■ MYANMAR
Thai PM visits junta leader
Thai Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej yesterday met with the leader of military-ruled Myanmar during a one-day courtesy visit, official sources said. Samak, traveling with Thailand's foreign minister and army commander, held talks with Senior General Than Shwe in the new capital of Naypyitaw, Myanmar government sources said. The sources declined to give their names because they were not authorized to speak with the press. Thai government spokesman Wichianchote Sukchotrat said there was no fixed agenda for the trip, calling it a courtesy visit by the new prime minister.
■ NORTH KOREA
No accord in nuclear talks
North Korean and US negotiators failed to reach any breakthrough in talks on Pyongyang's nuclear program on Thursday, US chief negotiator Christopher Hill said, adding that there were no plans to resume negotiations yesterday. "It was good consultations but we are not there yet," Hill told journalists late on Thursday outside the US mission in Geneva after meeting his North Korean counterpart, Kim Kye-gwan. "We are going to report to our capitals," he said.
■ AUSTRALIA
Rudd against binge drinking
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's new campaign against teenage binge drinking revived questions yesterday about his own drunken escapade in a New York strip club. "Don't look to me to be a paragon of moral virtue on these questions," Rudd told Melbourne radio 3AW. "I'll take any incoming flak about yours truly, but I've got one target in mind and that is to get that number down," he said, referring to the 168,000 Australian teenagers under the legal drinking age of 18 who abuse alcohol. During his election campaign last year, Rudd was embarrassed by media revelations he had spent a drunken night in a Manhattan strip club in 2003. Rudd apologized for his behavior as a senior lawmaker while on official business in New York.
■ AUSTRALIA
Springsteen fan kills partner
A woman who said she stabbed her partner to death because he objected to her listening to the music of Bruce Springsteen was sentenced on Thursday to eight years in jail. A Brisbane court heard that Karen Cooper, 50, used a kitchen knife to stab Kevin Watson, 49, once in the chest because she "just got tired" of him bossing her around, the AAP news agency said. "I mean, who the hell doesn't like Bruce Springsteen, for God's sake?" she told police who arrested her. "I just picked up a knife and I went `boom.'" Cooper, who pleaded guilty to manslaughter, had experienced a "brain snap" after Watson said he didn't want to listen to a CD by Springsteen, her lawyer said.
■ CHINA
Dirty hubby burned to death
A Chinese bride burned her new husband to death after he got into bed after a drunken argument without washing his feet, Xinhua news agency reported on Wednesday. "Wang and his wife, Luo, were married on Feb. 2, but frequently "fought over trivial things while still on their honeymoon," Xinhua quoted a local newspaper as saying. The couple, from Hubei Province, had another fight on the night of March 4, "and in frustration they together drank a bottle of liquor to ease their anger." "At about 10pm, Luo watched her husband get into bed without cleaning or washing his feet. In a fit of anger and intoxication, she set fire to the sheet he was sleeping in," the report said.
■ MACEDONIA
Bear found guilty of theft
A court convicted a bear of theft and damage for stealing honey from a beekeeper who fought off the attacks with thumping "turbo-folk" music. "I tried to distract the bear with lights and music because I heard bears are afraid of that," Zoran Kiseloski told the daily Dnevnik after the year-long case of the bear versus the beekeeper ended. A court in Bitola found the bear guilty and since it had no owner ordered the state to pay the US$3,500 damage it caused. There was no information on the bear's whereabouts.
■ GERMANY
Cat killer gets jail sentence
A plumber who killed his former girlfriend's cat by hurling it from a fifth-floor balcony has been sentenced to seven months in jail, media said on Thursday. The 37-year-old man, identified only as Torsten F., said he threw the black-and-white cat to its death in a fit of anger because it soiled the apartment, the Bild newspaper reported. Judge Monica Pelcz ruled that an example had to be set. "This was an incredibly brutal act towards a helpless animal ... People have to realize that they are not allowed to take out their anger and frustration on those weaker than themselves," she said.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Pregnant women wanted
Far from being heavy, lumbering and clumsy, pregnant women are often fascinating, beautiful and serene, the artistic director of a ballet company said. And to prove it, Balletlorent is seeking 12 pregnant women to star in a production with six professional dancers. MaEternal will debut in Newcastle in May and is offering the 12 who get through the auditions "a chance to share with an audience the beauty of what it means to carry the life of another within you." Director Liv Lorent said she was keen to combine trained dancers with people from all ages and stages in life.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Guilty plea in faked death
A man accused of faking his death in an insurance scam pleaded guilty to fraud on Thursday. His wife denied involvement and will stand trial later this year. John Darwin, 57, admitted to obtaining money by deception and obtaining a false passport. Darwin made headlines in December when he walked into a London police station claiming to have amnesia. He had been declared dead after disappearing while canoeing off the English coast in 2002. Police accused Darwin and his wife, Anne, of staging the death to collect his US$50,000 insurance policy. Newspapers ran pictures that appeared to show the couple in Panama after Darwin's alleged death.
