■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
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