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■HONG KONG

Court told of feng shui lover

Asia’s richest woman, according to court testimony, was the lover of a feng shui master for 14 years before leaving him her entire multibillion US dollar fortune, a news report said yesterday. Lawyers for feng shui master Tony Chan said he and Nina Wang shared a “long-lasting, close and affectionate love” from 1993 to her death last year, the South China Morning Post reported. The pair allegedly had “midnight meetings” disguised as feng shui consultations during their secret affair, which began three years after Wang’s husband was kidnapped, never to reappear. The claims were made at a preliminary High Court hearing on Friday after lawyers for Wang’s relatives had claimed Wang was tricked into giving away her fortune to Chan in return for a promise of eternal life. Wang, head of Hong Kong’s Chinachem property empire, died of cancer at the age of 69 after signing her fortune, estimated at up to US$13 billion, to the little-known feng shui master.



■INDIA

Media hail probe landing

Indian newspapers yesterday were euphoric about the landing of a probe on the moon, marking a milestone for the country’s 45-year-old space program. “The tricolour has landed,” trumpeted the Hindustan Times in a banner headline, referring to the nation’s green, orange and white flag. “India touches the moon,” the Indian Express newspaper said. The probe made a textbook-perfect landing on the lunar surface late on Friday after being released from the unmanned Chandrayaan-1 orbiter circling the moon, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) announced. India now joins Russia, the US, Japan and the European Space Agency in successfully landing moon probes.



■CHINA

Faulty IV needles recalled

Authorities are recalling a defective batch of intravenous needles after one easily broke and became embedded in a baby’s scalp, the latest in a string of product safety problems for the country. The incident occurred last month at a maternity and childcare hospital in southern Guangdong Province, the Health Ministry said on its Web site in a notice posted on Friday. Sample testing on needles in the same batch showed that six of them broke easily, the notice said. The needles, produced by the Shanghai-based Damei Medicinal Plastic Factory, have been recalled by the State Food and Drug Administration.



■INDIA

Court decries handwriting

A doctor has sworn in a legal undertaking that she will improve her handwriting after judges complained that they could not read her spidery scrawl, media said yesterday. The radiologist from Thane, in the greater Mumbai area, had been asked to file a report in the case of a man who claimed that his underage daughter had been forced into marriage by a neighbor. The medic conducted an age test on the girl, found her to be over 18 and that she wanted to stay in the marriage, leading to the dismissal of her father’s case. But the doctor’s conclusions had to be relayed by telephone to the Bombay High Court Friday, as she was not present at the hearing and the two judges could not decipher her handwriting.



■MALAYSIA

Thai chickens banned

Officials have temporarily frozen the importation of chickens from Thailand because of fears over bird flu cases in its Southeast Asian neighbor, a newspaper reported yesterday. Agriculture Minister Mustapa Mohamed said the ban would be lifted when the situation in Thailand returned to normal. “Operations to prevent chicken smuggling at border areas have to be beefed up,” Mustapa was quoted as saying by the New Straits Times newspaper. On Thursday, Thailand confirmed its second bird flu case in a week, saying the virus had been detected in a rural district north of Bangkok.



■SINGAPORE

Malaysian to hang for drugs

A Malaysian man was sentenced to death by hanging after he was found guilty of drug trafficking, a newspaper report said yesterday. Yong Vui Kong, 20, was found guilty of bringing 47g of heroin into the city-state from Malaysia in June last year. Yong, who was 19 at the time, said he did not know the contents of the gift-wrapped packages and was ordered by his boss not to open them, the Straits Times newspaper reported. However, Yong’s accomplice, who has been sentenced to 22 years in jail, testified to receiving drugs from Yong five to six times last year. Anyone caught carrying more than 15g of heroin, 30g of cocaine, 500g of cannabis or 250g of methamphetamine faces a mandatory death sentence.



■INDONESIA

Iraqi migrants found

Forty Iraqi migrants are being questioned by authorities after being found stranded on a remote island on their way to Australia, police said yesterday. The Iraqis, including nine children, were picked up by police on Tuesday off southern Sumbawa island and are being fed and housed at police headquarters in the nearby town of Dompu, local police chief Giri Basuki said. “We found them on a small island, they were probably suffering from engine trouble,” Basuki said. “They said they were heading to Australia to find work,” he said.



■GERMANY

Troop drinking shocks many

If the Defense Ministry’s figures are anything to go by, being a soldier in Afghanistan is clearly thirsty work. Military sources said around 1 million liters of beer were shipped to German troops stationed in Afghanistan last year, as well as almost 70,000 liters of wine and sekt, a local sparkling wine. The admission has shocked a country that has never had much time for the Afghan mission. Newspaper reports under headlines such as “Drink for the Fatherland” and “Bundeswehr Boozers” have suggested that alcohol was the only way of keeping soldiers onside at a time when it was becoming ever harder to recruit them. The figures suggested that the 3,600 soldiers based in Afghanistan as part of NATO’s ISAF reconstruction mission were each consuming around 278 liters of beer a year each, as well as 128 measures of wine.



