JAPAN
Teen chops off mom’s head
A teenager turned up at a police station yesterday carrying his mother’s head in a bag, saying he had chopped it off in hopes of bringing about world peace. The 17-year-old reportedly suffered from mental illness and was immediately arrested on murder charges, news reports said. The body believed to be that of his mother was found at his apartment. “I hope that all wars and terrorism would vanish from this world,” he told police, according to Jiji Press. “It didn’t matter whom I killed.” The boy, a student at one of the most prestigious high schools in Fukushima prefecture, suffered mental illness and was often absent from the school, it said.
Malaysia
Orangutan to undergo op
A South African vet will perform what is being described as the world’s first cataract surgery on an orangutan in Malaysia, an official said yesterday. Animal Ophthalmologist Izak Venter will perform the two-hour surgery early today, assisted by South African anesthetist Frik Stegman and local veterinarian S. Amilan, said an official at the Matang Wildlife Center in Sarawak state on Borneo island. Venter flew to Malaysia in March to examine the 19-year-old orangutan, named Aman, who was suffering from severe cataract in both eyes, the official said.
Japan
Unwanted child dropped off
The first unwanted child has been dropped off at the country’s new “baby hatch,” outraging the conservative government as news reports said it was a boy who was already three or four years old. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, an advocate of “family values,” has strongly opposed the anonymous child drop-off in the south of the country but found no legal grounds to stop it from opening last Wednesday. The site at the Roman Catholic hospital in the city of Kumamoto received a child on the same day it opened, police said. “There was one case and that’s all I can say,” a police spokesman said.
China
National liquor threatened
The water purity of a river tapped to make the national liquor is being threatened by uncontrolled building of other drinks factories along its banks, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Monday. Kweichow Moutai, maker of the fiery Maotai drink served at state banquets and used to toast guests ranging from former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher to North Korean leader Kim Il-sung, draws water for the brew from the Chishui River in remote Guizhou Province. But authorities are investigating how 39 illegal alcoholic drinks plants have sprung up by the river, polluting both the air and water, Xinhua said.
Japan
Laos to join whaling body
Landlocked Laos has agreed to join the world’s whaling body at Japan’s request, an official said yesterday, leading campaigners to accuse Tokyo of buying votes in its bid to resume commercial whaling. The Japanese foreign ministry said Laos, whose prime minister is on a visit to Japan, plans to join the International Whaling Commission (IWC). The move comes ahead of the IWC’s annual meeting later this month in Alaska when Tokyo is expected again to push for an end to a moratorium on commercial whaling. “Japan requested cooperation on preserving traditional culture and we think the reason Laos agreed to join the IWC is to help improve friendly ties with Japan,” the foreign ministry official said.
PORTUGAL
Leaders fight for Suu Kyi
More than four dozen former heads of state, including three former US presidents, have demanded that the military regime in Myanmar release Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest. Suu Kyi, winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, has been in and out of detention, mostly house arrest, since 1990, when her democracy movement won a landslide election. The military junta that seized power in 1998 refused to recognize the election result and crushed the democracy movement. In a letter on Monday to the military dictatorship's top leader, Senior General Than Shwe, the 59 former leaders urged the release of Suu Kyi.
PORTUGAL
Police investigate Briton
Portuguese authorities probing the disappearance of British girl Madeleine McCann have placed a British man under formal investigation in the case, Lusa news agency said yesterday. It quoted police sources as saying the suspect was 32-year-old Robert Murat, who was questioned late on Monday along with an unidentified German woman and a Portuguese man as part of the investigation into the disappearance of the four-year-old. Investigators on Monday searched Murat's home in Praia da Luz some 100m from the Ocean Club complex where the little girl went missing on May 3 while her parents ate in a nearby restaurant.
BRAZIL
Pope offends Indians
Outraged Indian leaders said on Monday they were offended by Pope Benedict XVI's "arrogant and disrespectful" comments that the Roman Catholic Church had purified them. In a speech to Latin American and Caribbean bishops at the end of his visit, the pope said the Church had not imposed itself on the indigenous peoples of the Americas. They had welcomed the arrival of European priests at the time of the conquest as they were "silently longing" for Christianity, he said. Millions of tribal Indians are believed to have died as a result of European colonization backed by the Church through slaughter, disease or enslavement.
