■TIBET
Pills used for ‘desert rats’
Authorities have scattered 200kg of contraceptive pellets across the Tibetan plateau to control what they describe as a “plague of desert rats” blamed for destroying fragile high-altitude grasslands and accelerating the spread of deserts. But biodiversity experts say the campaign could worsen soil degradation and that poisons used could damage other parts of the plateau’s ecosystem. The drugs were designed to induce abortions and prevent pregnancy in “gerbils,” Xinhua news agency reported. It is possible they were referring to the pika, a small animal related to the rabbit, which has long been the target of government eradication campaigns. Workers began spreading the contraceptive in the Gurbantunggut desert in Xinjiang last May.
■PHILIPPINES
Journalist gets protection
President Gloria Arroyo yesterday ordered police to protect a journalist who has received death threats for linking the military to the murder of a communist insurgent’s daughter. “We must bring political killings to zero, including assassinations of government officials and media personalities,” she said in an address at the national police academy. Her speech came just days after the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists placed the Philippines on a list of countries where media personnel are allegedly murdered with impunity. Elgine Damasco of Radio Mindanao Network in Davao and his colleagues have blamed intelligence operatives from the military for the death threats.
■NEW ZEALAND
Mom charged in plane birth
A 29-year-old Samoan woman who gave birth on a flight to New Zealand was charged on Wednesday with abandoning her baby girl in an aircraft toilet. She faces a maximum seven-year prison sentence for abandoning the baby, who is now in custody of the child welfare department. The woman underwent surgery at Middlemore Hospital after what police said was a complicated birth on board the plane as it arrived in Auckland from Apia, the capital of Samoa, last Thursday. The baby was reportedly found by cleaners in the plane’s toilet rubbish can. The woman was identified when immigration authorities noticed her bleeding.
■NEW ZEALAND
Teen jailed for murder
A 15-year-old teenager was jailed for life yesterday for beating a Scottish tourist to death with a baseball bat. Jahche Broughton was just 14 when he attacked Karen Aim in Taupo, North Island, on Jan. 17 last year. Broughton, who pleaded guilty to murder in a court in Rotorua, was sentenced to remain in jail for 12-and-a-half years before he will be eligible for parole for the killing of the 27-year-old backpacker. He was also sentenced to six years for injuring a 17-year-old woman with intent to cause grievous bodily harm — an attack that took place just two weeks before Aim’s murder.
■JAPAN
Poll is bad news for Ozawa
Two out of three voters want opposition Democratic Party chief Ichiro Ozawa to resign over a funding scandal that is clouding his party’s prospects in this year’s general election, a Kyodo news survey showed on Wednesday. Support for unpopular Prime Minister Taro Aso, however, rose almost eight points to 23.7 percent, but almost two-thirds of voters were still dissatisfied with him. Ozawa said on Tuesday, after a close aide was charged with accepting illegal corporate donations, that he would stay in his post.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Wacky surnames dying out
The number of people with surnames like Cockshott, Balls, Death and Shufflebottom — likely the source of schoolroom laughter — has declined by up to 75 percent in the last century. A study found the number of people with the name Cock shrank to 785 last year from 3,211 in 1881, those called Balls fell to 1,299 from 2,904 and the number of Deaths were reduced to 605 from 1,133.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Police probe ‘terror’ charity
Regulators said they were probing allegations that a local charity was linked to a huge cache of weapons and a bomb-making factory found in an Islamic school in Bangladesh. “The matter is of serious concern to us, and we are taking this action given the gravity of the matter, the public interest and the need to protect charity work and funds,” said Andrew Hind, head of the Charity Fund that regulates charities in England and Wales. Bangladeshi police on Tuesday raided an Islamic seminary or madrasah on the remote island of Bhola in the south of the country, uncovering firearms, bullets and explosive devices. The recently-opened madrasah was owned by the UK-based Green Crescent charity, police said.
■GERMANY
Leaky ceiling reveals pot
A leaky ceiling has directed Berlin police to a full-scale indoor cannabis plantation in a three-room apartment. Police said they found some 780 blossoming cannabis plants, along with more than 1,000 seedlings and more than 6kg of marijuana, in the second-floor apartment in the capital on Sunday. They said on Wednesday that they were called to the building because water was dripping through the ceilings of rooms underneath the apartment. All three rooms of the apartment had been converted for growing cannabis — complete with ventilators, lamps and a watering system that appeared to be the cause of the leak. A police statement said that the tenant — a 34-year-old woman — and a male acquaintance were under investigation.
■UNITED STATES
Saberi parents plan Iran trip
The father of imprisoned journalist Roxana Saberi said he and his wife were making plans to go to Iran to see her in a couple of days. “I’m hoping if she sees us, it will lift her spirits,” Reza Saberi said on Wednesday. The Iranian government has said Roxana Saberi was imprisoned for doing reporting work in the country after her press credentials expired. Her parents found out about her arrest in a brief phone call from her on Feb. 10. Saberi, who grew up in Fargo, is a dual citizen of the US and Iran who has reported for a number of international news organizations. Her father said he worried his daughter may go on a hunger strike. He said she told him a prosecutor in Iran had told her she would remain in detention for months or even years.
■FRANCE
Workers release 3M boss
A 3M industrial conglomerate manager was released yesterday after being held for more than a day by angry workers trying to force their US employer to improve their redundancy package. Following hours of talks between representatives of labor unions, 3M-Sante and 3M France, the laboratory manager of the company’s factory in Pithiviers, 85km south of Paris, left the office where he had been held since Tuesday afternoon. The factory, which produces pharmaceutical products, employs 235 people but 110 of these jobs are to be shed this year because of falling orders and another 40 are to be shifted to another plant.
