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World News Quick Take

■ JAPAN

UN chief begins tour

UN chief Ban Ki-moon arrived yesterday, an airport official said, in the first leg of a two-week Asian tour that will take him to China, South Korea and the G8 summit in Hokkaido. The secretary-general is expected to stay in Japan until Tuesday, meeting Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura and Emperor Akihito. With climate change the main topic on his agenda, Ban was expected yesterday to head the ancient capital of Kyoto, home of the Kyoto Protocol, where he is scheduled to meet government officials and business leaders. He is expected to deliver a speech on climate change at Kyoto University today.


■ JAPAN

PM gives pre-G8 pep talk

Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda yesterday urged all major greenhouse gas emitters to tackle climate change as he sought to galvanize efforts ahead of next month’s G8 summit. “It is necessary for all major emitters to participate in efforts” to fight climate change, he said, speaking in front of lawmakers from the world’s eight most industrialized nations as well as five major emerging economies. Climate change “is a borderless problem. It will remain unresolved if only some countries participate, even if they do their best,” he added at a forum on climate change, ahead of the July 7 to July 9 G8 summit.


■ CHINA

Three die in coke plant blast

Three workers died and three others were injured by an explosion at a coke plant in Yunnan Province, the Xinhua news agency said yesterday. The explosion occurred on Friday morning at a workshop at the Yunnan Dawei Coke Co in Qujing, blowing off the cover of a storage tank. Strong prices for coke have kept many small and dangerous coking plants open, despite repeated government pledges to crack down on polluting plants or those that don’t meet minimum capacity standards.


■ SINGAPORE

‘Organsellers’ charged

Two Indonesians have been charged with putting their kidneys up for sale, in what reports say is the first prosecution against organ trade in the country. The health ministry said in a statement two Indonesian men had been arrested and charged for organ trading and lying to a hospital ethics committee. Both men have pleaded guilty. One of the potential recipients was Tang Wee Sung, the head of CK Tang, a well-known retailer. The Straits Times said yesterday one of the men had agreed to sell his kidney to Tang for 150 million rupiah (US$16,290), but the deal was scuppered when the health ministry intervened. The other sold his organ to an Indonesian woman for 186 million rupiah after convincing an ethics panel his buyer was his adopted mother. The transplant took place in a Singapore hospital in March.


■ BANGLADESH

Major party to enter polls

A major political party has said it will take part in local council polls in a big boost to the army-backed government’s plans for the country’s smooth transition to democracy. The Awami League said it would participate in polls for city and town councils on Aug. 4 in a dramatic U-turn on its earlier stand to boycott all polls except the parliamentary elections. “It is a unanimous decision of the party’s working committee. We are taking part in these polls for the greater interest of democracy in the country,” said Zillur Rahman, acting president of the party. The military-backed emergency government announced the local council polls schedule last week, only to be fiercely opposed by top parties.


■ RUSSIA

Plane crashes, five dead

A small plane crashed on Friday by a river near Moscow, killing all five people on board who were conducting an aerial photography assignment, officials said. The plane crashed by the banks of the Oka River in Pushchino District, about 100km from the capital, said Liudmila Martynova, a spokeswoman from the emergency situations ministry. The single-engine biplane’s two crew and all three members of the photography team died, she stated, confirming later that there were no other survivors. “It seems that the plane fell from an altitude of between 1.5 and 2km and burst into flames when it hit the ground,” news agency Ria-Novosti also quoted a ministry official as saying.



■ NIGER

Rebel fighting kills 26

Twenty-six government soldiers and seven rebels have been killed in clashes in Niger, the Niger Movement for Justice (MNJ) said in a statement. The rebel group said that the commander of the unit involved in the fighting on Friday was also missing. Niger’s authorities confirmed that the battle took place, but said that none of its soldiers were killed. The MNJ, which consists mainly of the nomadic Tuareg people, has carried out a series of attacks on the Nigerian military and foreign mining interests since early last year.



■ ITALY

Chavez asked to testify

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez will be asked to testify in a drug trafficking trial in Italy as a defense witness, the defendant’s lawyer said on Friday. Jailed Venezuelan businessman Walter Alexander Del Nogal, who was arrested in Milan in September and charged with drug trafficking, is seeking Chavez’s testimony. He is being tried at a court in the Sicilian capital Palermo, which agreed this week to allow Chavez as a witness, Del Nogal’s attorney Roberto Tricoli said. Del Nogal wants to debunk statements by the star prosecution witness, mob informant Massimo Lo Vreglio, who said he saw Del Nogal and Chavez together at a records office in Caracas, Tricoli said.


■ DR Congo

Troops riot, soldier dies

A riot by troops in eastern areas has killed one soldier and injured more than 20 people, UN officials said on Friday. It was the latest violence along the restive eastern border, where militias continue to clash with government soldiers and UN peacekeepers despite a series of ceasefires and peace agreements. The rioting started on Thursday at about 8pm local time. It appeared to have been sparked by the resistance of a battalion near the town of Bukavu to redeployment to another part of South Kivu Province, said Colonel Jean-Paul Dietrich, a UN military spokesman. Heavy and light weapons fire could be heard throughout the night and into Friday morning, but the area appeared calm by Friday.


■ GERMANY

Church imports Indians

A Catholic diocese unveiled plans on Friday to “borrow” about 12 priests from India’s Kerala State because it cannot recruit enough German men to lead prayers and run parishes. The northern diocese of Hildesheim will pay for the 12 to fly to the country and for them to learn German. The missionaries are to spend 10 to 15 years ministering to Catholics in the country before returning to their home diocese of Palai. The German Catholic Church, which is funded by taxes on parishioners’ income, has hired Dutch, Belgian and Polish priests to fill shortfalls for decades, but priest recruitment in those nations has been slipping too.


■ CANADA

Sealskin for Canada day

Canadians should wear sealskin to celebrate the country’s birthday on Wednesday, an Inuit leader said on Friday, in defiance of a European movement to ban the import of Canadian seal products. “I am quite tired of other people telling us how to live our lives, without taking the time to learn about our culture and way of life,” National Inuit leader Mary Simon said. “I am calling on Canadians who support us to get some seal clothing and wear it in a show of solidarity to Inuit and other Canadian sealers on Canada Day.” Simon said she made the plea in response to plans by animal rights protesters to gather in Brussels and demand a prohibition on seal items like furs, skins and health products.



■ CANADA

Teen faces murder charges

The brother of a teenage girl who was strangled to death, apparently for failing to wear the hijab, was charged on Friday with first-degree murder. Waqas Parvez, 27, initially was charged with obstruction of justice in the death of Aqsa Parvez. Aqsa Parvez, whose family is of Pakistani origin, was 16 when she was killed in December during what friends said was a family dispute over her reluctance to wear the traditional headscarf. Shortly after her death, her father, Muhammed Parvez, 57, was charged with second-degree murder. Earlier this month, the charge was upgraded to first-degree murder.


■ MEXICO

‘Green wall’ goes up

The first of 400,000 trees are being planted to form a “green wall” in protest of the fence the US is building along the border. The treeline will eventually stretch 512km along the border between the Mexican state of Coahuila and Texas. Coahuila Governor Humberto Moreira Valdes says “our wall is of life, and it competes with shame and hate.” The US government says the fence is critical to security. Critics say it fuels animosity between the two countries and raises environmental and private property concerns.


■ UNITED STATES

NRA sues San Francisco

The National Rifle Association (NRA) sued the city of San Francisco on Friday to overturn its ban on handguns in public housing, a day after the Supreme Court struck down a handgun ban in Washington. The legal action follows a similar lawsuit against the city of Chicago over its handgun ban, filed within hours of Thursday’s high court ruling. In San Francisco, the NRA was joined by the Washington state-based Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms and a gun owner who lives in the city’s Valencia Gardens housing project. The gun owner, who is gay, says he keeps the weapon to defend himself from “sexual orientation hate crimes.”



■ UNITED STATES

Organ trafficker gets jail

The mastermind of a network caught trafficking organs illegally harvested from some 1,000 bodies including that of veteran BBC journalist Alistair Cooke was sentenced to 54 years in jail on Friday. Former dentist Michael Mastromarino, 44, was sentenced after pleading guilty earlier this year to a conspiracy to steal human tissue. “In accordance with a March 18 guilty plea, Mastromarino was sentenced today to 18 to 54 years in prison,” said District Attorney Charles Hynes. Mastromarino was “charged with orchestrating a large-scale, criminal enterprise, in which tissues were harvested from people who never consented before they died, to be donors,” Hynes said.
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