■ JAPAN
Support high for whale hunt
Nearly two-thirds of Japanese support continuing the country's annual whale hunts and more than half agree with using whales for food, a survey by the Asahi Shimbun said yesterday. Asahi said 65 percent of respondents to a telephone survey favored continuing the hunts, while 21 percent said they were opposed. Three-quarters of the men surveyed supported the hunts, versus 56 percent of the women, it said. Japan annual kills more than 1,000 whales in hunts that anti-whaling nations and critics dismiss as a disguise for commercial whaling.
■ JAPAN
Vice minister berated
The top bureaucrat at the economics ministry was chided by his boss yesterday after he ridiculed day traders as "stupid." Minister for Economy, Trade and Industry Akira Amari told reporters that Vice Minister Takao Kitabata made "some radical remarks which may be misleading." Kitabata made the remark in an apparent joke during a Jan. 25 speech in Tokyo organized by the ministry's research unit. As he advised managers about ways to prevent corporate acquisitions, Kitabata described day traders as "a typical example of the most disgraceful shareholders." "They have no interest in management at all," Kitabata said. "They are stupid, wanton and irresponsible. Therefore, you don't have to provide voting rights to them." Kitabata later apologized for his remarks.
■ Australia
Drunk threatened city
A drunken man's threat to blow up half a city with his TV remote control forced the police to declare a state of emergency at a luxury golf resort, a local court heard on Thursday. Geoffrey Martin Fryatt, 57, was arrested by elite paramilitary police after terrifying neighbors with a knife and threatening to detonate a store of chemicals with the TV remote. "One push of the button will blow up half of Brisbane," Fryatt shouted in the standoff last May before police opened fire with rubber bullets. Fryatt's lawyer told the Brisbane District Court that his client lost control after losing much of his life savings in a fraud carried out by his finance broker, local media said. Fryatt was sentenced to a year's probation.
■ sri lanka
Army kills 34 rebels
Government troops attacked separatist Tamil Tiger bunkers along the front lines in the country's embattled north, triggering gunbattles that killed 34 rebels and one soldier, the military said yesterday. Army troops destroyed three rebel bunkers on Thursday in the Vavuniya region, just south of the rebels' de facto state in the north, killing 20 guerrillas, a defense ministry official said. There was no immediate comment from the rebels.
■ Australia
`Pacific Solution' ends
The nation's widely criticized "Pacific Solution" policy of holding asylum seekers on remote islands ended yesterday when the last detainees flew out of Nauru, the government said. The 21 Sri Lankans who had been held on the tiny island in the South Pacific for nearly a year would be resettled in Australia, Immigration Minister Chris Evans said in a statement. The dismantling of the system honors a pledge made by the new center-left government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. A total of 1,637 people were detained on Nauru or the Papua New Guinea island of Manus under the policy, introduced in 2001 in an attempt to discourage boatpeople from seeking asylum in Australia.
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