■INDONESIA
Big baby born
A woman has given birth to a baby weighing 8.7kg, news reports said yesterday. The baby boy born on Monday by Cesarian section in North Sumatra province was in good health, Erwanto, a doctor who treated the newborn, told the news portal Detik.com. Local media said the baby was the heaviest newborn ever recorded in the country. The previous record was 6.9kg. “The baby does not need an intravenous or ventilator, and his heart is normal,” the doctor, who goes by one name, was quoted as saying. The mother, who weighed 110kg after the delivery, was in good condition too, he said. Another doctor, Binsar Sitanggang, said the baby had a big appetite. “He cries for feeding almost every minute,” he said. “He cries very loudly, unlike other babies.” Doctors said the baby grew too large because the mother has diabetes, which caused him to receive too much glucose.
■NEW ZEALAND
Stabbing student sentenced
A South Korean student was sentenced yesterday to 18 months in prison after a court was told he stabbed a college teacher in the back during a lesson because he had made “culturally insensitive” comments. The teacher spoke of Tae Won Chung’s likely conscription into the army and the possibility of North Korea launching an attack on his country, the court heard yesterday. The comments left Chung, 17, “festering with anger,” the Auckland District Court was told, and he took a knife to college the next day where he stabbed Japanese teacher David Warren, 49, in front of 20 classmates as he wrote on a whiteboard. Chung was sentenced after pleading guilty to a charge of injuring Warren with intent, news reports said. He was also ordered to pay the teacher, who told the court his spine was injured in the attack, NZ$10,000 (US$7,200) in compensation.
■INDIA
Chimney kills workers
Rescuers used heavy cranes and saws to free more than a dozen people still trapped in the rubble of a large chimney that collapsed at a power plant under construction in the center of the country, killing at least 14 people, police said yesterday. R.K. Vij, inspector-general of police, revised the death toll to 14 from the figure of 20 that was given earlier by police, and said another seven people were hospitalized. All 14 bodies have been recovered. Vij said at least 20 workers were still trapped in the rubble at the construction site in Korba, nearly 960km southeast of New Delhi. The 75m chimney came crashing down in the plant’s cafeteria as construction workers had tea, said Vishwa Ranjan, the director-general of police in Chhattisgarh state, where the accident occurred.
■NORTH KOREA
Leader angry with son
“Friction” has developed between leader Kim Jong-il and his youngest son, who has been touted as most likely to take over the isolated communist state, a Japanese news report said on Wednesday. An angry Kim Jong-il has even ordered state news agencies to temper praise of Kim Jong-un and talk of any succession, Japan Broadcasting Corp (NHK) said on its Internet news site. Around July, Kim Jong-un “made moves over personnel matters of the military without consulting his father and angered” leader Kim Jong-il, the national network said, citing several unnamed South Korean sources. The chill in relations between the pair, coupled with Kim Jong-il’s apparently improving health, could affect any succession, the report said. Speculation began in earnest after Kim Jong-il, now 67, suffered a stroke around August last year.
■SPAIN
Expats on crime watch
British expats visiting Spain on Wednesday were urged to be on the lookout for some of their country’s most wanted criminals who are suspected to be hiding out in the Mediterranean nation. The British crime-fighting charity Crimestoppers and the Serious Organized Crime Agency made the appeal at a press conference in the southern city of Malaga in which they added 10 new names to their existing list of 17 suspects believed to be on the run in the country. The 27 include drug traffickers, child abusers, rapists and murderers. Since Crimestoppers began operations in Spain in 2006, 23 of 40 suspects have been captured.
■RUSSIA
Yeltsin story a ‘fib’
The former head of Boris Yeltsin’s security on Wednesday dismissed as “fibs” a journalist’s claim that the former Russian president was found drunk and looking for pizza near the White House in 1995. Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Taylor Branch made the allegation in the USA Today newspaper as he was promoting his book detailing Bill Clinton’s presidency, parsed from hours of secret recordings with the former president. Yeltsin had been staying at Blair House, meters from the White House, when he was discovered late at night roaming by secret service agents, dressed in his underwear, Taylor said. When confronted trying to hail a taxi, Yeltsin slurred that he was looking for pizza. “That never happened,” said Alexandre Korjakov, now a member of parliament. “Abroad, Boris had such security that he couldn’t have looked for a taxi alone. It’s all fibs,” he said. Yeltsin, who died in 2007, is remembered for several embarrassing drunken incidents, once seizing the baton from a bandmaster in Germany to himself conduct and playing the spoons on the president of Kyrgyzstan’s bald head.
■ITALY
Police nab mob croc
Here’s another of the Mafia’s trademark offers-you-can’t-refuse: pay or be eaten by a crocodile. An anti-Mafia police unit said on Wednesday it has seized a crocodile used by an alleged Naples mob boss to intimidate local businessmen from whom he demanded protection money. Officers searching for weapons in the man’s home outside the southern city last week found the crocodile living on his terrace, police official Sergio Di Mauro said. The crocodile, weighing 40km and 1.7m long, was fed a diet of live rabbits and mice, Di Mauro said.
■POLAND
Parliament condemns WWII
The parliament adopted a resolution on Wednesday condemning the Soviet invasion of Poland at the start of World War II. Moscow swiftly criticized the resolution as “worthless politics based on lies.” Lawmakers in Poland’s lower house, the Sejm, unanimously passed the resolution on Wednesday to mark the 70th anniversary of the Soviet attack on Poland on Sept. 17, 1939. In the resolution, they also condemned the 1940 Soviet massacre of 22,000 Polish officers, intellectuals and priests at Katyn. The lawmakers declared that the massacre had “the characteristics of genocide.” In Moscow, Russian lawmakers sharply criticized the resolution. Russian leaders bristle at criticism of Moscow’s World War II-era actions and reject efforts to equate the Soviet Union with Hitler’s Germany. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union both invaded Poland in 1939 based on a secret agreement known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Polish lawmakers also condemned that, saying it made Poland “a victim of the two totalitarian systems: Nazism and Communism.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing