighborhood to protest the bombings, which police said were the work of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
■ United States
More tornadoes hit southeast
More tornadoes struck the southeastern US on Saturday but no fatalities were immediately reported, after the same storm front was blamed for at least 12 deaths a day earlier. The storms killed nine people late on Friday in one county in central Tennessee near Nashville, and caused three more deaths in another community in the same part of the state. The storms spawned more twisters and caused significant damage as they moved east on Saturday through Georgia. No new fatalities were reported by late Saturday. Cleanup began on Saturday in Tennessee, where the worst-hit communities were under nighttime curfews, with the state governor calling out National Guard troops.
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
‘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