■CHINA
Ex-aide sentenced to death
A court has handed down the capital sentence to a former aide to late vice premier Huang Ju (黃菊) for taking bribes and abuse of power, a Web site operated by the People’s Daily reported yesterday. Wang Weigong (王維工), who formerly served as secretary to Huang, was sentenced by the Changchun Municipal Intermediate People’s Court in Jilin Province on Friday, the report said. The court said Wang’s death sentence should be accompanied by probation of two years because he confessed to some of his crimes and paid back all the bribes. All his personal property was also confiscated. Wang, who was also a former deputy general manager of Shenergy Group, was convicted of taking bribes worth 12.9 million yuan (US$1.9 million) from eight companies or individuals from 1995-2006. Officials said he abused his power as a secretary of the Shanghai Municipal Communist Party Committee, and as secretary of the State Council, taking bribes in return for preferential treatment.
■CHINA
Alligator numbers rising
China’s endangered Yangtze alligator population is expected to more than double to 300 in the wild within five to 10 years, state media reported yesterday. Currently there are more than 120 alligators breeding in a wider area than five years ago, an official at the Chinese Alligators Protection Nature Reserve in eastern Anhui Province told Xinhua news agency. “We have for the first time found wild baby alligators. Normally their survival rate is only 2 percent,” the official was quoted as saying. Measures such as the protection of baby alligators and the releasing of captive-bred alligators into to the wild were helping bring the species back from the brink of extinction, the report said.
■SOUTH KOREA
Prosecutors arrest Roh aide
Prosecutors arrested a close aide to former President Roh Moo-hyun for alleged corruption yesterday, ahead of plans to question the former head of state himself, a news report said. Jung Sang-moon, a former general secretary for Roh, was arrested shortly after midnight on graft charges, Seoul’s Yonhap news agency said, citing the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office. Jung was suspected of taking millions of dollars from a corrupt shoe manufacturer, who has already been arrested, and other local businessmen for Roh’s family, prosecutors said. Roh served as president from 2003 to last year. Prosecutors plan to fix a date for summoning him for questioning this week, Yonhap said.
■SINGAPORE
Monk enjoys the high life
The country’s top Buddhist monk has lived a lavish lifestyle with name branded goods and nine gold credit cards, a report in the Sunday Times said. “We are living in a modern world,” the newspaper quoted monk Ming Yi as telling auditors and police during an investigation into a charity hospital that he had headed. The report said Ming Yi was a high-end shopper who spent on brands like Louis Vuitton and Montblanc and had given three supplementary credit cards to his friends including a monk based in Hong Kong. The 47-year old former chief executive officer of a charity-run hospital is under investigation for making an unauthorized loan of S$50,000 (US$33,000) to a friend. “I always don’t look upon money as important,” Ming Yi said. “What I can, I spend and that’s it; what I don’t have, I don’t spend.”
■JAPAN
Missile may enter territory
South Korea’s first satellite-installed rocket may fly over Japanese territorial waters, Kyodo News reported. The two-stage rocket will be launched in late July and is likely to fly over waters off Japan’s southwestern Kyushu Island and the southern Okinawa group of islands, Kyodo said late on Saturday, citing unnamed diplomatic sources. The first stage will drop in the East China Sea off Kyushu and the second stage in waters off the southeastern Philippines, it said.
■VIETNAM
Passenger caught with fetus
An airline passenger was found carrying an embryo in his luggage, a senior security official said yesterday. Security staff at southern Ho Chi Minh City’s Tan Son Nhat airport discovered the tiny corpse on Friday when checking the luggage of a man about to fly to the northern port city of Hai Phong, the official said, refusing to be named or to provide other details. According to the Thanh Nien newspaper, Vu Van Tho, 36, was trying to carry the body of his son home for burial. His son died when his mother prematurely gave birth in her 27th week of pregnancy. A similar case was reported last year when a passenger was discovered carrying the body of a relative’s daughter. She died a day after birth and was being returned to the family’s native province for burial.
■VIETNAM
Toy gun kills 10-year-old
A 10-year-old boy was killed and another seriously wounded when a toy gun they were playing with exploded, media said yesterday. The accident happened in the southern province of Binh Phuoc on Friday when the two were trying to install batteries in a plastic gun found in their family’s garden. The 10-year-old died on the way to hospital, while his five-year-old relative was seriously burned. Witnesses described the gun as a toy and said the blast could be heard from a long distance.
■UNITED STATES
Hit-run suspect arrested
A man suspected of pulling a badly injured college student off a car windshield after a deadly hit-and-run accident was arrested while trying to cross back into the US from Mexico, police said on Saturday. Josue Luna, 32, of Los Angeles, was detained by federal agents at the San Ysidro border crossing on Friday after his name prompted a computer alert that he was wanted in Los Angeles, LAPD Officer April Harding said. Luna was jailed on suspicion of being an accessory to the hit-and-run, she said. He was released on Saturday on US$50,000 bail.
■UNITED STATES
Children die in crash
Five Houston children died after their sedan slid into a rain-swollen ditch when the driver lost control while trying to answer a cellphone, authorities said. John Cannon, a Houston police spokesman, told several Houston television stations that the driver of the car was the father of four of the dead children, all seven or younger. Cannon said the driver was taken for blood-alcohol testing. The father was among two adults and a 10-year-old girl who escaped the fast-moving current that swept the car 30m on Saturday from where it left the road and made the vehicle inaccessible to emergency workers for hours, Cannon said.
■UNITED STATES
‘Waiter’ steals from diners
Police said a man posing as a waiter collected US$186 in cash from diners at two restaurants and walked out with the money in his pocket. Diners described the bogus waiter as a spikey-haired 20-something wearing a dark blue or black button-down shirt, yellow tie and khaki pants. Police said he approached two women in their 20s dining at a Hoboken, New Jersey, restaurant called Hobson’s Choice on Thursday night, the Jersey Journal reported. He asked if they needed anything else before paying. They said no and handed him US$90 in cash. About two hours later he approached three women in their 40s dining at Margherita’s Pizza and Cafe. He asked if they were ready to pay, took US$96 in cash and never returned with the change they asked for.
■UNITED STATES
New dead dolphin found
Since winter closed in on a family of dolphins that had been living in two New Jersey rivers, many observers felt the animals were living on a prayer. On Saturday, the body of another dead dolphin was spotted in the Navesink River just outside the Middletown home of rocker Jon Bon Jovi. If it’s confirmed to be part of the group of 16 dolphins that had spent half of last year in the Shrewsbury and Navesink rivers, it would be the sixth to have died. The dead dolphin was the third to surface in the past two weeks.
■AUSTRIA
Eagle snatches handbag
An eagle shocked an elderly woman on Saturday when it swooped down and snatched her handbag, police in the Tyrolean town of Kundl said yesterday. The tamed Bald Eagle was apparently looking for food. Several days earlier, buzzards had hunted after the eagle while it was in the air, and the bird had not returned to its owner, a professional falconer. The 69-year-old woman was walking with her family when the bird of prey robbed her bag, landed nearby and started rummaging through it for food. “She got the shock of her life,” Kundl police officer Lambert Autengruber said. The eagle mistook the brown bag for that of its owner, as that is where its food is normally stored, he said.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the