■CHINA
‘Gambling network’ busted
Police in Hangzhou have arrested 11 suspects in an illegal gambling network linked via the Internet to a casino in the Philippines, state media said yesterday. A local businessman, identified only by the surname Li, set up the network after meeting representatives of the unidentified casino during a gambling trip to Macau, the China Daily quoted police as saying. Li paid the casino a deposit of 5 million yuan (US$730,000) to act as its agent in China, allowing customers to see real-time images of the casino and place bets through his account.
■HONG KONG
Tycoon sues over sex pact
A shoe tycoon is suing his mistress because she broke an agreement not to have sex with anyone else, a report said yesterday. Patrick Tang, 66, is demanding his mistress Karen Lee, 39, hand back properties worth HK$10 million (US$1.3 million), the Standard newspaper reported, citing a writ filed with the High Court. Tang, who is married, said Lee had breached the no-sex condition under which he agreed to buy her several properties between 2002 and 2005, the report said. According to the paper, the writ said Lee began an affair with a former Mr Hong Kong, Wong Cheung-fat, 23, in the last few months that made the agreement invalid.
■NEPAL
India offers electricity
India has offered to export electricity to neighboring Nepal, where residents are facing severe power outages, an official said yesterday. A spokesman at Nepal’s Water Resources Ministry said the country had received a proposal from India to export as much as 200 megawatts of electricity. Nepalese receive only eight hours of electricity a day because of low water levels in reservoirs that drive hydroelectric plants.
■HONG KONG
Diva’s mum denied cash
The 85-year-old mother of late Canto-pop diva Anita Mui (梅艷芳) has been stopped from taking HK$800,000 (US$102,000) from her daughter’s estate to finance a round-the-world trip, a media report said yesterday. Tam Mei-kam (覃美金) told Judge Andrew Cheung (張舉能) she felt bored and stressed from last year’s unsuccessful attempt to gain control of her late daughter’s estate and needed to take along nurses, maids and family on the trip, the South China Morning Post said. Rejecting her application, Cheung said Tam’s demand was unreasonable. Mui’s estate, which is valued at about HK$100 million, included HK$3.9 million in cash which is used to pay her mother’s monthly allowance. Tam lost a court battle last year to gain control of Mui’s entire fortune after a judge upheld a will Mui signed shortly before she died of cervical cancer in December 2003 at the age of 40, which left most of her estate in a trust. Mui feared that if she left the estate to her mother it would be squandered.
■BANGLADESH
Bill outlaws begging
The Government has made begging illegal, an official said yesterday. Hundreds of thousands of people depend on begging to survive in a country where 40 percent of the population earn less than US$1 a day. An official, who declined to be named, said that a bill had been passed in parliament this week outlawing begging. “Anyone caught begging will be put in jail for a month. This includes people who pretend to be ill or use a disability to get money,” the official said. A 2005 survey showed that a beggar in the capital Dhaka, home to around 27,000 beggars, earns an average 100 taka (US$1.45) a day.
■IRELAND
Unemployment surges
The unemployment rate surged to 11 percent last month from 10.4 percent in February, official data showed on Wednesday, as the eurozone nation’s recession-hit economy worsens amid a global crisis. The Central Statistics Office said 173,279 extra people had signed on for benefits on the state’s Live Register in the year to last month, the largest annual increase since records began in 1967. The month-on-month increase in the number signing on last month was 16,834. This brought the number of people signing on last month to 371,271, which is also the highest since records began, said an office spokeswoman. Prime Minister Brian Cowen told parliament that a drop in unemployment was unlikely in the short term.
■SWEDEN
Police arrest mother
Police yesterday said they had arrested a woman accused of kidnapping her two children in a custody dispute with their Australian father. The boys, aged nine and 11, were handed over to their father after the woman was arrested overnight, police spokesman Svante Melin said. He said the woman had failed to return the children, who had been living with their father in Australia, after they came to visit her in October. The family’s names were not released because of privacy rules.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Police report severed head
Police said on Wednesday they were investigating the discovery of a severed human head in a field in Leicestershire. It was not clear whether the head, found by a member of the public in Asfordby near Melton Mowbray on Tuesday, was male or female. Detective Superintendent Julia McKechnie said the main priority was to determine the identity of the person involved and that it was too early to confirm whether the discovery was linked to any other criminal investigation. But McKechnie said the force was in contact with their counterparts in Hertfordshire, where a man’s arm and left leg have been discovered in recent weeks.
