■ CHINA
ArticleText = "Court sentences swan-killer
A court sentenced a farmer to 12-and-a-half years in prison for killing and selling endangered white swans that are under state protection, a court official said yesterday. Zhao Naishun, 42, of Henan Province, was accused of poisoning 37 white swans on the Yellow River last fall and selling them to another area farmer for 150 yuan (US$20) each, according to Xinhua news agency and Li Guowang, an official at the People's Court of Lingbao. The court also ordered him to pay a fine of 40,000 yuan. The farmer accused of buying the swans, Zhang Yuelin, was sentenced in May to 13 years in prison after being convicted of buying the birds and selling the meat.
■ CHINA
Accident data released
Authorities said yesterday that 79,000 people died in industrial and road accidents in the first 10 months of this year, but claimed progress had been made in improving notoriously weak safety standards. The death toll marked a drop of nearly 14 percent over the same period last year, work safety minister Li Yizhong (李毅中) said in a speech reported on his administration's Web site. More than 419,000 road and workplace accidents were recorded from January to October, down 22 percent on the same period last year, he said.
■ NEPAL
Wives send condoms
Women in a rural village have been mailing condoms to their husbands working abroad to protect them from sexually transmitted diseases, report said yesterday. The women in Pang village, in the midwestern mountains, have been writing to their husbands urging them not to have sex with other women, but also mailing them condoms so that if they are unfaithful, they will have safe sex. The Kantipur newspaper said that social workers have been counseling women in the village about sexually transmitted diseases over the past two years.
■ JAPAN
Fighter jets grounded
The nation's F-15 fighter jets have been grounded following a crash in the US involving the same type of aircraft, Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba said yesterday. Tokyo gave the order on Sunday after it was informed by US forces that an Air National Guard F-15 fighter jet crashed in Missouri, Ishiba said. "The cause of the crash in Missouri is not yet known," he said. Flights of F-2 fighter jets were also suspended after one crashed on takeoff and burst into flames at an airport last week. "We will deal with the task of preventing airspace incursions with our F-4 fighter jets," the oldest model among Japan's fighter jets, Ishiba said.
■ FRANCE
Sarkozy tries to end protests
President Nicolas Sarkozy was to make a lightning trip yesterday to the Brittany fishing town of Guilvinec in an effort to calm fishermen blocking ports to protest the rising price of fuel. Angry fishermen blocked a handful of ports yesterday as well as the entrance to a Total refinery in Donges. They lit bonfires at fishing ports to call attention to their plight and slowed down traffic between major towns in Brittany with barrages. Fishermen pay at least 0.50 euro (US$0.72) per liter for fuel for their boats, a sum they say eats up 30 percent of their take. Sarkozy to fly to the US afterwards, where he was due to dine last night with US President George W. Bush at the start of a two-day visit to Washington.
■ NETHERLANDS
Officials admit break-in
The government admitted on Monday that some of its bureaucrats had improperly accessed the internal computer system of a Dutch news agency, raising concerns about press freedom. Marcel van Lingen, editor-in-chief of the GPD news agency which serves more than a dozen newspapers in the country and Belgium, accused the government of spying. The Social Affairs Ministry "used stolen information to influence [our] reporting," Van Lingen told the national NOS broadcaster. He said the press bureau first became aware of systematic "break-ins" when a ministry press officer complained about a story that had yet to be published. The ministry confirmed in a statement some of its employees had accessed GPD's internal site and apologized.
■ GERMANY
Pay raise proposed
Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives and the center-left Social Democrats presented legislation on Monday to give lawmakers their first in four years -- a 9.4 percent raise. But the opposition criticized the draft proposal. The proposal would raise a lower-house lawmaker's monthly pay by 659 euros (US$956) from the current 7,009 euros. The raise would be introduced in two stages between now and 2009.
