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World News Quick Take
AGENCIES
Saturday, Sep 12, 2009, Page 5
■CHINA
Sing no to drugs
Karaoke singers in Beijing are being forced to listen to an anti-drugs song before belting out tunes as part of a crackdown on narcotics use ahead of National Day, state media said yesterday. Police have told more than 1,200 karaoke venues in the capital to install the three-minute “educational video” as authorities clamp down on drug users and dealers ahead of the Oct. 1 festivities, the Global Times reported. “It pops up after you start the system. You can’t cut it short but have to wait till the song finishes,” said Li Tong, manager of a Party World karaoke venue. “Some sing to it. The tunes are quite catchy.”
■BRUNEI
Police look for croc victims
Police divers searched the rivers yesterday for a missing man and a four-year-old boy snatched by crocodiles in separate attacks. Awg Tuah Yahya, 41, was pulled underwater by a crocodile while he was fishing in knee-deep water on Monday. His wife, who witnessed the attack, said they had spotted the crocodile lurking around but chose to ignore it. The second attack occurred on Wednesday, when Sharizan Anak Sumua was dragged away by a crocodile while bathing with his father and siblings in a different river, a police report said.
■JAPAN
No new appointees
Prime minister-designate Yukio Hatoyama may delay choosing his Cabinet until a meeting of party lawmakers next week on the advice of a party heavyweight known for behind-the-scenes maneuvers, media said yesterday. Hatoyama initially said he would announce his ministerial lineup after officially being voted in as prime minister by parliament on Sept. 16. But he later announced he had chosen Naoto Kan as head of a new National Strategy Bureau, and Katsuya Okada, his rival in the last party leadership race, as foreign minister. However, media reports yesterday said further appointments could be held over until next week on the advice of party No. 2 Ichiro Ozawa. “It seems Ozawa wants everything decided on Sept. 15,” the Nikkei Shimbun quoted one lawmaker as saying. The Asahi and Tokyo newspapers also said Ozawa had urged the delay.
■HONG KONG
Police arrest 17 in killing
Seventeen people have been arrested over the execution of a feared triad gang leader outside a luxury hotel in Hong Kong, police said yesterday. Lee Tai-lung, 44, known as the “Baron of Tsimshatsui East,” was run down by a van outside the five-star Kowloon Shangri-la Hotel on Aug. 4 and then hacked to death by three men with knives. Police said the attack was a well-organized hit using a technique known as “ram and chop.” They said the murder bore the hallmarks of a hit by the Wo Shing Wo triad faction. Seventeen suspects aged between 19 to 49 have been arrested after a city-wide operation by officers from the specialized Organized Crime and Triad Bureau, a police spokesman said.
■JAPAN
Centenarians top 40,000
The number of centenarians has doubled in the past six years to a record high of more than 40,000, with women dominating the list, the government said yesterday. Japan will have 40,399 people aged 100 or older this month, surpassing the previous record of 36,276 last year, the Health and Welfare Ministry said in an annual report marking a Sept. 21 national holiday honoring the elderly. More than 86 percent are women.
■UNITED NATIONS
Child mortality drops
The rate of child deaths has declined by 28 percent since the early 1990s, the UN Children’s Fund said on Thursday. “Compared to 1990, 10,000 fewer children are dying every day,” said Ann Veneman, UNICEF director general. “While progress is being made, it is unacceptable that each year 8.8 million children die before their fifth birthday.” The new estimates provided by UNICEF were obtained and analyzed from sources including demographers, the WHO, the World Bank and the UN population division. There were 90 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990, for an estimated world total of 12.5 million deaths. The death rate declined to 65 deaths per 1,000 live births last year for a total of 8.8 million deaths.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Reminiscing boosts memory
Reminiscing about the war and school lessons from earlier days can improve the memories of elderly people in care homes, psychologists have found. A study of 70 to 90-year-olds living in care homes in Somerset and Cornwall discovered that the sharing of stories from the past increased memory scores for the residents by 12 percent. The study, to appear in the journal Psychology and Aging, was led by Catherine Haslam, a neuropsychologist at Exeter. She recruited 73 elderly people into three groups that met each week. The first played skittles together, the second spoke individually to a carer about the old times, and the third met for half an hour to reminisce together about childhood times, schooldays and family holidays. Only those who reminisced together scored higher in the memory tests at the end of the six-week study. The skittles group showed an 11 percent rise in well-being, as judged by a questionnaire. But those who shared memories with a carer showed no improvement in memory or well-being.
