■ PAPUA NEW GUINEA
Hundreds mourn Kabui
Hundreds of mourners have filled a cathedral for the state funeral of the first president of the autonomous island of Bougainville. Joseph Kabui died on Saturday of a suspected heart attack. His funeral yesterday was attended by top Papua New Guinea officials and others. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a statement that the 54-year-old Kabui was a skilled mediator and peacemaker who had a genuine concern for the future of his people. Kabui had been president since May 2005. He led the Bougainville Revolutionary Army during the 1990s until a deal in 1997 granted wide autonomous powers to his island. Kabui is survived by his wife, Rose, and four children.
■ THAILAND
Separatists kill three in Yala
Suspected separatists have killed three people in the southern part of the country, including a senior police officer whose body was set on fire in front of his frantic wife, police said yesterday. A group of militants in a pick-up truck followed Somkid Taptimsri, a 44-year-old deputy investigator in Yala Province, to his father-in-law’s house and shot him on Monday evening, local police said. They then doused his body and his car with petrol and set him on fire as his wife tried to call for help, police said. Yesterday morning, a 25-year-old former soldier and his 20-year-old friend were killed in a drive-by shooting in nearby Narathiwat province, local authorities said.
■ NORTH KOREA
State denounces terrorism
Pyongyang on Tuesday stressed its opposition to all forms of terrorism, describing such attacks as a threat to human life and international stability. The communist state is pressing for its removal from a US list of state sponsors of terrorism in return for its efforts to shut down its nuclear weapons program. North Korea “will firmly maintain its consistent stand of opposing all forms of terrorism and any support to it and fulfill its responsibility and duty in the struggle against terrorism as a dignified member of the United Nations, in the future, too,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.
■ JAPAN
Unlicensed firefighter fired
A firefighter lost his job after city officials found out he had been driving ambulances and firetrucks for over 20 years without a driver’s license, an official in Takaoka City, central Japan, said yesterday. The case came to light when the firefighter in his 40s, who had been working for the city for over 25 years, hesitated to show his driver’s license during a regular inspection last week, said Shigeru Sawasaki, a Takaoka City official. “He was acting awkward when the inspection took place on the fifth,” Sawasaki said. “And when the inspector took the driver’s license and checked, it belonged to a family member.”
■ HONG KONG
Ambulance called over bite
A squeamish Hong Kong animal lover was rushed to hospital by ambulance after being bitten on the finger by his pet hamster, emergency services said yesterday. The 20-year-old rang 999 after the hamster nipped him on his finger at his home as he stroked him in the city’s Tin Shui Wai district at 3am on Monday. An ambulance was sent to take him to hospital where he was treated and later discharged after minor treatment, a police spokesman said. Government advertising campaigns have been launched in Hong Kong to try to stop people misusing the free emergency services in the wealthy city of 6.9 million.
■ FRANCE
Smoking affects mind: study
Middle-aged adults who smoke tended to perform poorly on tests of memory and reasoning compared with nonsmokers, adding to the list of reasons not to smoke, researchers from the National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Villejuif, France, said on Monday. Analyzing previously collected data on about 5,000 British civil servants, the researchers found those who smoked were more likely than people who never smoked to be in the lowest-performing of five groups in tests of memory, reasoning, vocabulary and verbal fluency. Smoking was associated with mental decline in middle age, as it is with dementia and a host of physical ills later in life, the report published in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine said.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Abandoned owls increasing
A bird sanctuary has blamed the rising number of abandoned owls on Harry Potter magic. The Flintshire Wildlife and Pet Rescue Centre in Holywell, Wales, said on Monday it was looking after 36 owls and believed that at least half of the birds were bought for children who had read the Harry Potter books or seen the films. “People want these owls for small children but they are not suitable for small children, especially the large owls like Hedwig in the Harry Potter film,” said Joy Pierce Jones, the centre’s co-owner. “It is a very nice pet but you have to have the commitment,” she said, adding that children did not have that commitment.
■ FRANCE
Veteran anchor to be ousted
Star news anchor Patrick Poivre d’Arvor is to be ousted in favor of a glamorous younger woman, reports said on Monday. Known by his initials “PPDA,” Poivre d’Arvor, 60, has spent 21 years hosting the country’s most-watched evening news broadcast on private channel TF1. The veteran journalist made global headlines in 1990 just before the Gulf War for smuggling an 18-month-old baby out of Baghdad in a travel bag. But RTL radio reported on Sunday that Laurence Ferrari, 41, who has hosted a string of prime-time TV shows for the past 10 years, would take over in September as part of an image revamp to fight a ratings slump.
