■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.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion