■ Malaysia
PM may step down in 2010
Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi will announce plans to retire in June 2010, a move aimed at ending months of political uncertainty that have unnerved investors, a news Web site said yesterday. Abdullah was expected to announce the handover date to his deputy, Najib Razak, at a party meeting yesterday, the influential Malaysian Insider said without citing sources. Abdullah laid out a timeline “because he believed that setting a date would bring some semblance of certainty to Malaysia and reduce the level of politicking, which has upset many Malaysians and foreign investors,” the Web site report said. The Malaysian Insider site is run by several individuals, including an ex-journalist, known to be close to Abdullah.
■ PHILIPPINES
Tribunal sacks 11 plotters
A military tribunal dismissed 11 officers from service yesterday for participating in a short-lived mutiny against President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo in July 2003. The military said the five captains and six lieutenants would remain under detention because they still face charges in a civilian court for taking over a high-rise building in Makati during the 2003 mutiny. Two months ago, Arroyo pardoned nine other army officers convicted for the coup by a civilian court after they apologized to her in public and promised not to take part in future attempts to unseat her. Those nine were also removed from military service.
■ HONG KONG
Foreign maids protest
Foreign maids working in the territory were to stage protests yesterday over a US$12.80 a month pay rise awarded by the government. The pay rise increases the minimum monthly pay for foreign live-in maids, most of them from the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand, to US$458. Philippine Consul General to Hong Kong Alejandrino Vicente welcomed the move, saying it would help workers cope with rising living costs. However, groups representing the maids say the pay rise was too little after their monthly pay was slashed by US$51 in 2003 to help employers cope with the 2003 SARS crisis.
■ UZBEKISTAN
Depot blast kills three
A series of explosions at a Soviet-era arms depot in southern Uzbekistan killed at least three people and smashed windows in buildings several kilometers away, media and witnesses said yesterday. The blast, caused by a fire, occurred in the town of Kagan outside the ancient Silk Road town of Bukhara late on Wednesday, a local witness said. Russia’s Ria-Novosti news agency quoted an Uzbek government source as saying three people died and another 21 were injured by the explosion. Uzbek officials have not issued any official information on the accident.
■ SINGAPORE
Ministry slams rights critics
Allegations that Singapore fails to meet international standards for political and human rights are without substance, the law ministry said yesterday. It was reacting to a report by the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, which said it had identified a number of areas in which Singapore fell far short of international norms. It accused the rights institute of closing ranks “with other Western human rights NGOs to prescribe for Singapore and all new countries, especially China, Western norms of liberal democracy as the only way to bring stability and prosperity.” The ministry referred to a 15-page brief it submitted to the bar association but which it said had not been taken into account.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Omagh charges ruled out
No one will be charged over the bomb massacre in the town of Omagh unless fresh evidence is found and new witnesses come forward, the body that oversees policing in Northern Ireland said on Wednesday. The Northern Ireland Policing Board concluded that there is virtually no chance of charges being brought against anyone in the Real IRA, the terror group responsible for the attack. The blast that ripped through Omagh on Aug. 15, 1998, killed 29 men, women and children — the highest death toll for a single act of terrorism in 35 years of the Troubles. Relatives of those killed on Wednesday accused the police and governments on both sides of the border of “throwing in the towel.”
■ RUSSIA
Man dies in folding couch
A woman in St Petersburg killed her drunk husband with a folding couch, media reported on Wednesday. Channel Five said the man’s wife, upset with her husband for being drunk and refusing to get up, kicked a handle after an argument, activating a mechanism that folds the couch up against a wall. The man fell between the mattress and the back of the couch, Channel Five quoted emergency workers as saying. The woman then left the room and returned three hours later to check on him, but found him dead. Emergency workers said the man died instantly.
■ ROMANIA
‘Happy news’ quota blocked
Romanians have a right to doom and gloom, the constitutional court ruled on Wednesday, blocking a new law obliging radio and television stations to broadcast good and bad news in equal proportions. The law, passed by the Senate last month, was unconstitutional, the court found. The opposition liberal democrats had appealed to the constitutional court, arguing that the new legislation infringed freedom of expression. The law had been the idea of two senators, whose aim, they said, was to “to offer to the public the chance to have balanced perceptions on daily life, mentally and emotionally.”
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Woman finds bat in her bra
A woman on Wednesday spoke of her surprise after finding a baby bat in her bra. Abbie Hawkins, 19, harbored the creature in her bosom for over four hours and had felt a slight twitching, but thought it was her mobile phone vibrating. Eventually, though, she checked and found the creature nestling in the padding pocket of her 34FF bra. “Once I realized it was a bat I was shocked, but then I felt quite sorry for it really,” Hawkins, a hotel receptionist from Norfolk, told the Eastern Daily Press newspaper. “It looked very snug in there and I thought how mean I was for disturbing it.” The bat survived unharmed and has been released back into the wild.
■ SCOTLAND
Infertility linked to obesity
Fertility doctors on Wednesday advised obese men to lose weight if they want to start a family, after research linked a dramatic fall in sperm quality to rising body weight. Obese men produced substantially less sperm than average and had higher levels of abnormalities, which can reduce chances of conceiving and increase the risk of miscarriage, researchers said. Doctors examined records for 5,316 men attending Aberdeen Fertility Centre in Scotland between 1990 and last year and identified 2,037 who had listed their body mass index (BMI). They found that obese men produced 60 percent less seminal fluid than men with a healthy BMI, and had 40 percent higher levels of abnormal sperm.
■ CANADA
Air India bomber released
The only man convicted in connection with the 1985 Air India bombings was granted bail yesterday as he awaits trial for allegedly lying to a court that he knew nothing about the plot. The ruling by British Columbia Court of Appeal judge Anne Rowles, which caught government officials by surprise, allows Inderjit Singh Reyat, 55, to be out of prison for the first time in two decades. Details of the ruling, including the reasons and the conditions placed on Reyat during his release, are subject to a publication ban. His perjury trial in Vancouver is scheduled to start in January.
■ CANADA
US deserter gets reprieve
A US national guardsman who refused to redeploy to Iraq was granted a last-ditch reprieve from deportation yesterday when the Federal Court said he could stay while it decides whether to hear his case. Sergeant Corey Glass, 25, was the first Iraqi war dodger from the US to face imminent deportation. Glass, who had already left his Toronto apartment and was set to return to the US and possible jail time, was ecstatic. Like other US soldiers who fled to the country, his asylum claim was turned down on the grounds that although he faced prosecution in the US, he could rely on due process. Glass was served a deportation order in May. About 200 US military deserters are believed to have fled north of the border to avoid service in Iraq.
■ UNITED STATES
Left-handed presidents
Regardless of whether citizens elect the Republican John McCain or Democrat Barack Obama president in November, the man who takes up residency in the White House will be a lefty — at least in terms of the hand he favors. He will follow in the footsteps of a slew of presidents, from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton, who were left-handed. The country has had four left-handed presidents since 1974: Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, the New York Sun noted recently.
■ UNITED STATES
‘Fake Steve Jobs’ retired
The once-mysterious blogger known as “Fake Steve Jobs” is turning off his iPhone for good. Daniel Lyons, the former Forbes magazine journalist who wrote the blog The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs for the last two years, is moving on with his professional life and creative pursuits. In a final entry yesterday entitled, “I’m sailing away,” the author, who is moving to Newsweek as a technology columnist this fall, said he was shutting down the popular parody of the life of the Apple chief executive and starting a new blog under his own name. Lyons said that he had grown tired of his fictional creation, but mainly he was worried about making fun of a real person whose health has been a recent topic of speculation.
■ BRAZIL
Congress kills abortion bill
A committee in the lower house of Congress voted down a bill yesterday that would have legalized abortion in the world’s most populous Roman Catholic nation. The Justice and Constitution Committee in the Chamber of Deputies voted 57-4 against a bill that had been stuck in Congress for 17 years, steeped in controversy. It is now likely to be shelved. Several ruling party legislators pushed the bill after Health Minister Jose Temporao last year all but endorsed legalizing abortion. Church groups, which lobbied against the legislative proposal and witnessed the hearing, cheered and prayed in celebration after the vote.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing