■INDONESIA
Killer to release album
A man on trial over a string of gruesome murders is planning to release an album of pop songs, a report said on Wednesday. Verry Idham Henyansyah, also known as Ryan, is facing a possible death sentence over the murder of 11 people, including a toddler. Ten of Henyansyah’s alleged victims were found buried behind his parents’ home in East Java Province. The accused serial killer told reporters as he was led away from his first trial hearing that he was planning to record an album of pop songs in the archipelago’s languages, news Web site Kompas.com reported.
■JAPAN
Shy scientist accepts Nobel
Nobel Physics laureate Toshihide Maskawa, an introvert who until recently had no passport, said on Wednesday he would make his first trip overseas next month to accept the award in Stockholm. “The Nobel Prize is a social phenomenon and while it is not a research activity, I will go to accomplish that phenomenon,” he told reporters. The bespectacled, gray-haired physicist — one of three to share the prestigious award — denied being shy, although he blushed and giggled at times during a press conference at The Foreign Correspondents’ Club. In the 1970s, Maskawa and Makoto Kobayashi came up with a theory on why antimatter sometimes does not obey the same rules as matter. They found that nature had three families of quarks, an elementary particle.
■JAPAN
‘He’ bear turns out to be she
Handlers of a popular polar bear, brought to mate with a female in a zoo, found their breeding plan was doomed when they noticed that he, in fact, was a she. Tsuyoshi, a four-year-old, 200kg cream-colored polar bear, had been living in harmony with a female polar bear since June, the two often playing together, Masako Inoue, a zookeeper at the Kushiro Municipal Zoo, said on Wednesday. “We thought he was a male, so we never had any doubts as we took care of him,” she said. “But one day we realised that the two bears urinate in the same way, and we thought, is that how males do it? And once we started to look at things that way, we weren’t quite so sure.” After two DNA examinations of Tsuyoshi’s hair and a manual exam, the Kushiro Municipal Zoo found Tsuyoshi to be a female.
■MALAYSIA
Woman convicted of abuse
A court sentenced a former flight attendant to 18 years in prison yesterday for scalding her Indonesian housemaid with hot water and an iron in one of the country’s worst cases of domestic worker abuse. Sessions Court Judge Akhtar Tahir found Yim Pek Ha guilty of using dangerous weapons to inflict injury on Nirmala Bonat at her Kuala Lumpur condominium on three separate occasions in early 2004. Akhtar ordered Yim to start serving the sentence immediately. Bonat said she was beaten and burned for mistakes she made during her five months in Yim’s home. She said that on one occasion her employer took a hot iron and pressed it against her breasts after complaining that clothes had not been properly ironed.
■JAPAN
PM fumbles yet again
The gaffe-prone prime minister is in trouble again — this time for a remark criticizing the elderly as a tax burden for racking up medical expenses. “They’re hobbling around and constantly going to the doctor,” Prime Minister Taro Aso was quoted as saying in a transcript of a Nov. 20 meeting of ministers on economic policies.
■EGYPT
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