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■THAILAND

Royal pardon submitted

Bangkok prison authorities submitted a request for a royal pardon for Australian Harry Nicolaides, who is serving a three-year prison sentence for lese majeste, officials confirmed yesterday. “We very recently submitted his relatives’ request for a royal pardon to the Corrections Departments,” said a Bangkok Remand Center official, who required anonymity. If the department accepts the request, it will forward it to the Royal Household for consideration. “The process will take months,” he said. On Jan. 19 the Bangkok Criminal Court sentenced Nicolaides, 41, to three years in prison for insulting the monarchy in his novel Verisimilitude, which sold only seven copies. Three years’ imprisonment is the minimum sentence under the country’s harsh lese majeste law. The maximum sentence under the law, which makes it a criminal offense to insult or belittle the Thai monarchy and royal family, is 15 years’ imprisonment.



■SOUTH KOREA

President fears armed clash

President Lee Myung-bak chaired a top-level security meeting yesterday amid growing fears of an armed clash with North Korea, the defense ministry said. It was the first time for five years that the president has headed such a meeting, which drew about 200 top military, intelligence, law enforcement and local government officials yesterday. Concerns are rising that Pyongyang, after months of threats against Seoul’s conservative government, will trigger a clash along the disputed western sea border. The area around the border known as the Northern Limit Line (NLL) was the scene of deadly naval clashes in 1999 and 2002. Last month Pyongyang declared that all its peace pacts with Seoul were void including a 1991 agreement to recognize the NLL as an interim border.



■SOUTH KOREA

Nation mourns cardinal

Seoul yesterday mourned the death of the country’s first Roman Catholic cardinal, “the conscience of an era” who played a key role in helping the nation transform into a genuine democracy. Throngs visited Seoul’s Myeongdong Cathedral to pay final respects to Cardinal Stephen Kim Sou-hwan, who died on Monday at the age of 86. Local TV footage showed mourners praying or bowing in front of a glass case in which Kim, dressed in Catholic vestments and a miter, was laid. His body was to be placed in a wooden coffin before a funeral Mass on Friday, the Archdiocese of Seoul said. Many others waited in a long line outside the church despite freezing temperatures. Among the visitors were former president Kim Dae-jung, a Catholic who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to improve ties with Pyongyang, archdiocese official Lee Hee-yeon said.



■SRI LANKA

Tigers lash out at UN

Tamil Tiger rebels lashed out at the UN yesterday after it accused them of shooting civilians who tried to escape the bloody ethnic conflict. The UN said the Tigers have detained tens of thousands of non-combatants inside rebel-held territory and have “shot and sometimes killed” those crossing the battle lines to seek safety. A front organization for the rebels, who have been cornered in the jungle by government troops, countered the allegations by saying the UN had failed in its duty to protect innocent civilians. The UN was “withdrawing even the remaining few local staff from the conflict zone [and] completely shedding its responsibility of caring for the civilians trapped here,” the Tamils Rehabilitation Organisation said.



■ITALY

Castrate rapists: minister

A government minister called on Monday for rapists to be castrated. “Society has to protect itself,” Roberto Calderoli, minister for legislative simplification in Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Cabinet, told La Stampa newspaper. “In some cases, I don’t believe that rehabilitation is possible ... I think that chemical castration may be insufficient and that surgical castration is the only option left,” Calderoli said.



■UNITED KINGDOM

Ronnie Biggs back in jail

Ronnie Biggs, one of the country’s most notorious criminals who took part in the 1963 Great Train Robbery, has returned to jail after being hospitalized with pneumonia, his son said on Monday. The 79-year-old Biggs, who spent more than three decades on the run before turning himself in in 2001, had been taken from prison to a hospital over the weekend. The Great Train Robbery holds legendary status as one of the most audacious in Britain’s criminal history. A gang held up a mail train, making off with £2.6 million — a massive amount at the time. Biggs played only a minor role but was jailed for 30 years. However, after serving only 15 months, he escaped prison, had plastic surgery, and ended up in Brazil in 1970. Brazil did not have an extradition treaty with Britain, so Biggs was safe from the long arm of the law. In 2001, suffering from ill health, he decided he wanted to return to Britain and handed himself in.