■TURKEY
Penis-chopper awaits fate
A woman accused of cutting off her lover’s penis must wait 18 months for a verdict and sentencing while a court determines whether his re-attached penis still functions, a court source said on Thursday. The criminal court in the Black Sea town of Trabzon will wait for a medical report assessing whether the 28-year-old victim has regained full use of his organ or if he is permanently disabled, an official involved in the trial said. The 39-year-old defendant faces between one and three years in prison if her former lover recovers, HaberTurk newspaper said. She will be jailed for at least eight years if he does not. The woman told the court he had broken his promise to marry her, forced her into prostitution and beat her.
■UNITED STATES
Scientists float mice
Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have succeeded in levitating mice, a feat that they say could lead to advances in treating bone loss for astronauts living for extended periods in low gravity environments. Jet Propulsion Laboratory physicist Yuanming Liu said on Thursday that the mice were levitated using a device called a no gravity simulator, which is powered by a superconducting gradient magnet. “We first tried a fully conscious mouse and he didn’t like it very much, he started to spin and got disoriented,” Liu said. A second experiment was conducted with a mouse that had been partially sedated by a veterinarian, and that rodent calmed down considerably as he floated in the air. Liu said the second stage of the study will involve having the mice live in the levitator for a week or longer to see what physical effects result.
■UNITED STATES
Lawmaker denies affairs
A California lawmaker who resigned after he was caught on tape bragging about his sexual exploits with two women, one of them reportedly a lobbyist, denied on Thursday that he was having extramarital affairs. Mike Duvall stepped down from the California Assembly on Wednesday, one day after a videotape surfaced in which the married legislator is heard telling a colleague that he enjoys spanking one of the women — who he boasts is 18 years younger and favors “eye-patch”-sized underwear. “I want to make it clear that my decision to resign is in no way an admission that I had an affair or affairs,” Duvall, a 54-year-old family-values Republican from Orange County, said in a statement on his Web site. “My offense was engaging in inappropriate storytelling and I regret my language and choice of words,” he said.
■ARCTIC SEA
Underwater mountain found
Joint US-Canada exploration of the Arctic sea floor discovered an unusual underwater mountain and evidence that could boost the two countries’ claims that their boundaries extend farther north. For the past two months ships from the countries have ventured north in an effort to find out how far the continental shelf extends. Christine Hedge, a US school teacher aboard the US Coast Guard cutter Healy, found the first indications of something unusual jutting up from the seabed 2.7km deep. Further examination showed that it was a mountain almost 1,158m high, 19km long and 38km wide. It is about 1,127km north of Alaska.
■UNITED STATES
Bride-to-be disappears
Yale University police appealed to the public for information that might help them find Annie Le, a graduate student who was last seen on Tuesday. Le’s teachers, colleagues, friends, family and fiance are assisting the investigation, along with the FBI, the Connecticut State Police and the New Haven Police, Yale Police Chief James Perrotti said yesterday. Le, 24, was last seen in a university research building in New Haven, Connecticut, where Yale is located. State Police used bloodhounds to try to find Le, and officials are reviewing images from security cameras in search of clues, the Yale Police said.
■UNITED STATES
Jackson might be exhumed
Michael Jackson may not have found his last resting place in a California cemetery, with his brother Jermaine telling a German television show on Thursday he would like to see the grave moved. “I’m not so happy with it,” said the elder Jackson, according to text released in advance of broadcast by the Johannes B. Kerner Show. Jermaine Jackson, 54, who was interviewed in Berlin, said he expected an exhumation and reburial at Neverland, his brother’s private ranch. Michael Jackson died on June 25 and was buried on Sept. 3 at the Grand Mausoleum of the Forest Lawn Memorial Park.
■UNITED STATES
Cat survives weeks in debris
A woman’s pet cat has been found alive, buried beneath debris 26 days after an Ohio fire. Sandy LaPierre says she assumed one-year-old Smoka had died from the Aug. 10 fire in Franklin, about 48km north of Cincinnati. A demolition company moved in to tear down what was left of the building the day after the fire. A crew from Stark Wrecking Co came back last Friday to clear away the rubble and found Smoka’s head sticking out from under nearly 5m of debris. LaPierre said the cat lost a lot of weight and has some difficulty walking, but otherwise seems fine.
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