■ China
Shenzhen goes solar
The southern boomtown of Shenzhen has set an example for power-hungry cities in energy saving by mandating the use of solar power in new housing construction, state media reported yesterday. The law, the first of its kind, will require all new residential buildings with fewer than 12 floors to install solar powered water heating systems, the China Daily reported. Taller buildings have been exempted due to technological limitations that cannot guarantee 24-hour hot water supply, it said.
■ China
Wolves starving to death
Two Arctic wolves, the first China has imported, have refused to eat since their arrival at a zoo last week, putting the endangered animals' health at risk, state media said yesterday. The wolves have snubbed dishes of beef, pork, fruit and vegetables offered to them since their arrival from Canada on Aug. 3 at the Zoo for Polar Animals in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, Xinhua news agency said. They appeared to be starving themselves and had consumed nothing but water since their arrival, Xinhua said, adding experts were perplexed.
■ Hong Kong
Living gets cheaper
Three years ago Hong Kong was ranked as the second most expensive place to live, but three years later falls in the cost of living have pushed the city into 27th place, a media report said yesterday. Oslo, the Norwegian capital, remained the most expensive location out of a survey of 71 cities by investment bank UBS, the South China Morning Post said. The survey excluded rent from its calculations.?
■ India
Boy's eye gouged out
A 10-year-old boy was attacked and his eye gouged out by men in Bihar state after his parents refused to vote for a candidate in local elections, news reports said yesterday. A group of men gouged out the boy's left eye with a scythe earlier this week after his parents refused to vote for their chosen candidate in a village-body election in Bihar's Begusarai district, NDTV television channel reported quoting police officials. "They pierced my son's eye because I did not vote for their candidate. They had threatened me not to vote for the candidate I had chosen," said Jago Devi, the boy's mother. The boy was out alone with his grazing cattle when the incident occurred, police said.
■ India
Militants kill three
Suspected Islamic militants killed three members of a Hindu family living in a village near the Himalayan frontier dividing India and Pakistan, police said yesterday. The militants entered the family's home in the village of Arra in Indian Kashmir's Udhampur district and fatally shot a woman and two children as they slept, said Police Inspector General S.P. Vaid. Arra is a predominantly Muslim village, 210km northwest of Jammu, the winter capital of India's Jammu-Kashmir state.
■ Indonesia
Doctors mull baby's options
Doctors said on Thursday they were unsure whether they would be able to operate on a two-headed baby, who was born earlier this week. The medical team at the Pelni Petamburan Hospital in Jakarta is still deciding how to treat the baby, said hospital spokeswoman Dyah Purwanti. The baby girl was born after a Cesarean operation on Aug. 8 "in a healthy condition ... and with complete organs" said Purwanti. The newborn -- officially called a dicephalus baby -- was formed the same way as Siamese twins but only has one body, one set of organs and two arms and legs, doctors said. Several pairs of Siamese twins born in Indonesia have undergone successful separation.
■ Japan
Man calls `kind' operators
A Japanese man was arrested this week after making 37,760 silent calls to directory inquiries because he wanted to listen to the "kind" voices of female telephone operators. The 44-year-old has admitted to allegations of obstructing the operations of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp by making up to 905 calls a day from his mobile phone, the daily Mainichi Shimbun said on its Web site. "When I made a complaint call once, the operator dealt with it very kindly, so I wanted to hear these women's voices," the paper quoted him as telling police in Hiroshima, western Japan. Police believe the calls, made between March and July this year, caused distress to more than 100 operators.
■ Australia
Pedophile sentenced
A pedophile who tried to revive a boy with a makeshift electric shock device after he raped him was yesterday convicted of manslaughter by a Sydney court. William Clare, 35, was jailed for 25 years despite a finding that the three-year-old choked to death on his vomit. Clare is already serving a 16-year sentence for raping the boy's six-year-old sister while the pair were in his care in a Sydney flat in 2003. Before calling an ambulance, Clare applied live electric wires to the child's bare chest in an attempt to save his life. Clare met the children's mother at a train station and had offered to look after them for a small amount of money.
■ Ireland
Goat crowned king
A goat named Louis was crowned King of Ireland on Thursday in one of the country's oldest festivals. Each year a wild male mountain goat is caught in the foothills of Carrauntoohill, Ireland's highest mountain, and paraded through the town of Killorglin as part of the Puck Fair -- an annual festival of music, drinking and dancing. The goat then reigns for three days from a platform 15m above the town's streets. He is kept in a special pen during his reign and fed a regular mountain diet of nuts, wild herbs, holly leaves, saplings and tender grasses. Louis will be dethroned and returned to the wild today.
