■ CHINA
Croc killed after eating boy
A show crocodile in an amusement park has been shot to death after it dragged a nine-year-old schoolboy into its pond and devoured him. Several youths had climbed over the fence at the Yintan resort in Beihai and were hitting animals with sticks and rocks when one croc took hold of the boy's clothes and pulled him into the water, the Beijing Morning Post said yesterday. A swarm of up to 11 crocodiles then ate the boy, the report said. The crocodiles are still being bred even though their performances at the park were halted several years ago, it said.
■ JAPAN
Abe: `We feel responsible'
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has said Tokyo feels "responsible" for forcing women to work in brothels during World War II, Newsweek magazine has reported. Abe's remark appears to be an effort to deflect US criticism over comments he made last month that there was no proof the government or the military had forced the women, mostly Asian and many Korean, to serve soldiers in the brothels. "We feel responsible for having forced these women to go through that hardship and pain as comfort women under the circumstances at the time," Abe was quoted as saying in the interview.
■ JAPAN
Businessman faces verdict
Former property developer Joji Obara, charged with serial rape and killing two foreign women, including Briton Lucie Blackman in 2000, faces a court verdict tomorrow in a case experts call the worst sex crime in the country's history. Obara, 54, is charged with total of 10 cases of rape, including drugging, raping and killing Blackman, a 21-year-old former British Airways flight attendant who was working at a hostess bar in Tokyo when she disappeared seven years ago. Obara also faces the same charge in the death of an Australian woman in 1992, and has been indicted for drugging and raping eight other women. Obara has denied all the charges, while the prosecutors are demanding a life sentence.
■ PAKISTAN
Video, CD shops blown up
A homemade bomb blew up three video and music shops in a market in the northwest where hardliners believe the businesses are un-Islamic, police said yesterday. The blast happened late on Saturday in Swabi, about 100km northeast of Peshawar, the capital of the deeply conservative North West Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan, they said. "It destroyed one shop and partially damaged two others, but there were no casualties as the market was closed," local police chief Fazal Elahi Badshah said. The blast occurred in the Gulzada Market which has some 80 shops of CDs, DVDs and tape recorders.
■ MALAYSIA
Tribe sets up blockades
A struggling tribe in the rural countryside has set up blockades in a desperate attempt to protect its ancestral land on Borneo from logging. The Penan tribe in Sarawak state have used tree branches and wooden poles to build the blockades in what they say is a bid to save forests from being completely wiped out. "If we do not defend our rights today, after logging ends our forests will be set to be destroyed by plantation schemes," the chairman of the Sarawak Penan Association, Ajang Kiew, said in a statement. Ajang said Sarawak had failed to recognize Penans' native rights over the land.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Arrest warrants to be issued
British detectives are set to issue arrest warrants for three Russians they suspect killed former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko, the Mail on Sunday newspaper said. Police have told sources close to Litvinenko's widow Marina that they intend to charge the trio with murder and poisoning, the weekly said on its front page. Andrei Lugovoi, Dmitry Kovtun and Vyacheslav Sokolenko, all wealthy businessmen and ex-agents in the former Soviet KGB spying service, met Litvinenko three weeks before his agonizing death from radiation poisoning in London last year. They deny any wrongdoing.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Police probes card fraud
Police are investigating a global credit card scam, allegedly linked to Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebels, which has conned thousands of motorists out of cash, the BBC reported on Saturday. BBC television said that the Sri Lankan government has claimed that its opponents, the Tamil Tigers, are behind the scam. Complaints are currently being investigated in Edinburgh, Leeds, Nottingham, Bristol, Hull, Norwich, Peterborough and Bury St Edmunds, said the BBC, which added that 200 of Britain's 9,500 gas stations have been hit.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Women avoid sentence
Four women who forced two toddlers to fight as they were filmed savagely punching each other, have walked free from court. The mother of the children, Zara Olver, 21, admitted child cruelty and was given a one-year suspended sentence by Plymouth Crown Court on Friday. Judge Francis Gilbert also handed the same sentence to the children's 48-year-old grandmother and two aunts. The four women were filmed goading the youngsters to hit each other until they cried. A two-year-old boy was called a "wimp" for refusing to fight his three-year-old sister. At one point, one of the women encouraged the boy to hit his sister with a hairbrush.