■SWEDEN

Child killer sentence upheld

A German woman who bludgeoned two toddlers two death and seriously injured their mother in a fit of jealousy had her life sentence upheld in a Swedish appeals court on Monday. In its verdict, the Svea Court of Appeal said Christine Schurrer, 32, had beyond reasonable doubt murdered one-year-old Saga Jangestig and her three-year-old brother Maximilian and attempted to kill their mother Emma. It upheld the life sentence imposed by a lower court in October. Schurrer attacked the family with a “hammer-like object” in their home in Arboga last March. The court said the rampage was triggered by jealousy after Schurrer’s ex-boyfriend ended their relationship and started a new one with the children’s mother.



■FRANCE

Escaped prisoners captured

Two armed convicts who blasted their way out of a jail taking guards and motorists hostage were captured yesterday near Paris, police said. The pair were picked up outside the town of Creteil. A source close to the investigation said gunfire was exchanged and at least one of the escapees may have been injured. The duo escaped from a jail in central France on Sunday after taking two guards hostage and using smuggled explosives to blow open security gates, officials said. On Monday, they kidnapped a motorist and his grandson in the town of Amiens and forced them to drive to Arras where they released them unharmed.



■UNITED KINGDOM

Airline crew arrested

Customs officials say 15 crew members from a South African Airways flight have been arrested after 5kg of cocaine was found in a bag. Bob Gaiger of Revenue and Customs says the flight attendants and pilots were arrested as they passed through customs after disembarking the flight to London from Johannesburg on Monday morning. It is the second time in less than a month that the crew of a South African Airways flight has been arrested and accused of carrying illegal drugs into the UK.



■UNITED STATES

TV network founder charged

The founder of a US Muslim TV network has been arrested and charged with murdering his wife by beheading her, the network’s Web site and local media reported. Muzzammil Hassan, founder and chief executive officer of Buffalo, New York-based Bridges TV, was charged after reporting the death of his wife, Aasiya Hassan, 37, on Thursday night. After Hassan, 44, told police his wife was at the Bridges TV offices, they found her beheaded body there, the Buffalo News reported. Aasiya Hassan had recently filed for divorce and had an order of protection mandating that he leave their home as of Feb. 6. He is being held on second-degree murder charges. The couple had two children.



■UNITED STATES

Pet chimp shot dead

An 80kg domestic chimpanzee became enraged and attacked his owner’s friend, mauling her badly in the face and hands before he was shot dead by police, a Connecticut newspaper reported on Monday. Travis, a 15-year-old chimpanzee well known in Stamford, Connecticut, was slashed with a kitchen knife by his owner Sandra Herold trying to protect her friend, before he was killed. Two police officers responding to Herold’s emergency call were also injured when they tried to stop Travis from entering a police car, where another officer shot him in self defense, the Stamford Advocate said. The injured woman, whose identity was not disclosed, was recovering in hospital from serious injuries. What drove Travis to his aggressive outburst remained a mystery.



■MEXICO

Roaming buffalo penned

Mexico City residents are thankful to have a home where the buffalo no longer roam. Police say residents of a west-side neighborhood called to report buffaloes standing in the street, saying they didn’t know what to do. Two officers were dispatched to the scene Monday, and used a flashlight to herd the animals back to a pen from which they appeared to have escaped. A man showed up at the pen saying he was in charge of the buffaloes and thanked the policemen for returning them, but police say they will investigate whether the animals are being properly held there.



■MEXICO

Treasure-hunters rebuffed

The US treasure-hunting firm Odyssey has been denied a permit to search for a sunken 17th century Spanish galleon off the country’s eastern shores. Odyssey’s expedition “lacks investigative purposes and the support of archaeologists or of an academic institutions of renown prestige,” the National Institute of Anthropology and History said in a statement on Monday. Florida-based Odyssey was seeking to locate the remains of Nuestra Senora del Juncal, a Spanish galleon that sank in Campeche Sound in 1631.



■COLOMBIA

Eleven nabbed for sex

Police have arrested 11 Israelis for allegedly taking part in sex tourism in the Caribbean port city of Cartagena. The Israelis were arrested at a posh home in Cartagena allegedly while on hallucinogenic drugs and with prostitutes, including one minor, authorities said.



■UNITED STATES

Key crash parts located

Investigators have located the steering column, propeller blades; five of six deicing valves and other key components that might help reveal what the pilot did to try to save a plane that crashed into a home near Buffalo last Thursday, killing all 49 people on board and one person on the ground.
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