■RUSSIA

Hang him by the balls: Putin

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin allegedly threatened to hang Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili “by the balls” during the August war in Georgia, a report not denied by Putin’s spokesman on Friday. French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s diplomatic aide Jean-David Levitte earlier told Le Nouvel Observateur magazine that Putin had told Sarkozy in a meeting: “Saakashvili, I’m going to make him hang by the balls.” “Vladimir Putin did use strong language,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, refusing to deny the report. He also called the report “provocative” and said its publication was “difficult to understand.” Putin is known for his colorful and often very crude turns of phrase. Referring to Chechen separatist rebels, he once threatened to “waste them in the outhouse.”



■BELARUS

President praises Obama

President Alexander Lukashenko called US president-elect Barack Obama “good-looking” in an interview published on Friday and said he was just like himself when he came to power in 1994. “I look at Obama, a young man, a good-looking person,” Lukashenko told the Wall Street Journal. “That is my first impression, I feel sorry for him. He looks 100 percent like Lukashenko, when I came to power after the downfall of the Soviet Union. The store shelves were empty, a severe financial crisis,” he said. Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus since 1994, has been dubbed “Europe’s last dictator” by Washington and presides over an unreformed Soviet-style command economy.



■SPAIN

Madrid bans tinsel wigs

Madrid has banned the sale of tinsel wigs, costumes and other joke-shop items from its main Christmas market in a bid to limit the offerings to traditional items. The decision aims to restore the “Christmas spirit” to the market, held every year for over a century at the central Plaza Mayor square, the online edition of daily newspaper El Pais reported, citing city officials. It was taken in June but only made public on Friday, it said. Under the new rules, the 84 stalls that will be set up in the square later this month will only be allowed to sell lights, trees, decorations, figurines and other items needed to make a traditional nativity scene. Vendors wishing to sell novelty items will be allowed to do so at 20 stalls that will be set up at the nearby Santa Cruz square. The sale of costumes at the market has grown in popularity in recent years, with many of the hundreds of people who flock to it in the days before Christmas wearing their freshly bought wigs and masks, creating a carnival-like atmosphere in the square.



■UNITED STATES

Pet cemetery on travel list

A travel guide’s list of the best places in the world to be entombed includes a cemetery for animals in a New York City suburb. Lonely Planet’s Best in Travel 2009 includes the Hartsdale Pet Cemetery with the Taj Mahal and the Great Pyramids among the 10 “best places of rest.” A spokesman for Hartsdale says it’s “delighted to be in such esteemed company.” The guide says the headstones at the pet cemetery are fascinating to read. One says, “Sport: Born a dog, died a gentleman.” There are 70,000 creatures and several bereaved humans in the 112-year-old pet cemetery, 32km north of New York City.



■UNITED STATES

‘Soul Train’ host charged

The Los Angeles city attorney has charged Don Cornelius, former host of the 1970s show Soul Train, in connection with two domestic incidents involving his wife last month. Cornelius was charged with spousal battery, assault with a deadly weapon and dissuading a witness from making a police report, all misdemeanors, city attorney spokesman Frank Mateljan said on Friday. The married 72-year-old producer was taken to jail last month after police were called to his Hollywood Hills home following a report of domestic dispute. Cornelius was released on US$50,000 bail. He could face up to one year in prison for each of the five misdemeanor charges.



■UNITED STATES

DNA leads to guilty verdict

A jury has reached a guilty verdict in the case of a man who was linked to the 1984 murder of a service station attendant through DNA found in blood on a dollar bill. Fifty-one-year-old Glenn Howard Griffin was convicted of first-degree murder on Friday. Bradley Newell Perry was working at a convenience store in Brigham City, Utah on May 26, 1984, when he was bludgeoned and stabbed to death. Police say Griffin gave a dollar bill as change to two men just after the killing while pretending to be an attendant at a gas pump. In 2005, DNA testing linked Griffin to blood found on the bill.



■UNITED STATES

‘Endeavour’ blasts off

The space shuttle Endeavour blasted off late on Friday carrying seven US astronauts on a “home improvement” mission that will expand living quarters on the orbiting International Space Station (ISS). Endeavour twisted up and away from the Kennedy Space Center launchpad at 7:55pm. Four minutes into flight, NASA’s shuttle was racing along at 9,600kph and continued to pick up speed before leaving Earth’s atmosphere eight minutes 33 seconds after liftoff, hurtling towards a rendezvous today with the space station that will last 12 days. The mission of the Endeavour, which launched nearly 10 years to the day since a shuttle crew first began constructing the ISS on November 20, 1998, will be to repair the station’s power-generating solar arrays and expand its living quarters to accommodate bigger crews.



■MEXICO

Body partially stuffed in pot

Two bullet-ridden bodies were found on Friday at the foot of a monument in Ciudad Juarez, one of them partially stuffed into a large pot. Police had not identified the bodies and had no immediate suspects. The bodies were discovered before dawn at the bottom of the Juan de Onate monument on John Paul II boulevard, said Alejandro Pariente, a spokesman for the regional Attorney General’s Office. One of the bodies was sitting inside a large pot commonly used for cooking pork, with his legs sticking out. The other had his hands tied.


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