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■CHINA

Forty percent of dams at risk

More than 40 percent of the country’s dams and reservoirs are at risk of breaching this flood season, which could be worse than normal, state media quoted the water resources minister as saying. Heavy rain is expected to hit the Yangtze and Huaihe Rivers, while floods and typhoons could be worse due to climate change, Minister of Water Resources Chen Lei (陳雷) was quoted as saying by Xinhua news agency. “Extreme weather may pose a big threat to dam safety,” Chen said. “Special purpose inspections on dams also show many of them are not in good condition.” Chen said about 37,000 reservoirs, or 43 percent, were at risk, but only 3,642 dams were undergoing repairs.



■CHINA

Smoking order withdrawn

A county has dropped an order that its officials collectively smoke nearly a quarter of a million packs of cigarettes after a public outcry, a report said yesterday. The Gong’an County Government in Hubei Province was also persuaded to change its policy after officials higher up in the bureaucracy intervened, the Beijing Times reported. The plan had called for Gong’an government employees to smoke 230,000 packs of locally produced cigarettes a year or risk being fined, a move that was interpreted as a way to help the Hubei tobacco industry.



■INDONESIA

Police killing sparks protest

About 1,000 residents of a town near the main airport of Papua Province took to the streets yesterday in protest over a man shot dead by police. The protesters blocked the road to the airport at Sentani after police shot dead a relative of an influential tribal chief, police said. Papua police spokesman Nurhabri said the dead man was Agus Ohee, whom villagers had accused of extortion. “When the policemen came, the drunken Agus Ohee, who was about 20 years old, tried to chase them. Suhartono, the policeman, shot Agus Ohee in self-defense,” Nurhabri said.



■SOUTH KOREA

Embassy blackmailed

Two North Korean refugees who took refuge in Seoul’s embassy in Beijing attempted to blackmail the mission after stealing information, officials said yesterday. The pair absconded from the embassy with a USB computer memory device last December, said the foreign ministry, which confirmed the case after it was publicized by local media yesterday. The ministry said the consul general in Beijing was relocated as a punishment after the refugees broke into an office to steal the device. Yonhap news agency said the refugees demanded “a huge sum” for the memory device. The agency said the drive contained a list of refugees from the North and other data. The embassy managed to locate them and quickly retrieve the information, Yonhap said.



■NEPAL

Police hurt in clashes

Three policemen were hurt yesterday in a clash with Maoist demonstrators taking part in wave of protests following the collapse of the former rebels’ government, witnesses said. The ultra-leftists called their supporters on to the streets of the capital to demonstrate against a move by the president to stop the Maoist government from sacking the head of the army, a longtime rival. In the latest protest, around 500 Maoist loyalists tried to vandalize a statue of a former king, prompting a clash with anti-riot police, a reporter said. Three policemen were hurt by stones lodged at them.



■NORWAY

‘Ghost fishing’ poses threat

Lost or abandoned nets in the oceans can keep on “ghost fishing” for years in a growing threat to marine stocks, a UN report said yesterday. About 640,000 tonnes of discarded fishing gear gets added to the oceans yearly, or 10 percent of the world total of marine debris, the study by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and UN Environment Program (UNEP) found. This fishing gear can then start what the report termed “ghost fishing” — pointlessly ensnaring fish or creatures such as turtles, seabirds or whales for years or even decades. The study recommended cash incentives for fishing fleets to bring broken nets to port, better mapping of subsea hazards to avoid losses or new designs such as nets that dissolve if left in the water too long.



■NETHERLANDS

Serb’s acquittal overturned

The UN Yugoslav war crimes tribunal overturned the murder acquittal of a Serbian army officer on Tuesday, ruling in an appeal that he did help kill 194 Croatian prisoners of war and more than tripling his sentence. The court gave Major Veselin Sljivancanin 17 years in prison, ruling that the five-year sentence he received from a lower court was too lenient. Sljivancanin was convicted in 2007 of enabling the beatings and torture of prisoners seized from a hospital in Vukovar, Croatia, in 1991. But he was acquitted of aiding and abetting murder. Overturning that acquittal in a split decision, the judges i said Sljivancanin should have ignored his commander’s order to leave the prisoners in the hands of Serb paramilitaries because it was obvious they would be killed.



■GERMANY

Schindler’s list on display

A copy of a list of Jewish forced laborers saved by Oskar Schindler are among rare documents that went on display on Tuesday, the body responsible for preserving Nazi papers said. Others include a document with names of people transported to death camps including Anne Frank and Gestapo records on Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s first postwar chancellor, the International Tracing Service (ITS) said. The list is of the 1,200 workers that Schindler managed to have transferred to a factory in Bruennlitz — Brnenec in the present day Czech Republic — from another factory he owned near the Plaszow concentration camp.



■YEMEN

Two boys killed by bomb

A police official said two boys died when a bomb they found in their village school yard went off. The official said Monday’s blast occurred when the students passed the device around during recess in the school in al-Shayem. The official said a 17-year-old and a seven-year-old were killed, and five other students were wounded. It was unclear how the bomb got into the school.



■DENMARK

‘Mermaid’ to visit Shanghai

Copenhagen’s famous Little Mermaid sculpture will be replaced by a video installation when it leaves its historic perch over the port for a visit to China next year, Danish officials said on Tuesday. The thousands of tourists who flock to the site will see a video following her journey to China for next year’s World Expo in Shanghai. The statue, inspired by a character created by Hans Christian Andersen in an 1837 fairytale, is to be absent from Copenhagen from April to November next year. The decision is contentious in Denmark, where Edvard Eriksen’s 1913 sculpture, measuring 125cm and weighing 175kg, is considered a national treasure. A majority of Copenhagen residents opposed the idea.



■ANTIGUA

Cargo ship hijacked

An Antigua and Barbuda-flagged cargo ship has been hijacked by a band of pirates in the Gulf of Aden off the coast of Somalia, the government of the Caribbean state said on Tuesday. The Antigua and Barbuda government said in a statement that the 58 gross tonne, 146m MV Victoria had a crew of 10 and it was believed that the vessel, which was hijacked by eight pirates, was being taken to the Somalian port of Eyl, a known pirate lair. The statement gave no more details about the fate of the ship’s crew. It added that the vessel, which is managed by a company in Germany, had been registered with the EU anti-piracy flotilla operating in the region and was navigating in the recommended East-West corridor of the Gulf at the time of the hijacking.



■UNITED STATES

Drug convict gets four years

A Dominican immigrant who was held hostage and beaten after being lured to suburban Atlanta to settle a drug debt was sentenced on Tuesday to nearly four years in prison for his involvement with a cocaine distribution cell. US District Judge Jack Camp sentenced Oscar Reynoso, 31, to 46 months in federal prison, with five years supervised release to follow. Reynoso is a legal resident who lived in Rhode Island but will face deportation once he is released, US attorney David Nahmias said.



■UNITED STATES

Governor welcomes debate

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday said he would welcome a debate on taxing marijuana sales but said he remained opposed to legalizing the drug in the state. Schwarzenegger was speaking just a few days after a recent Field Poll indicated a majority of Californians supported legalizing the drug, a move that would help raise valuable tax revenues for the cash-strapped state. Asked if it was time to legalize marijuana, Schwarzenegger told reporters on the sidelines of a wildfire awareness briefing: “No. I think that it’s not time for that, but I think it’s time for a debate.” He added: “I think that we ought to study very carefully what other countries are doing that have legalized marijuana and other drugs, what effect it had on those countries, and are they happy with that decision?”



■UNITED STATES

‘Iron lung’ woman dies

A woman who spent 61 years in an iron lung yet graduated from college and wrote a book about her life died at her home in North Carolina. A close friend said Tuesday that 71-year-old Martha Mason died early on Monday in Lattimore. She was 71. Mary Dalton, an associate communications professor at Wake Forest University, produced a documentary about Mason’s life in 2006. Dalton said polio left Mason paralyzed from the neck down in 1948, yet she graduated first in her class from Wake Forest in 1960. With the aid of a voice-recognition computer, she wrote about her life in the book Breath: Life in the Rhythm of an Iron Lung, which was published in 2003.



■MEXICO

Gunmen kill journalist

At least four gunmen confronted and killed columnist Carlos Ortega on Sunday when he got out of his car in front of his home in the small town of Santa Maria del Oro, the Durango state prosecutor’s office said in statement. A motive hadn’t been determined. Ortega was shot in the head after struggling with the attackers, it said. There was no evidence that Ortega, 52, was targeted for his newspaper work, said Victor Garza, director of the newspaper Tiempo. He said Ortega was also a lawyer who defended criminal suspects.
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