MALTA
Island's size `multiplies'
When the Mediterranean island country adopts the euro next year, it will get an unexpected boost to its international stature. New euro coins and notes show Malta to be much bigger than it actually is, the Times newspaper reported on Monday, because the island is too small for the minting machines to show it on the same scale as other euro zone countries. As a result the country, which is only 27km long, is shown to be about 180km long. Malta adopts the euro on Jan. 1.
JAPAN
Tourists in West Bank
Around 15 Japanese tourists involuntarily spent the night in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank because they were unable to pronounce the letter "L", the Israeli daily Maariv reported on Monday. The tour group were on an excursion originally set to take them to Afula in northern Israel. But when buying bus tickets in Jerusalem, they pronounced the letter "L" like the letter "R", and were given tickets for the Ofra settlement. When they arrived at the high-security entrance to the settlement, the puzzled guard explained there was no "nearby hotel" in the crisis-torn region. The tourists had to stay overnight in Ofra, which is a radical stronghold in the Palestinian territories.
UNITED STATES
Missile defense talks held
Poland and the US opened formal talks on Monday on Washington’s contentious request to place part of a new missile defense system in the eastern European nation. Robert Loftis, the US State Department’s senior adviser for security negotiations and agreements, met with two members of Poland’s conservative government, which has signaled interest in hosting a US site. But Warsaw must also contend with Russian threats that doing so would spark a new arms race. Some government members have said they would agree to the plan only with additional security guarantees from Warsaw, such as the additional placement of Patriot missiles.
UNITED STATES
UN official not welcome
A UN human rights official said he was barred from visiting an immigration detention center in New Jersey on Monday. It was the second time that he was denied access to a US immigration jail on a weeklong monitoring tour. The official, Jorge Bustamante, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, said he was informed over the weekend that his visit to detained immigrants in the Monmouth County Correctional Institution in Freehold, scheduled for Monday, had been canceled. Bustamante said he had received no explanation.
MEXICO
Top officials murdered
A police commander and the head of intelligence for the national prosecutor’s office were murdered on Monday, officials said. Jose Nemesio Lugo, coordinator for anti-crime intelligence at the General Prosecutor of the Republic was executed while inside his car in the early hours on Monday morning in a neighborhood to the south of Mexico City, a spokesman said. Also murdered was Jorge Alatriste, General Prosecutor of the Republic’s commander of police investigations for the state of Baja California, the prosecutor’s office said. He was kidnapped early on Monday while in Tijuana, a drug trafficking hot spot on the US border, where police and army units were carrying out joint operations.
UNITED STATES
Work while working out
Think work feels like a treadmill now? Try a new desk designed at the Mayo Clinic. They built what they called a “vertical workstation” — a desk fitted over a standard treadmill. They persuaded 15 obese people to work at this treadmill-desk and measured how many calories they burned. If an overweight office worker used this vertical workstation all day, every day for a year, he or she could lose up to 30kg, the researchers report in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. James Levine and Jennifer Miller measured how many calories their 15 volunteers burned using exhaled breath but did not determine if the volunteers lost weight.
UNITED STATES
Sharing sites off limits
US military officials said on Monday that MySpace, YouTube and about 10 other social-networking Web sites are off limits to soldiers using Department of Defense computer systems. The regulation is intended primarily to prevent military Internet connections from being clogged with uploads or downloads of data-rich files such as video clips, said Defense Department spokesman Commander Jeffrey Gordon. The ban is also meant to guard against infiltration by malicious or spying software hidden in files by hackers, according to Gordon. “The bottom line is bandwidth,” Gordon said.
SEEKING CHANGE: A hospital worker said she did not vote in previous elections, but ‘now I can see that maybe my vote can change the system and the country’ Voting closed yesterday across the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific nation’s first general election since the government switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing and struck a secret security pact that has raised fears of the Chinese navy gaining a foothold in the region. The Solomon Islands’ closer relationship with China and a troubled domestic economy weighed on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots. As many as 420,000 registered voters had their say across 50 national seats. For the first time, the national vote also coincided with elections for eight of the 10 local governments. Esther Maeluma cast her vote in 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
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