■NEW ZEALAND
Rocket booster found
A booster from the nation’s first rocket launched into space was recovered from the sea yesterday, but the nose cone containing scientific instruments with vital information about the project remained missing. A fisherman spotted the stage one booster floating off Monday’s launch site on Great Mercury Island, and owners Mark Rocket, 39, and Peter Beck, 32, asked boatmen to look out for the nose cone.
■NEW ZEALAND
Toddler locks mom in
Karen Kilgour, 32, spent seven frustrating hours locked in a closet after her 14-month-old son, Harry, shut the door on her, the New Zealand Herald reported yesterday. With her husband, Jason, at work she had to sit helplessly listening to “crashing and banging” as the toddler ran around their home in Mount Eden, Auckland, by himself on Friday, the newspaper said. She told the paper she spent about three hours fruitlessly trying to open the door and screaming for help before resigning herself to waiting for her husband to come home and free her.
■VIETNAM
Hubby sleeps with bones
A man who encased his wife’s skeleton in a plaster statue and kept it in bed beside him for five years has been ordered to bury the remains, authorities said yesterday. Le Van, 55, a resident of Ha Lam village in Quang Nam province, removed his wife’s remains from her grave in November 2004 — 20 months after her death — and encased them in a plaster statue of her, the Thanh Nien newspaper reported. “I sleep with her every night,” Van told Thanh Nien. “Sometimes my 12-year-old son also hugs her when we sleep.” “He is very superstitious. He told people he feels much stronger and fresher when he sleeps with his wife’s remains,” Phan Thang An, chairman of the Thang Binh People’s Committee, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur.
■HONG KONG
HK Santa named best
A Father Christmas from subtropical Hong Kong was celebrating yesterday after being named the world’s No. 1 Santa at an annual tournament in northern Sweden. Jimmy Chan (陳漢強), 44, beat eight other contestants from countries, including Burundi, South Africa and Australia to claim the title at the Santa games in the town of Gaellivare near the Arctic Circle. The contestants took part in a series of challenges, including reindeer races, porridge eating and chimney climbing before Chan emerged as winner, the South China Morning Post reported.
■HONG KONG
School drug tests start
The government yesterday began a controversial trial project to test 22,000 secondary school pupils for drug use. Urine samples were being taken from pupils in 23 schools and results shared between teachers, police and social workers in a move to tackle a growing tide of youth drug abuse. The scheme, described as voluntary, has triggered criticism with academics and youth welfare groups saying it infringes on civil liberties. Pupils are selected for testing during normal school hours.
■INDIA
Bus robbers in for shock
Robbers in the Indian state of Haryana could be in for a nasty surprise after officials announced plans to booby trap bus conductors’ money bags so that anyone stealing them gets an electric shock. “The attacker receives an electric shock of approximately 250 volts,” state Transport Minister O.P. Jain told the United News of India news agency.
■SWEDEN
Dark, gloomy November
Stockholm registered only 17.5 hours of sunshine for the entire month of November, making it the gloomiest November since 2000, meteorologists said on Monday. The sun shone on average for only 35 minutes a day during the month, the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute said. In the past quarter-century, only the years 2000 and 1993 had darker Novembers, with eight and nine hours of golden rays respectively, while the average for the month is 54 hours.
■SPAIN
Pacheco wins Cervantes
Mexican writer Jose Emilio Pacheco has won the Spanish-speaking world’s highest literary honor — the Cervantes Prize. Pacheco, 70, is a poet, novelist, journalist and literary critic. “We’ve defined him as representing the whole of our language,” said Jose Antonio Pascual Rodriguez, a member of the Cervantes Prize jury and representative of the Spanish Royal Academy.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Genitalia resemble ‘Cyclops’
A cringe-inducing passage that compares a sexual encounter to battle with a one-eyed mythological monster was awarded Britain’s Bad Sex in Fiction Prize on Monday. The editors of Literary Review magazine said bestselling American author Jonathan Littell won the prize for describing a sex act as “a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg.” The passage compared female genitalia to various Greek fiends, including the mythical monster Gorgon and “a motionless Cyclops whose single eye never blinks.”
■INDONESIA
Cops detain protesters
Police detained several protesters flying outlawed independence flags yesterday during peaceful demonstrations against Jakarta rule in the restive Papua Province, an official said. At least two demonstrations in the provincial capital Jayapura marked the 48th anniversary of the Free Papua Movement that declared independence from Dutch colonial rule. Papua Police chief Brigadier General Bekto Suprapto told reporters that several men were detained for holding an unauthorized demonstration.
■INDIA
China stops construction
Authorities in Kashmir have stopped work on a mountainous road near the border with China after objections from the Chinese army, an official said. The 8km road was being built in the remote Demchok area of Ladakh area near the Line of Actual Control, a military line that divides Indian Kashmir and the part held by China. “The construction work at the road has been stopped by the Chinese army, saying that the area belonged to them, and no road would be constructed,” said Tsering Dorjay, chief executive councillor of the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council. “The road was well within Indian territory.”
■ITALY
Cop crashes Lamborghini
When police unveiled Lamborghini patrol cars, they were not prepared for a motorist who pulled out of a gas station without looking on Monday. A bandaged and bruised police driver may have had a tough time explaining how he managed to write off one of the force’s prized Lamborghinis when he rammed it so hard into a line of parked cars that one of the stationary vehicles ended up on the police car’s roof. According to the police, the crash was caused by the driver of a Seat Ibiza that clipped the £130,000 (US$214,000) Lamborghini and sent the vehicle swerving into the parked cars.
■UNITED STATES
Police kill ‘Jesus’
Police in a Washington suburb are in the awkward situation of having to admit they killed “Jesus” — after they shot and killed the Rottweiler-pit bull mix who had attacked his owner. Police in Rockville, Maryland, were called to a house late Saturday night by the owner of Jesus after the 60kg dog became aggressive and agitated, the department said. They managed to catch the animal but searched in vain for sedatives to subdue it. Eventually, they used a Taser device to administer 50,000 volts of electricity to the animal, which would ordinarily provoke instant paralysis. “It didn’t faze the dog at all,” Rockville police chief Terry Treschuk said. “We tried everything. We just had to make a decision and bring this to an end.” So police shot and killed the dog. Jesus’ owner was hospitalized with bites to the arms, chest and thighs.
■ARGENTINA
Cosmetic surgery kills
A 38-year-old former Miss Argentina has died from complications after undergoing cosmetic surgery on her buttocks. Solange Magnano, a mother of twins who won the crown in 1994, died of a pulmonary embolism on Sunday after three days in critical condition following a gluteoplasty in Buenos Aires. Close friend Roberto Piazza said the procedure involved injections and the liquid “went to her lungs and brain.” “A woman who had everything lost her life to have a slightly firmer behind,” he said.
■MEXICO
Seven women murdered
Seven women were murdered, including one who was beheaded in the southern beach resort of Cancun, authorities reported on Monday. Four of the women were killed in Ciudad Juarez, where two were shot to death, another beaten with a baseball bat and a fourth, a school teacher, also was beaten to death. The northern border city is at the center of a raging drug war that has claimed 2,300 lives so far this year. In Baja California state, two women were found shot to death in Mexicali, also on the US border, the Attorney General’s office said. In the Caribbean tourist mecca of Cancun, a 19-year-old woman was found beheaded in a sports stadium. The victim, a suspected prostitute, had a relationship with a police officer who was murdered last week, the office said.
■CANADA
Speedy verification begins
Canada will soon fast-track verification of foreign work qualifications to help stem a growing shortage of skilled workers, the government announced on Monday. Many immigrants are now forced to take jobs in fields unrelated to their expertise while employers are struggling to fill vacancies for work that newcomers could do but lack the proper credentials. Some wait years for their foreign work experience and education to be assessed. According to Statistics Canada, six in 10 immigrants do not work in their chosen field and 42 percent are overqualified for their current job.
■CANADA
Eight-year detention ends
A federal court on Monday ordered the release of an Egyptian man convicted of terrorism in his home country and who was later detained in Canada for eight years as a possible national security threat. “The court is satisfied that the threat Mr. [Mohamed] Mahjoub poses to national security or the safety of any person can be neutralized by the imposition of conditions on his release from detention,” the ruling said. Mahjoub will be permitted to live alone but will remain under surveillance.
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
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema