■ MALAYSI
Two charged in wildlife case
A court has charged two men allegedly involved in illegal wildlife trading with torturing 70 pythons by keeping them in a sack and sealing their mouths shut with tape, a news report said yesterday. The two men, aged 38 and 40, were also charged with being in possession of several clouded monitor lizards and a dead black leopard, both of which are protected animals. The duo, who pleaded not guilty to the charges, also allegedly had crocodile meat, deer meat and deer hide in their possession, the New Straits Times daily said. Wildlife officers discovered the animals during a raid at a home in the capital Kuala Lumpur last Sunday. The animals and meat were believed to be destined for the local market and were worth 100,000 ringgit (US$30,800), the report said.
■INDONESIA
It’s raining cash
If you’re short of cash and don’t mind running in tropical humidity and smog for a few bucks, read on. A businessman plans to throw 100 million rupiah (US$10,600) out of an airplane over the capital today as a publicity stunt to promote his new book. “I want to create a rain of money in Jakarta,” author and motivational speaker Tung Desem Waringin said. “It’s a little bit crazy, but it’s marketing.” Police spokesman Colonel I Ketut Untung said authorities may not allow the plan to go forward because it could draw huge crowds and cause chaos. Tens of millions of Indonesians live on less than US$1 a day and food and aid giveaways always draw large numbers. The 42-year-old Tung said instead of opting for regular advertising for his book, he came up with an idea that “will make people happy.”
■ MALAYSIA
Fuel restrictions delayed
A temporary curb on foreign motorists buying fuel at petrol stations will begin tomorrow, two days later than planned, local media reported yesterday. A Domestic Trade Ministry official said the change was made to allow all parties involved to be ready. “This is to ensure that all parties involved in the implementation of the rules, including traders and users especially foreigners, understand the guidelines,” Iskandar Halim Sulaiman was quoted as saying. The ministry had earlier said filling stations in its towns bordering Singapore and Thailand would be temporarily barred, starting yesterday, from selling fuel to foreign-registered vehicles in a move aimed at curbing the abuse of subsidies.
■CHINA
Heavy rain kills 64
Torrential downpours have now claimed 64 lives, state media reported, with flash-floods destroying thousands of homes as well as bridges and large swathes of crops. Guizhou Province was hardest hit, with 43 people killed in floods, Xinhua news agency reported late on Friday, after a new downpour on Thursday flooded 19 cities and counties. More than 130,000 people were affected by the continuing bad weather, which also knocked out two bridges and a highway, Xinhua said. Torrential rain has also hit four other provinces in the past four days, killing 21 people.
■INDONESIA
Defendant gives donuts
A woman accused of bribing a prosecutor handed out boxes of donuts at her trial on Friday, reports said. Artalyta Suryani is accused of giving a US$660,000 bribe to the leading prosecutor to get him to drop an investigation into a banking tycoon wanted for alleged embezzlement of billions of dollars. Reports from the gallery indicated that after judges rejected her initial defense and ordered witnesses to be called, Suryani tried to show her sweet side. Local news Web sites Detikcom and inilah.com reported that the businesswoman offered boxes of donuts and mineral water to everyone in the courtroom.
■INDONESIA
Bribe money discovered
Anti-corruption officers discovered thousands of dollars in bribe money at a customs and excise office in Jakarta in a midnight raid on the premises, reports said yesterday. During the raid “more than 300 million rupiah [US$32,000] was found,” Mohammad Jasin, deputy of the Corruption Eradication Commission, told state news agency Antara. He said the cash was contained in envelopes attached to import documents at the North Jakarta Tanjung Priok port customs office in the Friday raid. Jasin said it appeared that importers had given the cash bribes to officials “so their documents can be processed without any problems.”
■NEW ZEALAND
Veterans get parade
About 3,000 veterans of the Vietnam War and their families marched to parliament in Wellington yesterday in the welcome-home parade they never received nearly 40 years ago. They were formally welcomed by Prime Minister Helen Clark, who earlier delivered a formal apology on behalf of previous governments for sending them into the “toxic environment” where Agent Orange herbicide was freely sprayed into the jungle and for ignoring them on their return. In an emotional ceremony on the forecourt of parliament, the veterans were given a traditional Maori warriors’ return from war. Photographs of the 37 New Zealanders who died in Vietnam were taken into the building for a vigil before a guard of honor.
■ ETHIOPIA
Flash floods kill 25
Flash floods following torrential rain in Ethiopia’s eastern town of Jijiga killed 25 people while they slept, a government official said on Friday. The underdeveloped area in the Somali region is usually battered by a succession of droughts and floods. Last year, scores of people there died from weeks of heavy rainfall and the waterborne diseases that followed it. Ministry of Information spokesman Zemedhun Tekle said the Jijiga airport was also flooded from the downpour on Thursday night and rescue mission teams were being ferried by helicopter.
■Nigeria
Plea for death row inmates
Nigeria on Friday appealed to the Indonesian government for clemency to be granted to two of its nationals recently sentenced to death for drug-related offenses. “They should not be executed. Instead, room should be left for their rehabilitation,” Nigerian Foreign Minister Ojo Maduekwe told Indonesian Ambassador Nurhadi Djazuli in a meeting. “We maintain a long-standing relationship with Indonesia. We feel we could leverage on that relationship to make an appeal for the two Nigerian citizens condemned to death for drug related offenses,” Maduekwe said. No details on the convicted Nigerians were available.
■Jordan
Man ‘murdered’ offspring
A criminal prosecutor on Friday accused a Jordanian man of premeditated murder after he confessed to stabbing to death six people, including his three children, a judicial source said. The suspect, who was not named, stabbed to death his neighbor and her two children at dawn on Thursday and then killed his own three children from a first marriage, all in an east Amman neighborhood, the source said. He was arrested after his current wife tipped off police about the murders and he admitted under questioning to carrying out the killings, the source said. A judicial source quoted the suspect as saying he was having an affair with his neighbor and decided to kill her after a row. After stabbing his neighbor and her two children he killed his own offspring, aged eight, seven and five “because my life is now over,” he reportedly told investigators.
■Lebanon
Explosion kills soldier
An explosion shook the area near an army post in north Lebanon yesterday, killing one soldier, security sources said. The explosion occurred in al-Abedeh near the northern port city of Tripoli, the sources said. One soldier was killed in the blast, the sources said. Other details were not available.
■Spain
Two die in plane crash
Nine skydivers leapt from a plane in eastern Spain on Friday when the aircraft lost a wing and plunged to earth, killing the pilot and one passenger, the interior ministry said. The News network Cadena Ser, citing local witnesses, reported that four of the parachutists were injured, two of them seriously. A 23-year-old man suffered a back injury and a 52-year-old man was being treated for a neck injury, Cadena Ser said in its radio and Web site news reports. Two other skydivers suffered light injuries and the remaining five were unhurt, the network said. A spokeswoman for the ministry said the plane, which was used for skydiving practice, burned on impact, killing the pilot and a passenger. The plane took off from Lillo in the province of Toledo.
■UNITED STATES
Robbers wear thongs
Police in a Colorado town are searching for two robbers whose masks showed plenty of fashion sense but little modesty: women’s thong underwear. A surveillance video released this week by police in Arvada, Colorado, shows two unarmed men inside the convenience store. They stole an undisclosed amount of cash and cigarettes in the robbery on May 16. One man wore a green thong and the other wore blue. Each thong barely covered the man’s nose, mouth and chin and left the rest of his face exposed. One also wore a pink backpack in which he stuffed the stolen items.
■UNITED STATES
Bedbugs bite Fox worker
A Fox News employee who says she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder after being bitten by bedbugs at work filed a lawsuit on Thursday against the owner of the Manhattan office tower where she worked. Jane Clark, 37, a 12-year veteran of Fox News, a unit of News Corp, said she complained to human resources after being bitten three times between last October and April. She said she was ridiculed and the office was not treated for months. The suit did not say how much Clark was seeking in damages.
■UNITED STATES
Police caught in sting
Two veteran police officers were charged on Friday with providing protection for purported shipments of cocaine and stolen goods in what was actually an undercover FBI operation. Officer Geovani Nunez and Detective Jorge Hernandez are accused in court documents of helping protect shipments of what they thought were stolen televisions and computers and at least 12kg of cocaine — sometimes by using their police cars to escort trucks. Prosecutors said the 13-year veterans of the Miami Police Department were paid a combined US$39,500 by a secret FBI informant they thought was involved in illegal businesses, prosecutors said.
■UNITED STATES
Drug kingpin sentenced
A Bahamian designated by the White House as an international drug kingpin was sentenced to 35 years in prison on Friday by a federal court judge. Samuel Knowles, who was extradited to Florida in 2006, was convicted of drug smuggling in March and ordered to forfeit nearly US$14 million in illegal proceeds for bringing thousands of kilograms of cocaine to the US in 1995 and 1996. The Bush administration had put Knowles on a blacklist that bars US banks from dealing with suspected international drug traffickers or their companies. Knowles faced a possible life prison term. But the US Attorney’s office said District Court Judge James Cohn in Miami limited his sentence to 35 years.
■MEXICO
Cocaine formed into Jesus
US customs officials have seized a statue of Jesus Christ made from plaster mixed with cocaine — the latest sophisticated attempt to smuggle drugs from Mexico. Sniffer dogs at the border crossing in Laredo, Texas, alerted officials to the smell of narcotics in the 3kg statue, which was in the trunk of a car being driven by a Mexican woman into the US last week. “The statue tested positive for cocaine,” Nancy Herrera, an official at the US Attorney’s Office Southern District of Texas said on Friday. US border police arrested a 61-year-old Mexican man accused of offering the woman US$80 to carry the statue to the bus station in downtown Laredo. The woman escaped back to Mexico, Herrera said.
‘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