■ China
Tourists sites limit visitors
Top domestic tourist destinations are limiting the number of daily visitors over the week-long National Day holiday, when hundreds of millions of Chinese travel around the country, state media said yesterday. To protect the sites from being overrun by tourist hordes, the scenic Jiuzhaigou Valley in southwestern Sichuan Province was limiting daily admissions to 28,000 while the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet, would allow no more than 2,300 visitors a day, Xinhua news agency said. The National Day break, which runs from yesterday to Oct. 7 will see some 330 million people take to the roads.
■ China
New Hunan governor picked
The nation has confirmed the appointment of a new acting governor for Hunan Province who will help consolidate the power base of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) chief Hu Jintao (胡錦濤). The official Xinhua news agency said late on Saturday that the first secretary of the Communist Youth League, Zhou Qiang (周強), had been appointed acting governor of Hunan. China had accepted the resignation of Zhou Bohua (周伯華) as governor of the province, Xinhua said. Zhou Qiang, 46, is a political ally of Hu. Hu will preside over a meeting of the CCP's sixth plenary from Oct. 8 to Oct. 11.
■ Afghanistan
`Soldier of fortune' released
Authorities have released from jail a US citizen imprisoned in 2004 for running a private jail and illegally detaining and torturing people in a freelance war on terror. Brent Bennett was initially sentenced to 10 years in prison after he and two other US citizens -- Jonathan Idema and Edward Caraballo -- were found guilty. An appeals court later cut their sentences. Bennett was released on Saturday after completing two years of his three-year sentence, a prison official said. "He was released from Pul-i-Charkhi prison and was flown out of the country," prison commander Abdul Qayoum said yesterday.
■ Hong Kong
Territory picks `The Banquet'
China has chosen the new Zhang Yimou (張藝謀) film Curse of the Golden Flower to represent the country in the Oscar best foreign film race next year, a news report said yesterday, while a Hong Kong industry official said the territory has picked the Feng Xiaogang (馮小剛) epic The Banquet. Curse, which revolves around ancient Chinese imperial politics, won a vote by a committee set up by China's Film Bureau, the Chinese news Web site Sina.com reported. Meanwhile, Federation of Motion Film Producers of Hong Kong chairman Crucindo Hung said an 11-member committee of the federation picked Feng's Banquet, a Chinese take on Hamlet, as the territory's entry.
■ Sri Lanka
Seven militants killed
Seven Tamil Tiger rebels were killed in clashes with the navy in two separate battles, the military said yesterday. Three rebels were killed Saturday evening on Kayts Island, west of the Jaffna peninsula, after sailors were deployed there, an official at the Media Center for National Security said on condition of anonymity, citing policy. The operation followed an attempted raid on Friday by a Tiger vessel that was destroyed trying to enter a naval base near the island, he said. Four guerrillas were killed in the sea battle and two bodies were recovered, the official said. The attempted infiltration prompted the navy to search Kayts on Saturday.
■ United States
Photo littering
Connecticut police received a complaint on Sept. 12 that a man in a car had been dropping photographs all over a university campus. Authorities spent over an hour collecting some 208 pictures of the same woman, which they later placed into evidence. James Famiglietti, 24, was charged on Thursday with breach of peace and littering. He and the young woman in the photos -- a student at Western Connecticut State University -- had in the past been in a relationship, police said.
■ United States
The missing "a"
Thanks to high-tech sound-editing software, an Australian computer programmer says he has found the missing "a" from Neil Armstrong's famous first words from the moon in 1969, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Some historians and critics have dogged Armstrong for not saying the more dramatic and grammatically correct "One small step for a man ..." in the version he transmitted to NASA. Without the missing "a," Armstrong would essentially have said, "One small step for mankind, one giant leap for mankind." The famous astronaut has maintains he intended to say it properly.
■ United States
Eminent China scholar dies
Frederic Wakeman Jr, an eminent scholar of Chinese history who wrote richly detailed books spanning seven centuries -- from bloody dynastic struggles starting in the 1300s into the communist era -- died of cancer on Sept. 14 at his home in Lake Oswego, Oregon. He was 68. Jonathan Spence, a professor of Chinese history at Yale University, called Wakeman "quite simply the best modern Chinese historian of the last 30 years." Starting in the 1970s, Wakeman was also the chairman of committees formed by American academics seeking to expand cultural and scholastic relations with China. In 1987, he helped write an appeal by 160 American academics calling on the Chinese government to stop oppressing intellectuals.