■UNITED STATES
Test flight ends in tragedy
The pilot of an F-22A fighter jet was killed when it crashed in California while on a test flight, news reports said. An Air Force spokeswoman said the crash took place about 55km northwest of Edwards Air Force Base. The F-22 Raptor is one of the most sophisticated fighter jets in the world and the crash was the first for this model since it went into full production, the spokeswoman said. The F-22 has been the focus of speculation about US President Barack Obama’s plans to cut spending on costly weapons systems. At US$140 million each, the F-22 is the Air Force’s most expensive fighter.
■UNITED STATES
EPA nominee withdraws
US President Barack Obama’s nominee for the No. 2 position at the Environmental Protection Agency, Jon Cannon, removed himself from consideration on Wednesday. Cannon said he was removing his name from consideration to be EPA deputy administrator because of scrutiny of America’s Clean Water Foundation, where he once served on the board of directors. “While my service on the board of that now-dissolved organization is not the subject of the scrutiny, I believe the energy and environmental challenges facing our nation are too great to delay confirmation for this position, and I do not wish to present any distraction to the agency,” Cannon said in a statement released by the EPA. The EPA Inspector General’s Office found in 2007 that the Clean Water foundation mismanaged more than US$25 million in EPA grants, the Washington Post reported.
■UNITED STATES
Stunt just like old times
Twenty-two students at St. Mary’s College of California have done something their predecessors famously did 50 years ago: cram into a phone booth. Teams competed to fit as many bodies as possible into a phone booth on the campus green on Wednesday, a half-century after Life magazine published a now-famous photograph of 22 St. Mary’s students stuffed into a phone booth, a popular college stunt in the 1950s.
■UNITED STATES
Man ‘kept mom in freezer’
A man has been accused of stashing his 98-year-old mother’s dead body in a freezer so he could keep cashing her Social Security checks. State police say they discovered Herta Auslander’s body in a freezer chest in October after receiving a tip she had died more than a year earlier. An autopsy concluded she died of natural causes. Police say Roland Auslander was arrested on Wednesday following a stakeout at his home in Cooks Falls northwest of New York City. They say he’s charged with grand larceny, unlawful disposal of human remains and forgery for faking his mother’s signature.
■UNITED STATES
Embargo violator jailed
A judge sentenced a woman to six years in prison on Wednesday for breaking a US trade embargo with Iraq by selling telecommunications equipment before the war in 2003. Dawn Hanna, who netted US$1.1 million, was motivated by greed and repeatedly ignored warnings from potential partners about doing business with Iraq, said US District Judge Marianne Battani. The prosecutor said Hanna lied to US and British authorities and committed perjury during the trial when she claimed the equipment was destined for Turkey. The equipment had “encryption technology,” which meant it could be used for civilian and military purposes, the government said. Hanna was in charge of international sales at Technology Integration Group Services of Rochester.
School bullies in Singapore are to face caning under new guidelines, but the education minister on Tuesday said it would be meted out only as a last resort with strict safeguards. Human rights groups regularly criticize Singapore for the use of corporal punishment, which remains part of the school and criminal justice systems, but authorities have defended it as a deterrent to crime and serious misconduct. Caning was discussed in the parliament after legislators asked how it would be used in relation to bullying in schools. The debate followed stricter guidelines on serious student misconduct, including bullying, unveiled by the Singaporean Ministry of
As evening falls in Fiji’s capital, a steady stream of people approaches a makeshift clinic that is a first line of defense against one of the world’s fastest-growing HIV epidemics. In the South Pacific nation — a popular tourist destination of just under a million people — more than 2,000 new HIV cases were recorded last year, a 26 percent increase from 2024. The government has declared an HIV outbreak and described it as a national crisis. “It’s spreading like wildfire,” said Siteri Dinawai, 46, who came to be tested. The Moonlight Clinic, a converted minibus parked in a suburban cul-de-sac in Suva, is
Jailed media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai (黎智英) has been awarded Deutsche Welle’s (DW) freedom of speech award for his contribution to Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. The German public broadcaster on Thursday said Lai would be presented in absentia with the 12th iteration of the award on June 23 at the DW Global Media Forum in Bonn. Deutsche Welle director-general Barbara Massing praised the 78-year-old founder of the now-shuttered news outlet Apple Daily for standing “unwaveringly for press freedom in Hong Kong at great personal risk.” “With Apple Daily, he gave journalists a platform for free reporting and a voice to the democracy movement in
A MESSAGE: Japan’s participation in the Balikatan drills is a clear deterrence signal to China not to attack Taiwan while the US is busy in the Middle East, an analyst said The Japan Self-Defense Forces yesterday fired a Type 88 anti-ship missile during a joint maritime exercise with US, Australian and Philippine forces, hitting a decommissioned Philippine Navy ship in waters facing the disputed South China Sea, in drills that underscore Tokyo’s rising willingness to project military power on China’s doorstep. The drill took place as Manila and Tokyo began talks on a potential defense equipment transfer, made possible by Japan’s decision to scrap restrictions on military exports. The discussions include the possible early transfer of Abukuma-class destroyers and TC-90 aircraft to the Philippines, Japanese Minister of Defense Shinjiro Koizumi said. Philippine Secretary of
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