■CHINA
Fireworks blaze kills 15
Revelers celebrating a birthday set off fireworks inside a bar in the south, triggering a blaze that killed 15 people and injured 22, state media said. The fire in Changle, Fujian Province, started just before midnight on Saturday, when 10 people lit the fireworks at their table, Xinhua news agency said. The explosion “set the ceiling on fire and the entire place was soon engulfed in flames,” Xinhua said, citing a city government spokesman.
■INDIA
Singh released after surgery
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was released from a hospital yesterday, one week after undergoing heart bypass surgery. Singh was in good condition and would likely be back at work in about three weeks, Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss told reporters outside the New Delhi hospital. “He is on his way to a speedy recovery,” Ramadoss said. The 76-year-old leader — who has a history of heart problems — underwent more than 12 hours of surgery to bypass five blocked arteries.
■THAILAND
Web prostitution on the rise
The Culture Ministry is urging authorities to crack down on a rising trend of Thai students using the Internet for direct-sale prostitution, media reports said yesterday. Culture Minister Theera Salukpetch asked the Education Ministry, the Communications Technology Ministry, police and Internet service providers to increase their vigilance against Web site prostitution, which he blamed on faulty values among the country’s youth, the Nation newspaper reported. Academics urged colleges and the government to take action against the trend of students using social networking Web sites such as Hi5 to advertise prostitution by posting their pictures with suggestive messages.
■JAPAN
Energy talks planned
Tokyo will soon launch talks with South Korea and Vietnam on cooperation in developing nuclear energy, with its sights set on growing demand in emerging economies, a report said yesterday. The talks on nuclear power accords with South Korea and Vietnam will start as early as this spring and Tokyo is expected to conclude an agreement with Russia, the Nikkei Shimbun said. Demand for construction of nuclear power stations is rising in emerging economies. The accords are designed to simplify export procedures for products related to nuclear power generation and prohibit their being diverted for military use or to other countries, the paper said.
■MALAYSIA
Drugs hidden in soap bars
Airport police detained an Indian national found carrying 7.5kg of the hallucinogen ketamine hidden in soap bars upon his arrival at Bayan Lepas International Airport in Penang, news reports said yesterday. The suspect, in his 40s, had arrived at the airport on Thursday night from Bangkok with 147 soap bars hidden in his two bags, the Star newspaper reported. The country’s tough drug laws prescribe a mandatory death sentence for smuggling most types of drugs. “We used the scanner at the airport to check the items,” state customs deputy chief Chik Omar Chik Lim said. He said the soaps were hollowed-out and filled with ketamine before being re-packaged. “We are surprised that he was willing to take the risk to courier the drugs for a meager 500 ringgit [US$145],” he said.
■HONG KONG
Sex worker found dead
Police said yesterday they were investigating the suspected murder of a Thai prostitute, the third sex worker to be killed in the territory in the past three weeks. Police found the 38-year-old woman lying unconscious on a bed inside a one-woman brothel after receiving a robbery report on Saturday night, a spokeswoman said. She was rushed to hospital but declared dead on arrival. “The suspected murder case is still under investigation,” she said. The Sunday Morning Post reported sources saying that the victim had been suffocated. The newspaper said police were investigating whether the case was linked to the unsolved murders of two sex workers last month.
■THAILAND
Grenade kills seven
At least seven people were killed and about 100 injured when a man lobbed a hand grenade into a busy Buddhist temple compound during a celebration, police said yesterday. Police in Nong Bua Lam Phu Province said a dispute erupted between young men late on Saturday as religious ceremonies to celebrate a new Buddhist pavilion led to traditional music and dancing. “A group of people came for Mor Lam,” said Police Colonel Thammajak Kongmongkol, referring to traditional song and dance. “They had an argument, before a person threw a hand grenade into the crowd.”
■CHINA
Eighth H5N1 case reported
A 21-year-old woman has been sickened with the H5N1 strain of bird flu in the country’s eighth reported case this year, the Health Ministry said. The woman, a farmer surnamed Shu in Hunan Province, fell ill after handling poultry that had died from disease, the ministry said on its Web site late on Saturday without giving more details. She was hospitalized and was in stable condition, it said.
■IRAQ
Ten killed in drug clashes
Police have killed 10 drug traffickers and seized more than 1 tonne of opium in clashes near the northeast border with Afghanistan, the state broadcaster reported on Saturday. The clashes happened over the past three days near the border town of Taybad in Khorasan Razavi Province in a bid to “clean up the eastern mountains,” provincial police chief Hamid Fahimi Rad said.
■GERMANY
Official fears election plot
A top intelligence official said on Saturday he fears that Islamic militants may be plotting to target the country ahead of this year’s parliamentary elections, drawing parallels with the 2004 terrorist attacks in Madrid. Joerg Ziercke, who heads the Germany equivalent of the FBI, the Bundeskriminalamt, was quoted by the Focus weekly as saying that a pair of recent videos by German-speaking radicals was an indication that Islamic extremists have the country in their sights. He expressed concern terrorists could strike before a September election. “The most recent video messages make it clear that Germany and German interests abroad are threatened,” Ziercke was quoted by Focus as saying in an advance release of the interview on Saturday.
■RUSSIA
Church enthrones patriarch
The Russian Orthodox Church yesterday enthroned its new head, Patriarch Kirill, in a ceremony at a Moscow cathedral attended by political leaders including President Dmitry Medvedev. Hundreds crowded into the cathedral for the ceremony, the first enthronement of a new Russian Orthodox patriarch since Soviet times when the Church was brutally oppressed by the officially atheist government. Medvedev attended the ceremony along with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in a sign of how the Church’s relationship with the state has changed radically since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. Others in attendance included Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin and representatives of Western churches including the Roman Catholic Church.
■RUSSIA
Fire consumes elderly home
Twenty-three people died on Saturday when a major fire engulfed a village retirement home in the remote northern Komi Republic, a local government spokeswoman said. “According to preliminary information, 23 people died and three were saved,” said Liubov Terentieva, a spokeswoman from the emergency situations ministry, speaking on the telephone from the Komi capital Syktyvkar. She said firefighters were alerted at around 6:20pm but the blaze was still not under control two hours later, adding that the fire had affected a surface of more than 1,000m2. The spokeswoman could not confirm how many people were in the complex when the fire erupted.
■EGYPT
Journalists fined, not jailed
An appeal court in Cairo on Saturday scrapped a one-year jail sentence imposed on four journalists for “harming the public interest” but upheld 2,800 euro (US$3,600) fines, judicial sources said. Defendants Abdul Halim Qandil (of Karama), Adel Hammuda (Al-Fagr newspaper), Ibrahim Eissa (Al-Dostur) and Wael al-Abrashi (Sawt Al-Umma) were each ordered to pay the fines, the sources said. They were condemned in a lower court to one-year jail terms in September 2007, as well as the fines, for publishing false information in 2006 that defamed the ruling National Democratic Party of President Hosni Mubarak.
■COLOMBIA
FARC to free six hostages
An International Red Cross spokesman says a special delegation has arrived to pick up six rebel-held hostages. Yves Heller says the 17-member group arrived on Saturday from Brazil aboard two helicopters and landed in Florencia, a city about 380km south of Bogota. Three policemen and a soldier were scheduled to be released yesterday by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The rebels have also promised to release former governor Alan Jara and former lawmaker Sigifredo Lopez later this week.
■MEXICO
French scientist dies
A French scientist injured last week by armed robbers in Mexico City died on Saturday of his wounds, the French embassy said. Christopher Augur had been working for three months on a biotechnology project at the Independent Metropolitan University. He was shot in the head last Tuesday after robbers followed him and his driver from a bank, where he had exchanged about US$6,500 dollars.
■UNITED STATES
Inter-faith proponent dies
Rabbi Leon Klenicki, an advocate for improving interfaith relations whose efforts were lauded by Pope Benedict XVI, has died at home in New Jersey at age 78. Klenicki’s wife, Myra, said on Saturday that her husband had died of cancer at their home on Jan. 25. Klenicki wrote or cowrote numerous books and papers aimed at improving relations between Jews and Catholics. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1930 to Polish immigrants, Klenicki studied in Argentina and completed his rabbinical studies in the US. He became director of the Anti-Defamation League’s department of interfaith affairs in 1984 and also was the organization’s co-liaison to the Vatican. He was made a Papal Knight of the Order of St Gregory the Great by Pope Benedict XVI in 2007, only the second interfaith official to receive the honor.
■UNITED STATES
Hudson River jet moved
The US Airways jet that landed in New York’s Hudson River on Jan. 15 has been moved from a marina in Jersey City to another site in New Jersey state. It was placed on a flatbed tow truck and driven through the city on Saturday, much to the surprise of onlookers. Peter Knudson, a spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board, says the jet was taken to a salvage company’s storage facility.
■UNITED STATES
Prisoners riot in Texas
Inmates at a privately run federal prison in western Texas started a riot and set at least one fire on Saturday for the second time in less than two months, authorities said. The disturbance broke out in an area of the Reeves County Detention Center that houses up to 2,000 inmates, corrections officer Matt Guerra said. He said rioting inmates were close to a control area where “they can open practically everything.” Guerra said prison officers were safe but that he wasn’t sure whether inmates were injured. Helicopters and Department of Public Safety troopers from the Pecos area had descended on the facility.
■VENEZUELA
Synagogue vandalized
About 15 people broke into the country’s main synagogue on Friday night to destroy scripture books and spray graffiti, said Elias Farache, president of the Jewish Association. “They stayed in the synagogue for about five hours, tied and gagged the guards, destroyed the offices and desecrated the place where we keep rolls of the Torah,” he said.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
‘DELUSIONAL’: Targeting the families of Hamas’ leaders would not push the group to change its position or to give up its demands for Palestinians, Ismail Haniyeh said Israeli aircraft on Wednesday killed three sons of Hamas’ top political leader in the Gaza Strip, striking high-stakes targets at a time when Israel is holding delicate ceasefire negotiations with the militant group. Hamas said four of the leader’s grandchildren were also killed. Ismail Haniyeh’s sons are among the highest-profile figures to be killed in the war so far. Israel said they were Hamas operatives, and Haniyeh accused Israel of acting in “the spirit of revenge and murder.” The deaths threatened to strain the internationally mediated ceasefire talks, which appeared to gain steam in recent days even as the sides remain far
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The