■ PHILIPPINES
Lightning kills mourner
A woman who was on her way to a neighbor's wake was fatally struck by lightning, while seven other mourners were injured on the island of Guimaras, officials said yesterday. Marilou Ecol, 45, suffered severe burns and died on the spot as she and the seven others huddled under a shed in Nueva Valencia in Guimaras Province during a rain storm on Tuesday, provincial disaster relief coordinator Teresita Siazon said. Ecol's 12-year-old daughter, Mariel, who was hugging her mother when the lightning struck, suffered second degree burns, Siazon said in a telephone interview. Two boys, aged 12 and 16, also suffered burns but were not seriously hurt, Siazon said. The victims were walking to the wake of a dead neighbor and sought shelter from the rain under the shed, she said.
■ MYANMAR
Famous poet arrested
A prominent poet was arrested after authorities deciphered a poem that contained a hidden message criticizing junta leader Than Shwe, colleagues said yesterday. Authorities arrested Saw Wai on Tuesday, a day after his poem February 14 was published in a popular weekly magazine, said friends and colleagues who spoke on condition of anonymity. The eight-lined poem was about love and romance ahead of Valentine's Day. But if read vertically, the first word of each line formed the phrase: "Power crazy senior general Than Shwe." Head of the junta since 1992, Than Shwe has little tolerance for criticism. He keeps himself sequestered in his newly built capital, Naypyitaw, deep in the countryside. Several news vendors said the journal, A Chit (Love), an entertainment and gossip magazine, had been removed from news stands.
■ MALAYSIA
Cow killed after car crash
Thieves stole an adult cow, squeezed it into the back seat of a car and drove off with it, but abandoned the animal when the vehicle crashed into a tree, police said yesterday. The cow, injured in the crash, was slaughtered by villagers. The thieves managed to push the cow into the back of a mid-sized sedan on Tuesday night, but were spotted by villagers who gave chase, said a police official in the northern state of Kedah. It was not clear how the thieves managed to get the cow into the car. A blurry photograph in the New Straits Times showed the cow's head with closed eyes sticking out of the back seat window of the crashed car.
■ CHINA
CCP pushes `pure' texting
Chinese Communist Party officials in Henan Province have urged mobile phone-wielding citizens to send rousing "red" text messages instead of blue jokes, but the response has been more derision than revolution. Nanyang city recently told residents to "mobilize to compose and send healthy, positive, uplifting red text messages," the China Youth Daily reported yesterday. "Red sentences occupy the text message culture front!" party officials urged in a local newspaper, the report said. "The broad masses of residents should mobilize ... and fight the vulgar with the healthy,"the announcement said. But many people have responded to the campaign with only more catcalls, the newspaper reported. "Too funny, this itself is a joke," said one message pasted on an Internet site. Others wondered whether officials should be doing more useful things. "All of you wallow in wine and women and want us to be pure-minded and puritanical," one Nanyang resident told the paper. "It's going a bit far."
■ CHINA
Leprosy rebounding
The Health Ministry said yesterday that it is recording an annual average of more than 1,600 new leprosy cases and will spend US$30 million this year to renovate leprosy villages. The country has a little more than 6,000 sufferers, drastically down from the estimated 500,000 in 1949 when the Communists took power, the official Health News said. "But every year there are still more than 1,600 new leprosy cases, and there are still people suffering relapses," the ministry-run newspaper said. There were about 100,000 survivors who had been permanently disfigured and some 20,000 lived in leprosy villages, it said.
■ AFGHANISTAN
Policemen, villagers killed
At least eight policemen were killed yesterday during an operation by US-led coalition troops in the village of Ghariban, Ghazni Province, during an operation that included airstrikes, Ghazni provincial council deputy head Habeb-ul Rahman said. It was unclear whether local troops had also taken part in the raid. Two other villagers, including a woman, were killed in the clash, Rahman said. The US-led coalition said it had yet to receive any information about fighting in that area.
■ JAPAN
Astronaut to test boomerang
Japanese astronaut Takao Doi plans to throw a boomerang inside a space station to test how it can fly in zero gravity, an official said on Wednesday. Doi, 53, is set to travel on a US shuttle in March to the International Space Station, where he will be in charge of construction of a Japanese scientific testing room. It is believed gravity is needed for a boomerang to fly back to the throwing spot, but no one has tried in zero gravity.
■ ANGOLA
UNITA accuses government
The opposition National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) party accused members of the country's ruling party of vandalizing the tomb of Jonas Savimbi, the rebel leader who led a 27-year bush war against the government. Savimbi, who is seen as a freedom fighter by some but a war criminal by many others, was killed by government troops in 2002. He is buried in a cemetery in Luena in the eastern Moxico Province. His tomb was attacked on Jan. 3 and a bronze plaque honoring his life was stolen, the UNITA Web site said.