■EGYPT
Toddler contracts bird flu
An toddler has contracted bird flu, the 61st recorded case since the first outbreak of the disease in the country in 2006, state-news agency MENA reported on Wednesday. The two-year-old was taken to hospital with a fever on Monday in Beheira governate, MENA quoted health ministry spokesman Abdel Rahman Shahin as saying. He had been exposed to dead fowl thought to have been infected with the virus. Twenty-three people have died of bird flu in the country. Most of the victims have been young girls or women, who are generally in charge of looking after poultry.
■SWEDEN
Gays allowed to marry
The country will allow homosexuals to legally marry from next month after parliament on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly in favor of the move. The change in the law, which currently allows gay couples to register unions but not formal marriage, comes into force on May 1 under the timetable set out in the bill. Scandinavian countries, known for their liberal attitudes towards gays and lesbians, were among the first countries in Europe to grant same-sex partners the same rights as married couples. Stockholm gave same-sex couples the right to form a union via registered partnerships in the mid-1990s and made it legal for them to adopt in 2002. The passage of the bill was widely expected and the final tally was 261 votes in favor of the bill and 22 opposed.
■UNITED STATES
Alaska sues BP over spill
Separate state and federal civil lawsuits were filed against BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc over two spills at the nation’s largest oil field in 2006. The lawsuits were filed two years after the company pleaded guilty to federal violations of the Clean Water Act for one of the spills and agreed to pay a US$20 million fine. The federal government filed its lawsuit on Tuesday in a District Court in Anchorage, Alaska, alleging violations of federal clean air and water laws for the spills at Prudhoe Bay, on Alaska’s North Slope. It asks the court to order BP Alaska to take actions to prevent spills in the future and impose stiff penalties.
■UNITED STATES
Conficker harder to detect
The Conficker worm’s April 1 trigger date came and went without the bedeviling computer virus causing any mischief, but security specialists warned that the threat was far from over. Conficker did just what the “white hats” tracking it expected — it evolved to make itself harder to exterminate and its masters tougher to find. “There are still millions of personal computers out there that are, unknown to their owners, at risk of being controlled in the future by persons unknown,” said Trend Micro threat researcher Paul Ferguson. A task force assembled by Microsoft has been working to stamp out the worm, referred to as Conficker or DownAdUp, and the US software colossus has placed a bounty of US$250,000 on the heads of those responsible for the threat. “It is pretty sophisticated and state-of-the-art,” Ferguson said. “It definitely looks like the puppet masters are located in Eastern Europe.” The worm was programmed to modify itself on Wednesday to become harder to stop and began doing that when infected machines got cues. The malicious software evolved from East to West, beginning in the time zones first to greet April Fools’ Day. Conficker had been programmed to reach out to 250 Web sites daily to download commands from its masters, they said, but on Wednesday it began generating daily lists of 50,000 Web sites and reaching randomly to 500 of those.
■UNITED STATES
Shop finds two-nosed rabbit
It’s no April Fools joke. A baby bunny really does have two noses. A pet shop worker found the nosey bunny in a delivery of six-week-old dwarf rabbits that arrived at the Milford, Connecticut, store last week. Both noses have two nostrils. The owner of the Purr-Fect Pets shop said he had never seen anything like it in 25 years in the business. He said the bunny eats, drinks and hops around like the rest of the litter. Beardsley Zoo director Gregg Dancho said the deformity could be the result of too much inbreeding or the parents’ exposure to pesticides or poisons.
■CANADA
Police arrest ‘Ganja Granny’
Police said a 71-year-old woman has pleaded guilty to drug smuggling charges after customs officials found 3.6kg of marijuana hidden in her luggage at a Jamaican airport. Montego Bay Police Constable Ulet Lewis-Green on Wednesday identified the woman as Margueritta Lancaster-Reid of Ontario. Authorities did not disclose a hometown for the “ganja granny.” Lewis-Green said the elderly woman pleaded guilty on Tuesday to concealing the marijuana in her luggage at Donald Sangster International Airport. The Jamaica Observer said she told police officers it was “herbs” when the drug stash was found last Saturday.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese