■ AUSTRALIA
Koalas under threat
Koalas are threatened by global warming because higher temperatures and increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could cripple their food supply, new research showed yesterday. Koalas live only on eucalyptus leaves. They face the prospect of falling nutrient levels in eucalyptus leaves, new research led by Ian Hume at Sydney University shows. The study found increased carbon dioxide in the air increases the level of anti-nutrients, toxins and other unhelpful ingredients in eucalyptus leaves. Hume said any significant further rise in carbon dioxide concentrations would strip enough of the nutrients from the leaves to force the animal out of its habitat and towards an uncertain future. He said it was unlikely there would be enough time for koalas to adapt their diet.
■ INDONESIA
Palm oil hurts orangutans
One of the biggest populations of wild orangutans on Borneo will be extinct in three years without drastic measures to stop the expansion of palm oil plantations, conservationists said yesterday. More than 30,000 wild orangutans live in the forests of Central Kalimantan province, or more than half the entire orangutan population on Borneo. Experts believe the overall extinction rate of Borneo orangutans is 9 percent per year, but in Central Kalimantan they are disappearing even faster due to unchecked expansion of palm oil plantations. “The expansion of palm oil plantations is wiping out entire habitats and unless the government takes drastic measures to protect these orangutan sanctuaries there is no way to reverse the trend,” Center for Orangutan Protection director Hardi Bhaktiantoro told a press conference.
■ CAMBODIA
Soldier arrested for killing
A fourth former Khmer Rouge soldier has been arrested and charged for his role in the 1996 kidnapping and killing of British mine clearer Christopher Howes, a court official said yesterday. Sin Dorn was charged on Tuesday with premeditated murder over the deaths of Howes and his translator. Authorities arrested Sin Dorn on Friday in the remote northern outpost of Anlong Veng, the Khmer Rouge’s final stronghold, he said. “He has been placed in jail” pending trial, Ke Sakhan said. In November, three other former communist rebels were arrested on the same charges over the deaths of the two men.
■ NEW ZEALAND
Mother’s Day sparks row
A row broke out yesterday over how best to mark Mother’s Day on Sunday — call her on the telephone or send a card? Cameron Brewer, who heads a retail business group in Auckland’s main shopping area, accused the New Zealand Post of “emotional blackmail” in sponsoring radio ads that say sending a card shows that one cares while making a phone call only indicates one has remembered the day. “We are one of the most commercial organizations in the country, yet we would never humiliate people who make the effort to telephone their mother on Mother’s Day,” he said. “The advertising is very poor taste, particularly given NZ Post is a state-owned enterprise owned by Mum and Dad taxpayers.” He said Mother’s Day was one of the biggest events in the retail calendar. “However, it’s very important that we don’t try to emotionally blackmail people who chose to mark the occasion by telephoning, e-mailing, or visiting their mothers. After all it is the thought that counts, and for many mothers including my own, a phone call may be all that they want.”
■ IRAN
MPs challenge speech
Hardline Iranian lawmakers plan to complain to the Intelligence Ministry about comments by moderate former Iranian president Mohammed Khatami deemed insulting to Iran’s late revolutionary leader, a newspaper said yesterday. The daily Etemad-e Melli said 77 lawmakers would ask Intelligence Minister Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei “to confront” Khatami for the remarks they say insulted the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Khatami’s remarks on “exporting the revolution” have been taken by hardliners to suggest Khatami was giving credence to charges often leveled by the US and other Western countries against Iran.
■ ANGOLA
Chinese ship leaves Luanda
The controversial Chinese ship carrying arms for the beleaguered government of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe left the Angolan port of Luanda after offloading cement and construction material, unions said on Tuesday. The International Transport Workers Federation and the International Trade Union Confederation said they had been informed by their members in Angola that the An Yue Jiang had restocked on fuel and food before leaving but made no attempt to offload its 77 tonnes of arms.