■ ITALY
Pope praised in letter
The Islamic community in Vigevano wrote a letter praising Pope Benedict XVI as he began a visit marred by a reported attack by Muslims on a Christian convert. The 80-year-old Pope began a 24-hour visit on Saturday to Vigevano, near Milan, with a mass in the Piazza Ducale. The visit was marred on Friday when a Moroccan man who had married a local Italian woman and converted to Christianity was beaten up by Muslims and needed treatment in hospital, media reports said. In a letter given to the city's bishop for the pope, the Muslim community told him they were committed to "a common path of under-standing and reciprocal respect."
■ SOUTH AFRICA
Police find kidnap victims
Police said on Saturday they had found 12 women and two children from Zimbabwe locked in a house north of Johannesburg, after their kidnapper was arrested and gave up their location. The man was caught trying to collect a ransom for a 17-year-old girl he kidnapped this week, police spokesman Lungelo Dlamini said. He had offered the girl a ride to the Beit Bridge border post between South Africa and Zimbabwe but instead called her mother and demanded a ransom of 300 rand (US$43), which he later raised tenfold.
■ UNITED STATES
Grandma has plane trouble
A grandmother of five was flying her small plane when the engine quit in midair, and she was forced to make an emergency landing in a muddy field. Emma Hanner, 78, was flying her two-seater plane home to Denver from North Carolina when the propeller stopped suddenly west of St Louis, Missouri. As the plane hit the ground, one wheel dipped into an irrigation ditch and buckled underneath the plane. That bent the plane's nose down and spun it around, Hanner said, jolting her forward. A cut below her nose was her only injury.
■ UNITED STATES
Woman whistles up a storm
A woman from Japan was one of the winners at the International Whistlers Convention in Louisburg, North Carolina. Kimiko Wakiyama, 34, of Sakuragaoka, Japan, performed Fruhlingslieder. The other grand champion award winner was American Terry Rappold, 55, who performed Concerto in C-Minor Allegro by Vivaldi. There was also a Japanese winner in the grand champion teen category. Takuma Gima, 19, of Osaka, performed Turkish March. More than 40 adults participated in the contest at Louisburg College, said Allen de Hart, who founded the convention in 1970. Phyllis Heil and Tom Bryant of the US were named whistling entertainers of the year.
■ UNITED STATES
Man mistakenly freed
Officials mistakenly released a prisoner from a Kentucky facility after receiving a phony fax that ordered him freed, and it took them nearly two weeks to realize it. The fax contained grammatical errors, was not typed on letterhead and was sent from a local grocery store. The fax falsely claimed that the Kentucky Supreme Court "demanded" Timothy Rouse be released. Rouse, 19, is charged with beating an elderly man and was at the Kentucky Correctional & Psychiatric Center in La Grange for a mental evaluation. Lexington police arrested Rouse at his mother's home on Thursday evening.
■ UNITED STATES
Man drowns in moat
A man fleeing security guards drowned on Saturday after he leaped over a railing into a moat surrounding a casino, authorities said. Police said Anthony Swopes, 21, of Kansas City, fled while being questioned about his identification at the Isle of Capri casino in Kansas City, Missouri. Authorities were called around 12:30am, and firefighters recovered Swopes about 45 minutes later. He was pronounced dead at a hospital. Moats are common fixtures at Missouri casinos. Casino gambling in the state initially was restricted to floating riverboats, but the state's constitution was amended to allow riverboat casinos to float within manmade moats.
■ BRAZIL
Traffic control slammed
ExcelAire said faulty air traffic control was to blame for a middair collision between one of the US company's executive jets and a commercial airliner that killed 154 people in the country's deadliest air disaster. The Gol airlines Boeing 737 and an ExcelAire Legacy 600 jet clipped each other on Sept. 29 over the Amazon jungle. The Gol airlines jet crashed, killing all aboard, and the Legacy jet landed safely. In a report to federal police this month, ExcelAire said air traffic control transmissions "confirmed that both planes were freed by Air Traffic Control to fly at the same altitude and the same path, in opposite directions."
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
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was