■ SINGAPORE
Convicted killer loses bid
A man who killed his two-year-old stepdaughter by dunking her in a pail of water lost his final court bid to escape the gallows, news reports said yesterday. Mohammed Ali Johari, convicted in September of murdering the toddler known as Nonoi, had his appeal dismissed by the nation’s highest court. Ali’s lawyer, RS Bajwa, argued that his 31-year-old client had no intention of causing the child bodily injuries, meaning only to temporarily deprive her of air, the Straits Times said of Monday’s proceedings. Nonoi, or Nur Asyura Mohamed Fauzi, was first thought to have gone missing from the flat belonging to Ali’s parents on March 1, 2006. Three days later, Ali confessed to killing the child but claimed her death was accidental.
■ JAPAN
Hello Kitty gets makeover
She may be cute, but the latest top model to make her debut in Vogue is also podgy with short legs and whiskers. Hello Kitty, a popular cat character in Asia, is set for a designer makeover in the June issue of Japanese Vogue, which goes on sale on Saturday. The fashion spread will show Kitty modeling the latest autumn and winter designs by John Galliano for the Dior brand, posing with the designer and enjoying a shopping spree in Paris. “Of course this is the first time the historic fashion house of Dior has had a cartoon character model their entire collection,” said an official at Conde Nast Japan, publishers of Vogue Nippon.
■ JAPAN
Teen sentenced to death
A court yesterday sentenced a man to hang for killing a young mother and her baby girl when he was a minor, in a high-profile ruling hailed by the bereaved husband. The Hiroshima High Court ordered capital punishment for the man who was 18 years old when he broke into an apartment where he strangled Yayoi Motomura, 23, and her 11-month-old daughter Yuka in 1999. The defendant, who cannot be named because of his age at the time of the crime, was also convicted of raping Yayoi after her death. Calling the crime “cruel and unhuman,” judge Yasuhide Narazaki said that the man lacked regret.
■ BANGLADESH
Workers killed in explosion
Two workers were killed and two other injured in a gas explosion on a ship-breaking yard near the port city of Chittagong in the southeastern part of the country, officials said yesterday. Police said the overnight explosion originated from a cylinder of oxyacetylene gas being used on the Sitakundu ship-breaking yard. Witnesses said the blast killed two workers who were using a cutting torch on decommissioned ship. The owners of the yard said two other workers suffered from minor injuries.
■ PHILIPPINES
Farmers enter ‘no rally zone’
About 20 farmers slipped past tight security around the presidential palace yesterday and briefly picketed one of the gates of the sprawling compound. The farmers were able to enter the “no-rally zone” around the Malacanang palace in Manila by taking public transportation. They gathered outside the New Executive Building, just a few meters away from where President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and her Cabinet members were scheduled to hold a meeting. The farmers unfurled anti-government banners and took off their shirts to demand Arroyo make good on her promise to place her family’s 157-hectare sugar plantation under agrarian reform.
■ IRAN
Four drug traffickers hanged
Four people convicted of drug trafficking in the southeast have been hanged, a news agency said on Monday, a week after Amnesty International listed the Islamic state as the world’s second most prolific executioner last year. The semi-official Fars news agency said they were put to death in a prison in the city of Kerman. Murder, adultery, rape, armed robbery, apostasy and drug trafficking are all punishable by death under the country’s Shariah law, practiced since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
■ GHANA
Poverty efforts falling behind
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Monday the world must do more to eradicate poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, where not a single country is on track to meet all the goals of a global anti-poverty campaign launched in 2000. Speaking at a UN conference in Accra, Ban said that though many nations were falling behind, there had been progress. “Senegal is making great strides toward meeting the water target. ... Niger, Togo and Zambia have made impressive progress in malaria control,” Ban said. “These success stories need to be replicated and scaled-up across Africa with effective support from the international community.”
■ FRANCE
Parachutist aims for records
A 64-year-old retired French army parachutist said on Monday he hopes to smash through the sound barrier with a record-breaking 40,000m freefall jump over Canada next month. Michel Fournier hopes to set four new world records at once: for highest freefall parachute speed, at 1,500kph, along with fastest and highest jump and highest air balloon flight. He will take off on May 25 from Saskatchewan Province in a pressurised capsule, harnessed to a 161m helium-powered balloon, rising to almost four times the height of an airline flight before jumping.
■ IRELAND
Ahern to visit Kenya
Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern is traveling to Kenya to meet the leaders of its new coalition government and visit camps for people displaced by ethnic violence. Ahern said he would visit two camps today and meet with Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and new Prime Minister Raila Odinga tomorrow. The two feuding politicians came together in February in a power-sharing deal brokered by former UN chief Kofi Annan. The pact followed weeks of ethnic violence that left more than 1,000 dead and forced 300,000 from their homes. Ahern said: “While Kenya may be out of the headlines, it is important that the international community continues to focus on both rebuilding the damaged communities and helping build the economy.”
■ RUSSIA
Media chastises Georgia
The pro-Kremlin media chastised Georgia yesterday over claims by Tbilisi that Russia had shot down a Georgian spy plane over one of Georgia’s separatist territories. “Georgia has again tried to shift the blame for its own internal headache onto the healthy,” said state newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta. On Monday tensions between the states rose as Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili alleged that a Russian jet had a day earlier shot down an unmanned Georgian spy plane over the breakaway territory of Abkhazia. Georgia’s military has used video footage and radar images to back its claims. The Izvestia newspaper said there were inconsistencies in Georgia’s account, principally an early Georgian denial that one of its drones had been flying over Abkhazia.
■ UNITED STATES
FDA missing facility checks
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is making progress in conducting more inspections of foreign drug manufacturers but still inspects relatively few facilities. The agency conducted 30 such inspections in the latest fiscal year and plans to conduct at least 50 this year, government auditors say. Concerns about the inspection program were recently highlighted, auditors said, when the agency learned that contaminated doses of the blood thinner heparin probably had come through a Chinese plant that the agency had never inspected.
■ UNITED STATES
Rings back from the dead
Walt Disney World seems to have worked its magic on a Massachusetts couple who accidentally threw away three platinum and diamond wedding rings. While tidying up their villa as they prepared to leave the park late last week, Paul Campanale dumped a cardboard bowl, not knowing the container inside it held his wife Karen’s engagement, wedding and five-year-anniversary rings. Executive housekeeper Drew Weaver realized that trash from the Campanales’ villa had not reached the industrial-size compactor. He and seven other volunteers donned protective clothing, emptied a parking lot bin and waded through bag after bag of rubbish to find the rings. And they did.
■ UNITED STATES
Two prisoners killed in riot
Two prisoners were killed and five wounded in a Colorado prison riot, officials said Monday, amid reports that white supremacists marking Adolf Hitler’s birthday may have sparked the unrest. The violence erupted in a courtyard of a federal penitentiary in Florence, some 160km south of Denver, Colorado, prison spokesman Leann LaRiva said. The penitentiary “was placed on lockdown status because of an inmate disturbance which occurred on the recreation yard yesterday afternoon at approximately 12:30pm,” he said.
■ ARGENTINA
Smoke crisis eases
Planes and helicopters on Monday dumped heavy loads of water on brush fires raging north of Buenos Aires as city residents enjoyed a second day of breathing easy. But smoke that shrouded the Argentine capital for nearly a week could return by today if the winds that swept away the haze shift again, forecasters said. The government claims the fires were intentionally set by farmers clearing scrub brush on the cheap for grazing cattle. Three people have already been arrested in an arson investigation. Police are searching for others responsible for the nearly 200 brush fires still ablaze that sent clouds of smoke across Buenos Aires last week.
■ UNITED STATES
Preaching in the bar
Another round and amen! Beer was on tap and a mechanical bull inspired the sermon as a new church held its inaugural service in a western Ohio bar. The Country Rock Church drew about 100 people to Sunday night’s meeting at the Pub Lounge in the town of Sidney. The barroom church is an offshoot of Sidney United First Methodist Church, whose head pastor says he has been looking for creative ways to reach people in unconventional places. The church’s Web site for its new branch advertises “Top regional bands, pizza, wings, rowdy fun & a short message.” The Reverend Chris Heckaman said people seemed to enjoy themselves so he expected the Country Rock Church would meet weekly. Heckaman’s sermon compared staying on the bar’s mechanical bull to learning to get along in life.
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