■ SPAIN
Cardinal’s niece strips down
Topless and dressed in suspenders, she stares from the cover of one of the country’s best-selling soft porn magazines. But this is not another of the scantily clad models who feature every week in Interviu, rather it is the niece of the conservative head of the Spanish Church, Cardinal Antonio Maria Rouco Varela. Magdalena Rouco Hernandez stripped off to embarrass her uncle, who is head of the Spanish Episcopal Conference and also a personal friend of Pope Benedict XVI. The 27-year-old said she chose to do the photoshoot to expose her uncle’s “hypocrisy” following her father’s death. “My uncle never tires of repeating that the family is sacred and that you have to respect it. But then he does not respect it and abandons his own,” she told the magazine. “When my father died, [Rouco] did not come to the funeral, didn’t send flowers or tell my mother of his sorrow. He told us he had a meeting with Pope John Paul II, but it was not true.”
■ UNITED STATES
Africans sent inferior drugs
Many Africans are getting substandard malaria drugs, with more than a third of the pills tested failing quality tests, a report published on Tuesday showed. Tests of 195 different packs of malaria drugs sold in six African cities showed 35 percent of them either did not contain high enough levels of the active ingredient or did not dissolve properly. Substandard antimalarial drugs cause an estimated 200,000 avoidable deaths each year, Roger Bate of the American Enterprise Institute, who led the study, and colleagues reported in the Public Library of Science online journal PLoS ONE.
■ AUSTRIA
‘Gullible’ officials criticized
Justice Minister Maria Berger criticized local authorities for being “gullible” in the Amstetten incest case, where a father abused his imprisoned daughter for 24 years. In an interview published in yesterday’s Der Standard, Berger said the authorities had acted with a “certain gullibility” regarding Josef Fritzl’s claims that his allegedly missing daughter Elisabeth had abandoned three of her children at his doorstep. Fritzl’s claims should have been put under closer scrutiny, Berger said.
■ CANADA
Illegal immigrants missing
Authorities have lost track of 41,000 people ordered to leave the country and in most cases have stopped looking for them, a federal watchdog said on Tuesday. In a scathing report, Auditor General Sheila Fraser said most of the missing were failed asylum seekers allowed into the country on temporary permits while their immigration or refugee cases were assessed. However, some of them “may pose a threat to public safety and security,” she said. Fraser noted an improved enforcement since her last audit in 2003, when responsibility for removals was transferred from Citizenship and Immigration Canada to the Canada Border Services Agency.
■ CANADA
PM’s residence crumbling
Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his family should move out of their crumbling official residence for more than a year to allow it to be fixed, the auditor-general said on Tuesday. In her annual report, Auditor General Sheila Fraser said 24 Sussex Drive, as well as the governor-general’s nearby Rideau Hall mansion, were “showing signs of fatigue and wear, and require extensive repair work.” “Rehabilitating the prime minister’s residence has become an urgent matter” and would require Harper to find alternate lodging for 12 to 15 months, she said. The windows, heating and air conditioning, as well as electrical and plumbing systems of 24 Sussex Drive “are nearing the end of their life cycle and are in poor condition,” Fraser said.
■ BRAZIL
Police arrest farm leader
Police trying to defuse a tense Amazon conflict between rice farmers and Indians arrested a farm leader on Tuesday, after his guards opened fire on Indians who were trying to build homes on land he claims he owns. Paulo Cesar Quartiero, who is also the mayor of the remote town of Pacaraima where he has vast plantation holdings, was taken into custody, although no details were immediately released on the accusations he faces, Agencia Brasil, the official government news agency, reported. His arrest happened after the government sent Justice Minister Tarso Genro to the remote region following the clash a day earlier between indigenous settlers and Quartiero’s workers.
■ UNITED STATES
Convict executed
The State of Georgia executed William Earl Lynd late on Tuesday, the first use of the death penalty in the country in more than seven months. The execution came after the Supreme Court last month upheld the right of states to use lethal injection, which opponents argued was unconstitutional and amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment.” A last-minute clemency request for the 53-year-old Lynd, convicted of killing his girlfriend and another woman in 1988, was denied on Monday by Georgia’s Board of Pardons and Paroles.
■ UNITED STATES
Blacks treated unfairly: HRW
African-Americans are arrested and imprisoned for drug-related crimes at a much higher rate than white offenders, even though whites commit more drug offenses in the US, a rights group said. A black man is 12 times more likely to be sent to prison for a drug offense than a white man, said a Human Rights Watch report titled Targeting Blacks: Drug Law Enforcement and Race in the United States. A black woman is five times more likely to go to jail for a drug crime than a white counterpart, said the report, which is based on a review of statistics in 34 US states.
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
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was