■ SERBIA
Prosecutor receives threats
The nation's chief war crimes prosecutor has received death threats for his role in trying to arrest fugitive suspects from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, his office said on Wednesday. "As a proven enemy of the Serbian people, you will be punished," said a letter sent to prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic by an unidentified "Serb Group" from Chicago, which has a large Serbian immigrant community. "This is not the first time the prosecutor has had death threats," his spokesman Bruno Vekaric said. Three months ago, the prosecutor received a phone call saying "have your documents on you always so you can be easily identified when you're dead." Four war crimes suspects indicted by the UN tribunal in the Hague are still on the run, and the court says they are within the reach of Serb authorities.
■ FRENCH
Warning issued over X-rays
Health authorities said on Wednesday they were advising thousands of people who had X-rays at five clinics to undergo medical checkups. Nearly 7,000 people were affected by the announcement -- mostly patients who had undergone mammograms and chest X-rays, the Health Ministry said. In a statement, it said radiographers at the clinics in the north of the country -- all closed last December -- were unqualified and had not respected hygiene and technical rules. A group of experts is to decide whether patients who underwent certain ultrasound procedures at the clinics are to be included in the advisory. It was suspected the procedures might have been performed with unsterilized instruments, putting patients at risk for hepatitis C and the AIDS virus, officials said.
■ FRANCE
Sarkozy OKs reform plan
President Nicolas Sarkozy gave the nod on Wednesday to a 300-point free-market reform plan commissioned to "unleash" the country's growth, but vetoed several flagship measures to quell a mini-rebellion in the ruling party ranks. Sarkozy had asked Jacques Attali, one of the country's best-known economists and a former advisor to the socialist president Francois Mitterrand, to lead a 43-member panel of international experts in identifying obstacles to growth. Their final report, entitled 300 Proposals to Change France, proposes a raft of sweeping changes, from job market deregulation to local government reform, life-long training, boosting Internet access, investing in green technologies or opening up French borders to immigration. Presenting his conclusions to Sarkozy and half a dozen key ministers at the Elysee palace, Attali said the combined effect of the reforms could add a percentage point to French economic growth by 2012 and that they would slash unemployment from 7.9 percent to 5 percent.
■ UNITED STATES
Mare not menu fare
Kristen DeGroat's plan for Foxy did not include placing the three-year-old mare on someone's menu. But human error landed the 25-year-old Akron, Michigan, resident's ad under "Good Things to Eat" in the classified sections of the Saginaw News and Bay City Times. "I was pretty outraged," DeGroat told the Saginaw News on Tuesday. "I've owned horses since I was a child. The worst part of all of it, if it had been any other section, it would have just been a mistake." DeGroat said she received dozens of calls from unhappy animal lovers after the ad ran on Sunday and Monday, but not under the classified heading for horses and stables as she wanted. About a third of the 60 or so calls she received were from people interested in buying horse meat. DeGroa sold Foxy to a man who wanted the horse for his grandchildren.
■ BOLIVIA
Morales shakes up Cabinet
President Evo Morales replaced four minor Cabinet ministers on Wednesday, but said they were not fired and had resigned of their own accord. At a ceremony in the presidential palace, Morales welcomed new heads of the Planning and Development, Economic Development and Small Businesses, Health and Public Works ministries. Twelve other ministers kept their posts. The outgoing officials stepped down for personal reasons such as family obligations, Morales said. "I have the same confidence in the ministers present here as I did in our ex-ministers," he said. "We always must continue improving."
■ BRAZIL
Pedophile suspect slain
A 61-year-old American man being investigated for pedophilia has been found shot dead in the northern city of Natal, where he resided, the Globo news network reported on Wednesday. The body of the man was found on Monday, buried in a vacant lot, the network said. He had been shot seven times. Police who went to his home in the same city found its front door broken open and its safe emptied. Hundreds of photos of naked children were also discovered. The US embassy in Brasilia said it was aware of the report and was investigating the matter, but had no immediate confirmation of a US citizen being killed.
■ BRAZIL
Drug kingpin's land sold
Hundreds of people campaigning for landless farmers on Wednesday ended a peaceful protest on a property seized from a Colombian drug kingpin and auctioned off by the state. The Landless Movement said its members had ended its two-day occupation of the ranch in the southern town of Guaiba, but warned "a new occupation in the area has not been ruled out." The protest had been to pressure authorities to turn the land over to the movement instead of selling it off. The property was bought by an unnamed Brazilian for 850,000 reais (US$465,000).
■ UNITED STATES
Doing the math earns cash
A Georgia high school is offering students who are weak in math and science US$8 an hour to go to study hall and review those subjects. "The kids are very enthusiastic," said Mike Robinson, the principal of Creekside High School in Fairburn. Forty students were selected on the basis of their grades and invited to attend two-hour remedial classes twice a week in exchange for money, which is provided by a private foundation. At the end of the 15-week experiment, a student who attended every session would be US$480 dollars richer.
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