■AUSTRALIA
Tourism official found
Victoria state Tourism Minister Tim Holding was found alive yesterday after spending two days lost in sub-zero temperatures in high country north of Melbourne. The 37-year-old went missing on Sunday after setting off on a solo overnight hike to the summit of Mt Feathertop.
■PAKISTAN
Khan now really a free man
Nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, who had admitted leaking nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya, said yesterday that restrictions on his movements have been lifted. A court declared Khan a free man in February, five years after he was put under house arrest. The 72-year-old Khan complained to a high court last week that his movements were still being restricted.
■AUSTRALIA
Marriages on the rise
The number of people tying the knot has hit a 20-year high, reversing a downward trend, Australian Bureau of Statistics data released on Monday showed. The figures show 118,756 marriages were registered last year, up 2.1 percent on 2007 and more than 12 percent on the recent low of about 104,000 in 2001. Divorces hit a 20-year low of 47,209 last year. Almost 80 percent of couples lived together before marriage and the average age of people getting married is now 29.6 for men and 26.3 for women.
■INDIA
Man faces rape charge
A 36-year-old businessman will face trial for raping a German teenager 12 years ago in Germany, police said yesterday. Jaswant Singh was arrested in New Delhi on Sunday after the police spent more than eight months looking for him, New Delhi’s deputy commissioner of police Neeraj Thakur said.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Police quell Belfast riot
Police fired plastic bullets late on Monday night to stop a riot involving around 200 people in East Belfast. Pro-Irish nationalists and pro-British unionists lobbed missiles at each other and the police in a clash sparked after nationalists held a rally to mark the closing of a local police station. A police spokesman said there were no arrests and no reports of injuries. Monday night’s riot was in a so-called “interface area” of Belfast, where Protestant and Catholic communities live in close and uneasy proximity.
■RUSSIA
Bomb kills one, injures 13
A man who was stopped by traffic police in the southern region of Dagestan detonated explosives in his car yesterday, killing a passer-by and injuring 13 other people. Dagestan Interior Ministry spokesman Mark Tolchinsky said the blast occurred at a traffic checkpoint on the outskirts of Dagestan’s capital city, Makhachkala. Tolchinsky said the police post was partly destroyed in the blast. In stopping the car, the traffic police managed to avert a large-scale terrorist attack in Makhachkala, Dagestani Interior Minister Ali Magomedov said in a statement. Russian news agencies reported a separate blast in Chechnya yesterday that injured three troops belonging to the region’s Interior Ministry. The director of Russia’s main security agency, the Federal Security Service, told Russian news agencies yesterday that he had received a presidential order to “prepare and realize additional measures to neutralize the terrorist threat” in the region. It was unclear what that meant.
■SWEDEN
First A(H1N1) death reported
Plans for mass vaccinations will continue after the country reported its first death from the A(H1N1) virus, or swine flu, officials said. Test results late on Monday confirmed that a man had become the first known Swedish fatality of the disease, Uppsala University Hospital said. The patient was in his late 30s and had “other underlying risk factors,” head physician Ulf Hanson said. The man died on Friday at his home near Uppsala. Sweden has reported 915 swine flu cases. A week ago, the Swedish government said it would allocate 1 billion kronor (US$142 million) for mass vaccinations and other measures to prevent the spread of the pandemic flu virus.
RSS