■ FRANCE
Leroy wins the Goncourt
The nation's top literary prize, the Goncourt, went to author Gilles Leroy on Monday for his Alabama Song, a story written in the first person but inspired by the descent into madness of the wife of famed novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. Leroy's 12th novel mixes biographical material with the imaginary to portray Zelda. Leroy uses the pronoun "I" to tell the story of his Zelda, saying that putting himself in her skin was the only way to recount "an extreme life." It wasn't an easy sell. The 48-year-old Leroy won the vote on the 14th round of balloting by the literary jury. A second prize, the Renaudot, went to Daniel Pennac for Chagrin d'Ecole (School Blues).
■ GHANA
Lithuanian teens arrested
Two Lithuanian teenage boys on their way back to London after a West African holiday were arrested at the airport for cocaine possession, officials said on Monday. A drug control officer said a 16-year-old student and a 19-year-old laborer -- who both live in London -- had swallowed dozens of cocaine pellets before attempting to board a plane on Saturday. The officer said police are also pursuing a Ghanaian suspected of giving the teens the drugs to swallow. The boys were at a hospital on Monday, where they had so far expelled 53 pellets of cocaine, the official said.
■ UNITED STATES
ArticleText = "F-15s grounded
The US Air Force has suspended some F-15 flights, citing a "possible structural failure" discovered after one of the fighter jets crashed in Missouri. All "non-mission critical" flights were suspended on Saturday, a day after a Missouri Air National Guard jet crashed in a wooded area, the Air Force said in a release on Sunday. The pilot, who ejected, was released from a hospital Saturday after being treated for a dislocated shoulder, broken arm and minor cuts; no one else was hurt. It was unclear which flights were considered non-mission critical.
■ UNITED STATES
Hell's couple wins lottery
Life in Hell just got a little easier for John and Sue Wilson. The couple, who live in the town of Hell, Michigan, 72km west of Detroit, were blessed with a US$115,001 windfall from the Michigan Lottery. They won the big prize in the Fantasy 5 drawing on Wednesday -- that is, Halloween. "How cool is that?" said Sue Wilson, 43, a teacher's aide. Her husband is an electrician. The couple said they plan to use their winnings to pay off bills, make some home improvements, buy a video game system for their 13-year-old son and possibly visit relatives in Georgia.
■ UNITED STATES
Envoy to Vatican named
President George W. Bush plans to nominate Harvard University law professor and anti-abortion scholar Mary Ann Glendon to be his new US ambassador to the Vatican. Glendon, 69, is an opponent of gay marriage who also has written on the effects of divorce and increased litigation on society. Her 1987 book Abortion and Divorce in Western Law was critical of the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that established a legal right to abortion. The White House announced on Monday that Bush would nominate Glendon to the post, which requires Senate confirmation.
■ UNITED STATES
Capitol incident in Colorado
A man shouting threats was subdued and arrested at the Colorado Capitol, less than four months after a trooper shot and killed an armed man inside the building, witnesses and authorities said. Derrick Shumate, 28, tried on Monday to get through a locked door on the Capitol's east side and punched a door window out, State Patrol spokesman Ryan Sullivan said. Shumate ran from a trooper inside the building, ignoring a command to stop, but surrendered to a trooper outside the building by putting his hands up and lying down, Sullivan said. Shumate was unarmed and there were no reports of injuries.
■ UNITED STATES
Man shares tub with snakes
Another day, another bizarre world record for Jackie Bibby, the "Texas Snake Man." Bibby spent about 45 minutes in a see-through bathtub with 87 rattlesnakes on Monday, fully clothed, shattering his own record by 12 snakes just in time for Guinness World Records Day tomorrow. A Guinness official certified the record. The snakes crawled under his arms, between his legs and anywhere else they could slither, Bibby said. None bit him. "They can go wherever they want as long as they don't start biting," Bibby said. "The key to not biting is for me to stay still. Rapid movement scares a rattlesnake. If you move real slow and gentle, that doesn't seem to bother them."
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
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema