■JAPAN
Police arrest baby-flusher
A woman who flushed her baby down the toilet was arrested on charges of abandonment on Sunday, police said. Ritsuko Taniguchi, 33, gave birth three months prematurely in her Nagoya apartment’s toilet on Saturday, a police spokesman said. Her attempt to flush away the baby, an 880g boy, did not succeed as he blocked the toilet. Taniguchi called a repair man hours later and recovered the body with his help. She reportedly told the man the dead baby was a doll but he was suspicious and called the police. Officers said they found the baby’s body in a plastic bag in Taniguchi’s apartment.
■JAPAN
Husband-killer gets 15 years
An abused wife who killed her husband, cut up his body and dumped the parts on a street and in a park was jailed for 15 years by a Tokyo court yesterday, a reports said. Kaori Mihashi, 33, killed her husband by hitting him over the head with a wine bottle in 2006, Kyodo news agency said. Doctors said Mihashi was insane at the time of the murder but the court ruled that while she had been seeing hallucinations she was mentally capable of making decisions. “While her married life was like hell and she was feeling desperate, the responsibility for the brutal and abject crime is serious,” the judge said.
■JAPAN
IKEA to clarify instructions
Swedish do-it-yourself furniture giant IKEA has been ordered to give better instructions in Japan after a customer suffered minor injuries assembling a chest, it said yesterday. The man in Chiba was hurt in the eye by a broken screw last July, the industry ministry said. “The cause of the accident is believed to be the customer using an inappropriate size of straight slot driver instead of a cross slot,” it said. “But the instructions on the product failed to give enough information on what kind of screwdriver should be employed or to alert customers on the risk of building the product.”
■CHINA
Rapist sentenced to death
A man has been sentenced to death for raping 21 girls of primary and middle school age, state media reported yesterday. Yang Chao (楊超) received the death sentence at a court in Anhui Province, the Anhui Market News reported, for raping girls as young as eight. He admitted to raping 21 young girls, starting from November 1996 when he raped a nine-year-old, sina.com.cn, a news Web site, said. Yang intercepted some of the girls as they were walking alone, the paper said. Just 14 cases were heard in court as some of the victims refused to testify.
■AUSTRALIA
Music pioneer passes away
Electronic music pioneer Tristram Cary, the technical whiz behind the Dr Who theme tune, has died in Adelaide at the age of 82, his family announced yesterday. English-born and Oxford-educated, Cary emigrated to Australia in 1974 to set up an electronic music studio along the lines of the one he established at London’s Royal College of Music in 1967. University of Adelaide music head Stephen Wittington said Cary’s contribution to music was “impossible to quantify” and had inspired 1960s rock groups Pink Floyd, The Who and Roxy Music. He helped design the VCS3 portable synthesizer that Pink Floyd used on their 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon. “He laid the foundations,” Whittington said. “Without him, we wouldn’t have techno, hip-hop or any kind of music which is sustained by technology.” Cary, who was a naval radar officer during World War II, died on Thursday.
■ITALY
Assisi bans begging
Assisi, home of Saint Francis, the 13th century patron of the poor, has banned begging, an Italian newspaper reported on Sunday. Right-wing Mayor Claudio Ricci has stopped people seeking handouts, lying down or sitting on the ground within 500m of town churches, other places of worship, squares and public buildings, La Repubblica said. The mayor of the town in northern Italy told the newspaper his ban was designed to “preserve the sacred character of Assisi without damaging its welcome.”
■SOUTH AFRICA
Mbeki pans xenophobia
President Thabo Mbeki urged his countrymen on Sunday to stop xenophobic attacks as foreigners continue to be killed and displaced by mobs who blame them for crime and unemployment. “As South Africans, we should refuse to be part of the unnecessary attacks on innocent people merely because they happen to be foreigners,” Mbeki said during Freedom Day celebrations in Cape Town. Days after an angry crowd burnt two foreigners, including a Zimbabwean, to death, the country’s human rights commission said xenophobia constituted a threat to the country’s constitutional democracy. Up to 3 million Zimbabweans are believed to have crossed the border into South Africa in recent years to escape the economic meltdown in their homeland.