■ Austria
Hamster grounds plane
It wasn't Snakes on a Plane, but an Austrian Airlines jet made an unscheduled stop as a precaution on Friday after a passenger sneaked a hamster aboard and the rodent escaped. The flight from Palma de Mallorca, Spain, to the southern Austrian city of Graz made a stop in Innsbruck so officials could search for the furry stowaway and make sure it didn't gnaw through any cables, the airline said in a statement. By mid-afternoon, a search of the aircraft still had not turned up any sign of the hamster. Austrian Airlines said the jet would remain grounded until the hamster was found "because it can't take off that way for safety reasons."
■ United Kingdom
Father accepts money
The father of slain British bar hostess Lucie Blackman said on Saturday he had accepted money from a friend of the Japanese man accused of killing her. Tim Blackman was paid ¥100 million (US$849,242) "condolence money" by a friend of Joji Obara, who is charged with abduction, rape resulting in death, mutilation and abandoning a corpse. "At the end of the day, nothing's going to bring Lucie back -- this isn't a payment that is relating to any value of Lucie's life because obviously that just doesn't have a figure one can put against it," Blackman said.
■ United Kingdom
Paper gets `martyr' video
The Sunday Times reported that it has obtained a "martyrdom video" allegedly made by Mohamed Atta, ringleader of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the US. It said it had been handed the tape, but did not reveal the source. Atta was filmed reading a document marked in Arabic as a will, as he sat beside fellow hijacker Ziad Jarrah -- who seized control of United Airlines flight 93, it said. A timecode stamp on the tape indicated it had been recorded on Jan. 18, 2000, it said, adding that the recording was made at an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. No soundtrack was present on the video, and attempts to lip-read the tape to transcribe the content had been unsuccessful, the newspaper reported.
■ United States
Official calls for sterilization
A Charleston, South Carolina, city council member, reacting to a video store holdup believed to have been carried out by children, says parents who can't properly care for their kids should be sterilized. "We pick up stray animals and spay them," Larry Shirley said in a story published on Saturday by the Post and Courier. "These mothers need to be spayed if they can't take care of theirs. Once they have a child and it's running the street, to let them continue to have children is totally unacceptable," he said. Shirley's comments come after police say a video store was held up by a group of children on Wednesday, including a 14-year-old girl suspected of wielding a BB gun that looked like a pistol.
■ United States
Officer fatally shoots self
A sheriff's deputy showing a handgun to friends at his birthday party accidentally shot himself in the face, killing himself, authorities in Florida said on Saturday. Matt Barnes,26, told guests at the Friday night celebration his .45-caliber revolver was not loaded, the St. Johns County Sheriff's Office said. He pulled the trigger around 10:30pm, authorities said, and was pronounced dead at the scene. Barnes, who had been a deputy for two years, was off duty at the time of the accident. The sheriff's office said alcohol was believed to have been involved. Barnes' fiancee witnessed the shooting, authorities said.
■ Canada
Highway collapse kills two
A highway overpass in the Montreal suburb of Laval collapsed on Saturday, trapping at least two cars underneath and sending four others, including a motorcycle, crashing down from above, police said. Five people, all adults, were pulled from the rubble and taken to hospital, including three in critical condition, police spokeswoman Chantal Mackels said. At least two more are likely dead, she said. "The four vehicles that fell from above were only slightly damaged, but the two that we can see underneath [the slab of concrete] are completely squashed, so there is not much chance anyone [in them] survived," she said. Officials do not yet know how many people were actually trapped under the three lanes that dropped.
■ Germany
Scientology a risk: officials
Germans are being warned of the "danger" of Scientology amid growing concerns over the numbers of after-school tutoring programs springing up across the country. The government has told internal security forces to step up their scrutiny of the movement, claiming that the Scientologists, which they label a cult, are seeking to take advantage of the nation's ailing education system as a means to recruit children. It has prompted US embassy officials to lobby the German government on the sect's behalf. Scientology-affiliated tutoring programs have more than tripled in the past 12 months, and there are now estimated to be at least 30 nationwide.
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