■ Kenya
Priest sentenced for sodomy
A Tanzanian court sentenced a Roman Catholic priest, Sixtus Kimaro, to a total of 35 years in prison for sodomizing a 17-year-old boy in Tanzania's commercial capital Dar es Salaam, local media reported on Thursday. In passing sentence on Wednesday, principal magistrate Pellagia Khaday said there was irrefutable proof that the clergyman had indecently assaulted the youth, who was legally still a minor, the daily Guardian reported. Kimaro was sentence to 30 years for sodomy, and five years for the "dehumanization" of the youth, whose identity was not disclosed, with the jail terms to run concurrently.
■ Latvia
Prison escapees captured
Police recaptured four men who escaped from a maximum security prison in the Latvian capital earlier this week at Lithuania's border with Poland, a prison official said yesterday. Authorities were holding the men at the border between Latvia's southern neighbor, Lithuania, and Poland, Karlis Serzants, a prison administration official, told the LNT television channel. The four escaped from the Riga Central Prison on Wednesday by breaking through their cell door, slipping through a window and scaling a high fence. Police fired several shots at them but missed.
■ Spain
Army fights forest fires
The government on Thursday said it would deploy 200 elite army engineers to help battle scores of forest fires in the country's northwest. Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said they would join around 1,200 troops already backing up local firefighters in an effort to control the flames, which have raged across the region for the past week. Zapatero said "criminal activity" was behind a considerable number of the outbreaks, a situation which he described as a crisis. Police have arrested 15 people this month -- nine in the last three days -- on suspicion of starting many of the 114 fires.
■ Kenya
Rangers rescue tortoises
Some 228 live tortoises packed as "shells" were seized at Kenya's international airport before they could be smuggled to Thailand, officials said on Thursday. Rangers from the Kenya Wildlife Service seized the tortoises on Sunday from 17 containers after officials at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport reported strange movement in containers bound for Bangkok, they said. "In addition to strange movements in the containers, we trailed some droppings which appeared to be from the containers until we found the tortoises," Wildlife Service spokesman Gichuki Kabukuru said.
■ United States
Hillary bust on display
A "presidential bust" of Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton was unveiled on Wednesday at New York's Museum of Sex, where sculptor Daniel Edwards hopes it will spark discussion about sex, politics and celebrity. Edwards, the artist who also created a life-size nude of Britney Spears giving birth on a bear-skin rug, said he wanted to capture Clinton's age and femininity in the sculpture. Clinton's office had no immediate comment. Edwards said his work features a soft "presidential smile" and wrinkles framing her eyes. A floral pattern runs across her breasts, part of Edwards' effort to present Clinton "as a woman -- not a covered up person, but as a woman," adding that "I didn't want to give her a face lift or change her age."
■ United States
Retiree nabbed over drugs
US border police arrested an 81-year-old man as he tried to cross from Mexico with 80kg of cocaine stuffed into his car, officials said on Wednesday. Officers at Nogales, Arizona, found the cocaine and arrested the elderly driver on Tuesday, said Customs and Border Protection spokesman Brian Levin. "I don't remember encountering someone quite this old trying to smuggle drugs into this country ... and he was driving an unusually large amount of cocaine," Levin said. The man is a resident of Nogales, Arizona but officials did not immediately know if he was a US or Mexican citizen.
■ United States
Mom gives girl to boyfriend
A woman who feared she would lose her boyfriend while she recuperated from surgery arranged for her 15-year-old daughter to have sex with him, authorities said. Police said the three signed an agreement specifying the sexual services the girl would perform and the compensation she would receive. "It's incredible that any parent would be involved in such a blatant case of abuse against her own daughter," prosecutor Tony Tague told the Muskegon Chronicle for a story published on Thursday. The woman was freed on US$25,000 bond after being arraigned on three counts of third-degree criminal sexual conduct. The boyfriend, Michael Fitzgibbon, was being held without bail on six counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct.
■ El Salvador
Fresh troops head for Iraq
El Salvador was to rotate in a seventh army contingent to Iraq yesterday to replace a unit that has had two soldiers killed and four wounded, defense officials said on Thursday. President Tony Saca presided over the departure ceremony for the 380 soldiers, the defense department said. Saca is a close ally of the US and has been sending troops to Iraq since August 2003, five months after the US-led invasion. The new contingent will replace the same number of soldiers currently based in the southern Iraqi city of Kut.
■ Colombia
Rebels kidnap three workers
Rebels kidnapped two engineers and a helicopter pilot who were part of a seismographic oil exploration crew, authorities said on Thursday. The three Colombians were abducted on Wednesday afternoon in the northwestern state of Choco, Interior Minister Freddy Lloreda said. "We understand that they were carrying out evaluations in the area, looking for places to explore for oil, when they were kidnapped," he said. Lloreda added that Colombia's second-largest guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army, or ELN, was believed to be responsible.
‘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