■ARMENIA
PM welcomes Turkey dialog
Armenia is ready to start dialog with Turkey on improving relations if Ankara does not set preconditions to talks, Armenia’s new prime minister said on Sunday. The two neighbors have no diplomatic links after Ankara severed ties in protest against Armenian control of the Nagorno-Karabakh region over which Armenia fought Turkey’s ally Azerbaijan in a war in the early 1990s. “I confirm the readiness of the government of Armenia to engage in constructive dialog and establish relations without preconditions,” the press office of Armenian Prime Minister Tigran Sarksyan said he wrote in a letter to Turkey. Last week Turkey’s foreign minister said he had sent Armenia a letter calling for dialog.
■IRAN
Prosecutor condemns Barbie
The country’s toy market is being inundated by models of Barbie, Batman, Spiderman and Harry Potter and the young must be protected from their harmful cultural effects, the prosecutor-general was quoted as saying on Sunday. “Promoting figures like Barbie, Batman, Spiderman and Harry Potter and the uncontrolled import of CDs of video games and films should alarm all the country’s officials,” Ghorban Ali Dori Najafabadi was quoted as saying by the student ISNA news agency. “We need to find substitutes to ward off this onslaught, which aims at children and young people whose personality is in the process of being formed,” he said. Dori Najafabadi’s comments came in a letter to an Iranian vice president, urging measures to protect “Islamic culture and revolutionary values.”
■NIGERIA
Policemen die in station raid
Unidentified gunmen killed five policemen and seized several weapons in a raid on a police station in the oil-rich southern Nigerian state of Rivers on Sunday, a police spokeswoman said. The attack took place early on Sunday on Bonny Island, the site of one of Nigeria’s largest oil and gas export terminals, spokeswoman Ireju Barasua said. It was not immediately clear who had carried out the assault on the Bonny Divisional Police Station.
■UNITED STATES
Nevada hit by quakes
Dozens of minor earthquakes shook Reno as a series of temblors entered its third month and prompted some frazzled residents to leave their homes. More than 150 aftershocks have been recorded on the western edge of northern Nevada’s largest city after a magnitude-4.7 quake hit on Friday night, the strongest quake in a sequence that began on Feb. 28. There were no reports of injuries or widespread damage. Scientists have urged residents to prepare for worse, saying the recent activity is unusual because the quakes started out small and continue to build in strength.
■UNITED STATES
Carter upbeat on Hamas
Former US president Jimmy Carter said yesterday that his recent meetings with leaders of Hamas had yielded specific results, hitting back at criticism from Palestinian and Israeli officials. “Through more official consultations with these outlawed leaders, it may yet be possible to revive and expedite the stalemated peace talks between Israel and its neighbors,” Carter wrote in an opinion piece for the New York Times. Earlier this month, Carter held two meetings in Damascus with exiled Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal, angering both Israel and Washington, who consider the movement a terror group despite its victory in 2006 Palestinian elections.
■UNITED STATES
Inmate sues county
An inmate awaiting trial on a murder charge is suing the county, complaining he has lost more than 45kg because of the jailhouse menu. Broderick Lloyd Laswell says he isn’t happy to be down to 140kg after eight months in the Benton County, Arkansas, jail. He has filed a federal lawsuit complaining the jail doesn’t provide inmates with enough food. According to the suit, Laswell weighed 187kg when he was jailed in September. Police say he and a co-defendant fatally beat and stabbed a man, then set his home on fire.
■HAITI
New prime minister named
Port-au-Prince on Sunday named a new prime minister two weeks after his predecessor was ousted over rocketing food and fuel prices that sparked violent demonstrations claiming several lives. President Rene Preval chose Ericq Pierre, 63, a respected economist with the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, to be the country’s prime minister, Senate President Kelly Bastien and Chamber or Deputies president Pierre-Eric Jean-Jacques said. Pierre, whose nomination must now pass a vote in parliament, would succeed former prime minister Jacques-Edouard Alexis, who was forced to resign on April 12 after a no-confidence vote followed food riots that killed six people and wounded about 200.
■VENEZUELA
Chavez to ‘help hostages’
President Hugo Chavez said he would try to facilitate the release of three Americans held captive by Colombia’s largest rebel group — even though he has lost contact with the guerrillas. Chavez confirmed his willingness to help on Sunday, a day after New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson said the socialist leader had agreed to mediate a possible exchange of the US defense contractors for imprisoned guerrillas. “I told him that we’re at their service, to try to help even though the issue is very complicated,” said Chavez, speaking during his weekly TV and radio program. Chavez helped pave the way for the release of six captives earlier this year.
‘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
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