■CHINA
Tiger shooter sentenced
A man who shot dead a rare tiger was sentenced to 12 years in prison and fined 580,000 yuan (US$85,000), state media reported yesterday. A court in Yunnan Province said Kang Wannian (康萬年) and another man shot the creature in a nature reserve in February, Xinhua news agency said. When the two men realized they had killed an Indochinese Tiger, which is on China’s list of endangered species, they got scared and ran away, leaving the corpse behind, the report said. The second man, Gao Zuqiao (高租橋), later returned to the animal’s body with six other people, skinned and dismembered the tiger, and brought the bones and flesh home to eat, the report said. Kang was sentenced to 12 years in jail for the illegal possession of a gun and illegally catching and killing a wild, endangered animal. Gao was jailed for four years and ordered to pay 20,000 yuan (US$2,900) for covering up the crime.
■NEW ZEALAND
Cow impaling doesn’t pay
A court convicted two farmers on an animal cruelty charge yesterday for impaling a live cow with a tractor’s fork. The two North Island men had shot an ailing Hereford cross cow last year to slaughter it and told authorities they thought it already was dead when they speared it with the tractor. But a policeman later noticed that the animal was still alive, and it was able to stagger away when released from the tractor fork. Farm owner Ronald Frew and farm manager Geoffrey Donald, both 43, were found guilty in Taihape District Court of ill-treating a cow, Radio New Zealand reported. Judge Gerard Lynch imposed fines of NZ$750 (US$530) for each man.
■CHINA
Beijing raises water prices
The price of water was raised yesterday to help fight a worsening water shortage after nine years of droughts. Beijing authorities said the water price for residential use would go up 8 percent, an increase that follows a jump of almost 50 percent in the price of water for nonresidential use last month, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
■PHILIPPINES
Residents flee volcano
Almost all 47,000 residents living on the slopes of a rumbling volcano have moved to emergency shelters, and lava and earthquakes yesterday heralded what officials say could be a major eruption. Low clouds obscured visibility of the smoldering 2,460m Mayon, towering over coconut farms and rice paddies in coastal Albay province. “Hazardous eruption ... can happen today or in the next few days,” said chief state volcanologist Renato Solidum, adding that an eruption also may not happen.
■UNITED STATES
Obama tries to save money
President Barack Obama on Monday touted a plan to cut back on wasteful spending on federal government contractors, a plan he said is on track to save US$40 billion per year by 2011. “Between 2002 and 2008, the amount spent on government contracts more than doubled. The amount spent on no-bid, non-competitive contracts jumped by 129 percent. This is an inexcusable waste of money,” Obama said.
■MEXICO
Cartel violence spikes
A spasm of drug violence has claimed the lives of at least 23 people in the northern state of Chihuahua, authorities said on Monday. Of the 23 deaths, 13 were in the city of Ciudad Juarez alone — not far from the US city of El Paso, Texas. Ciudad Juarez is the country’s bloodiest city, with more than 2,500 murders this year alone. In one of the cases from Sunday to Monday, a couple was gunned down in front of their children, aged three, five and nine, who were not injured, police said.
■UNITED STATES
‘Rain Man’ inspiration dies
The man who inspired the title character in the Oscar-winning movie Rain Man has died. Kim Peek was 58. His father, Fran, says Peek had a major heart attack on Saturday morning and was pronounced dead at a hospital in the Salt Lake City suburb of Murray. Peek was a savant with a remarkable memory and inspired writer Barry Morrow when he wrote Rain Man, the 1988 movie that won four Academy Awards. Fran Peek said his son met Morrow at a convention in the early 1980s and the writer was taken with Peek’s knack for retaining everything he heard. In his later years, Peek was classified as a “mega-savant” who was a genius in about 15 different subjects, from history and literature and geography to numbers, sports, music and dates.
■COLOMBIA
Chief makes Chavez quip
The defense chief joked on Monday that Venezuelan troops might have mistaken Santa’s sleigh for a spy plane, dismissing accusations by President Hugo Chavez about drones flying over Venezuela. Chavez on Sunday accused the US of violating Venezuela’s airspace with an unmanned spy plane and ordered his military to be on alert and shoot down any such aircraft. The Pentagon has declined to comment on Chavez’s accusations.
■UNITED STATES
Anthony Marshall sentenced
The elderly son of philanthropist Brooke Astor was sentenced on Monday to as long as three years in prison for defrauding his late mother, following his conviction in one of New York’s biggest society trials. Marshall, scion of one of the country’s most illustrious families, was found guilty in October of what prosecutors described as a “depraved” conspiracy to take control of Astor’s US$200 million estate, while the New York heiress and charity doyenne suffered worsening Alzheimer’s disease.
■UNITED STATES
Polanski dismissal rejected
In a case that has polarized public passions, director Roman Polanski did not win his freedom on Monday for a 32-year-old sex offense, but a US appeals court said in a strongly worded opinion there was probable judicial and prosecutorial misconduct in his case. The opinion criticized Polanski for fleeing to his native France in 1978
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