■ NETHERLANDS
Spiked pit claims victim
A man preparing a race course through a park was slightly injured when he fell into a pit lined with sharpened spikes — the third such trap found in the area this year, police said on Monday. The pit, lined with 15cm to 30cm long metal spikes embedded in a concrete block, had been carefully hidden under leaves and branches in a park near Venlo, a town near the German border, police said. The pit was 1.5m deep and 80cm wide. The man who fell in on Sunday managed to avoid the spikes, but suffered a bruised thigh.
■ ITALY
Ancient necropolis found
Archeologists have discovered a nearly 2,000-year-old intact necropolis on the outskirts of Rome that gives a rare insight into the lives of poor workers in the Roman era. The simple burial complex, dating to the first and second century when the Roman empire was at its height, held about 320 tombs bearing well-preserved skeletal remains and artifacts like lamps and jewelry to accompany the dead into the after-life. Archeologists on Monday hailed the discovery as significant for offering a rare glimpse into the beliefs and traits of one of the poorest sections of Roman society — laborers or slaves who probably carried merchandise at a nearby port. Some tombs also held remains of children.
■ UNITED STATES
Indiana Jones likes tigers
Harrison Ford traded his whip for the bully pulpit on Monday to make the case for saving tigers from extinction, which environmentalists believe could have a serious impact on the world’s ecosystem. While he spoke for less than a minute, the star of Indiana Jones was the main attraction at a National Zoo event in Washington, attended by ambassadors and conservationists from around the globe and designed to re-launch an international effort to preserve the dwindling habitats of wild tigers. Ford, who also sits on the board of Conservation International, pleaded with communities to help protect these “magnificent creatures,” who lie at the top of the food chain and at the center of the ecological systems they inhabit. Tigers’ roaming areas have been reduced to 7 percent from historic highs, and have been cut 40 percent since 1995.
■ VENEZUELA
Chavez rides ‘atomic bike’
President Hugo Chavez is mocking critics who question his close relationship with Iran by showing off what he calls an “atomic bicycle” produced in Venezuela under a joint venture with an Iranian company. Chavez rode one of the bikes during his Sunday TV program and joked about what he called the bicycle’s “radioactivity” and offered one to US President George W. Bush. Chavez says the new bicycle factory will eventually be able to manufacture 100,000 bikes a year.
■ CANADA
Race key to hate crimes
Hate crimes account for less than 1 percent of all crime in the country, a police study showed, but its main victims are blacks, followed by South Asians and people of Middle Eastern origin, the Statistics Canada’s study released on Monday said. In 2006 there were 892 hate crimes reported countrywide; the motivation in 60 percent of them was race or ethnic origin, 25 percent on religion and 10 percent on sexual orientation, the study found. A full half of the race and ethnic-based crimes were aimed at blacks; 13 percent at South Asians and 12 percent at Arabs and people from western Asia, the report said. Among religion-focused hate crimes, two-thirds of those reported were against Jews, 21 percent against Muslims and 6 percent against Catholics. Most of 80 incidents involving sexual orientation were directed at homosexuals, and more than half were violent, usually involving an assault, a much higher violence rate than for hate crimes in other categories. Youths aged 12 to 17 years old were far more likely to be involved in hate crimes than older people; they accounted for 38 percent of hate crimes reported in 2006, the study said.
■ BRAZIL
Bomb blast injures three
Three people were injured on Monday when a bomb exploded at a bakery in the center of the southern city of Porto Alegre, one seriously. The local fire department said the bomb was hidden inside a backpack that had been left in the shop by a man thought to be about 40 years old. The motive was not immediately known.
■ UNITED STATES
Anderson selling her Viper
Pamela Anderson is selling her prized Dodge Viper and donating the proceeds to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). “I’ve been working with PETA for 15 years,” she said. “They’re kind of my ethical advisers. With them, I see actual results.” The 40-year-old actress recently held a private estate sale to benefit the organization, and she’s planning to personally oversee the sale of her 2000 Viper at the Hollywood memorabilia auction later this month in Las Vegas.
‘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