■ CHINA
Storms decimate forests
Around one-tenth of China's forests were damaged by recent winter storms, the worst in at least five decades, and in the hardest-hit regions nearly 90 percent of forests were ruined, Xinhua news agency said yesterday. The State Forestry Administration said total losses reached 17.3 million hectares of forest in 18 provinces in southern China, Xinhua said. The agency did not give any value for the losses, but in an earlier report the administration said that by the end of last month the storms had caused about US$2.5 billion in damage.
■ MALAYSIA
Cash for rats
Authorities in Kuala Lumpur have ushered in the Year of the Rat by offering a bounty on rats to help fight the city's age-old rodent problem, a newspaper said yesterday. "There's no incentive like money," Yew Teong Look, a member of parliament for a Kuala Lumpur precinct, was quoted by the New Straits Times as saying. Dead or alive, the rats are worth 2 ringgit (US$0.62) each, he said. "All residents have to do is place the vermin at drop-off points where City Hall officers will collect them for disposal," he said.
■ AUSTRALIA
Man guilty of killing wife
A Welsh-born man who hid his wife's body for 23 years in a steel drum in the couple's suburban backyard was convicted yesterday of her murder. Frederick Boyle, 58, claimed he hid the body of Edwina Boyle out of panic after finding her dead in bed at their home on the outskirts of the southern city of Melbourne. But a Victoria state Supreme Court jury found him guilty yesterday of the murder on Oct. 6, 1983. He pleaded not guilty at the outset of his trial. Boyle told the court he found his 30-year-old wife dead in bed with two bullets in her head and one of his neckties around her throat. He said he thought he would be a suspect because he was having an affair, so he hid the body.
■ INDONESIA
Roof riders to be sprayed
Commuters riding on the roofs of trains will be sprayed with colored liquid so that security officers can identify and arrest them, a report said yesterday. Electric trains linking the Indonesian capital and its neighboring towns are packed with passengers during rush hours, with many sitting on the roofs due to a lack of space inside or to avoid paying. "We will confiscate their IDs and give them a ticket," the Jakarta Post quoted regional rail spokesman Akhmad Sujadi as saying. Although illegal, roof riding is rampant because of a lack of efficient and affordable means of transport for commuters in the greater Jakarta area. At least 53 roof riders have been killed in the past two years, the Post said.
■ INDIA
Avalanches kill 20
Twenty people were killed by avalanches and 15 were missing in Indian Kashmir as the heaviest snowfall in recent years brought the Himalayan region to a standstill, officials said yesterday. More than 300 people have been rescued from avalanche-hit areas, while many villages remained inaccessible, police said. Six members of a family, including two children, were killed when an avalanche swept away their home late on Friday in the Banihal area, 110km south of Srinagar, police said. In the neighboring area of Kapran an avalanche killed another family of six. The Indian army said it would airlift 1,500 people yesterday who have been stranded for more than a week on a snowbound mountain highway that connects the Kashmir Valley with the rest of India.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Gerry Adams' driver a spy
MI5, the domestic security service, took one of Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams' personal drivers into protective custody on Friday after he was unmasked as a British agent. MI5 advised Roy McShane to leave his west Belfast home after it emerged that an internal Irish Republican Army (IRA) investigation found he had been working for the British for more than a decade. McShane was part of a pool of drivers for senior Republican leaders from the time of the IRA's first ceasefire in 1994.
■ UNITED STATES
'Icebox' city defends title
International Falls is officially the "Icebox of the Nation." The Minnesota city on the Canadian border had been fighting the ski town of Fraser, Colorado, for the legal right to the trademark. International Falls claimed victory this week when the US Patent and Trademark Office sent the city attorney a certificate granting the city Reg. No. 3,375,139. "I ran over to the attorney's office and kissed the certificate," Mayor Shawn Mason said on Friday. She said the city has used the icebox title to market itself to industry as the premier site for cold-weather testing.
■ GREECE
Lost phone causes trouble
A young actress who forgot her cellphone in an Athens cab was blackmailed for 1,500 euros (US$2,200) when the driver threatened to post sex footage stored inside the phone on the Internet, the police said on Friday. The 30-year-old driver was arrested on Thursday after the unnamed actress gave him the demanded sum in marked currency. The driver, who had initially tried to peddle the sex footage to a reporter, told police he was facing "serious financial difficulties."
■ SWITZERLAND
Two Picassos pinched
Two oil paintings by Pablo Picasso worth nearly 5 million Swiss francs (US$4.5 million) have been stolen from a museum in the eastern town of Pfaeffikon, police sources said on Friday. Police said the circumstances surrounding the theft of Tete de Cheval and Verre et pichet on Wednesday evening were still unclear, but that the thieves managed to leave the building around 7pm. The security alarm was set off as they left the museum. The two paintings belong to the Sprengel museum in Hanover, Germany, which has offered a reward for their safe return.
■ UNITED STATES
Winehouse gets visa
A day after saying "no, no, no" to troubled British pop singer Amy Winehouse, US officials on Friday granted a work visa that would allow her to perform at tonight's Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. But Winehouse, who is in rehab for drug addiction, will instead stick with her plan to sing live via satellite from London. "Unfortunately, due to the logistics involved and timing complications, Amy will not be coming to the US this weekend to perform at the Grammys in Los Angeles," said Tracey Miller, the singer's spokeswoman.
■ UNITED STATES
Bogie's mistress dies
Verita Bouvaire Thompson, the mistress and confidante of Humphrey Bogart, has died at age 89. Thompson died of natural causes in New Orleans on Feb. 1, her boyfriend, Dean Shapiro said. In 1982, Thompson wrote a book called Bogie and Me: A Love Story in which she described a 14-year love affair with Bogart.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of