■ SPAIN
Height linked to jealousy
Feelings of jealousy are linked to how tall you are, the British weekly New Scientist says. University of Groningen researchers in the Netherlands and a team at the University of Valencia in Spain asked 549 men and women to list the qualities in a romantic competitor that were most likely to make them jealous. Men felt nervous about attractive, rich and strong rivals. But these feelings relaxed the taller they were themselves. The shorter the man, the greater his jealousy. For women, what counted most was the rival's looks and charm, but these feelings were less intense if the woman herself was of average height. A woman of average height was more jealous if their rival was taller.
■ UNITED STATES
Craft collects Saturn data
The international Cassini spacecraft collected science data on mysterious geysers spewing from Saturn's moon Enceladus and recorded new images of its surface during a close flyby, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said. The pass on Wednesday brought Cassini as low as 48km above the surface of the moon. It went through the icy geysers at 51,500kph and an altitude of 193m, the lab said on Thursday. It is hoped that instrument data on density, size, composition and speed of plume particles will provide clues to whether there's a water ocean or organics inside the frozen moon. The geysers spew water vapor from fractures in the moon's south pole.
■ UNITED STATES
'Dr Death' faces extradition
A surgeon was in a Portland jail on Thursday awaiting extradition proceedings over charges that he caused the deaths of three patients in Australia. Jayant Patel, 57, was called "Dr Death" in Australian newspapers after a government commission there concluded that his negligence contributed to the deaths of 13 patients at Bundaberg Base Hospital in Queensland, where he worked from 2003 until 2005. According to the commission, he performed unnecessary operations for which he was not qualified and removed healthy organs. The Australian authorities eventually charged him with three counts of manslaughter and two counts of inflicting grievous bodily harm as well as fraud, but by that time he had returned to the US.
■ UNITED STATES
House to hold secret session
The House of Representatives on Thursday agreed to hold a rare secret session, the first for a quarter century, on a wiretapping anti-terror bill, as a standoff with the White House deepened. Democratic leaders agreed to a request by Republicans for the extraordinary session, on legislation opposed by US President George W. Bush. House security officers were directed to seal and sweep the chamber before the session, believed to be only the fifth ever such event, could start. A vote on the legislation, which the White House opposes because it does not provide a retroactive legal shield to telecommunications firms that cooperated in government eavesdropping after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was expected yesterday.
■ MEXICO
Gunmen kill six in law office
Six people were shot and killed inside a private law office, state prosecutors said. Five men and a woman died in Thursday's attack in the city of Guadalajara, the Jalisco state attorney general's office said in a statement. Two women survived the shooting, the statement said. Mexico City newspaper El Universal reported they were seriously wounded, citing unspecified police reports. The bodies were found in different parts of the office, and some of the victims' hands were tied. Authorities did not say whether anything was stolen.
■ MEXICO
Investigators find 19 bodies
Investigators found 19 more bodies buried in the backyard of a house in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, increasing the tally of corpses found there to 33, officials said on Thursday. Federal agents began digging in the yard of the house in the on March 1, initially finding six dismembered bodies, the federal attorney general's office said in a statement. The remains date back about five years and all but three apparently are males, the statement said. In the initial raid, agents found 1,700kg of marijuana in the house.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
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
RIVER TRAGEDY: Local fishers and residents helped rescue people after the vessel capsized, while motorbike taxis evacuated some of the injured At least 58 people going to a funeral died after their overloaded river boat capsized in the Central African Republic’s (CAR) capital, Bangui, the head of civil protection said on Saturday. “We were able to extract 58 lifeless bodies,” Thomas Djimasse told Radio Guira. “We don’t know the total number of people who are underwater. According to witnesses and videos on social media, the wooden boat was carrying more than 300 people — some standing and others perched on wooden structures — when it sank on the Mpoko River on Friday. The vessel was heading to the funeral of a village chief in