■AFGHANISTAN
Two NATO staff killed
Officials said two NATO service members died in Afghanistan, including a Danish soldier killed by a roadside bomb. The Danish army said one of its soldiers was killed and five injured on Friday when a blast hit their vehicle in southern Afghanistan. The Army Operational Command said the members of a Danish scouting unit were flown to a field hospital for treatment but one was declared dead upon arrival. NATO yesterday said another service member died on Friday from wounds suffered in a vehicle accident in western Afghanistan. Meanwhile, three rockets were fired on Friday at a building leased as the site of a future US consulate in the western Afghan city of Herat, police said. One rocket hit the former hotel, shattering windows, and two others landed nearby, said Rahmatullah Sediqi, the deputy provincial police chief in Herat. No one was hurt, but police later fired in the air to disperse crowds, he said.
■UNITED STATES
Filipina nurses cleared
Ten Filipino nurses cleared last year of misdemeanor charges for quitting their jobs at a Long Island nursing home have filed a federal civil rights lawsuit. The nurses were recruited from the Philippines to help ease a staffing shortage in the US, but resigned en masse in 2006 in a dispute over working conditions. Prosecutors claimed they endangered sick patients. But a state appellate court ruled the prosecution was unconstitutional. The case attracted headlines in Manila. Hearings were held in 2007 in the Philippines’ Senate and House of Representatives. The lawsuit names the nursing home, as well as prosecutors, as defendants. Neither a nursing home attorney nor the Suffolk County attorney immediately commented.
■CHINA
Twelve miners die in blaze
A coal mine fire in Jiangxi Province has killed at least 12 miners, state media reported yesterday, citing local authorities. Emergency workers recovered the bodies of 12 people from the mine in Xinyu City yesterday morning, the Xinhua news agency reported. The blaze, which began on Friday afternoon, was still being investigated, it said. “An initial investigation indicates the fire was caused by short circuit of underground cables,” Xinhua quoted a district government statement as saying.
■CHINA
Uighur killed in Shenzhen
A Uighur man was stabbed to death in Shenzhen, a sign of lingering tensions after a factory brawl last summer sparked bloody ethnic riots in Xinjiang, a newspaper said yesterday. Energy-rich Xinjiang, homeland to the Muslim Uighur people and strategically located in central Asia, has been struck in recent years by bombings, attacks and riots blamed by Beijing on Uighur separatists demanding an independent “East Turkistan.” The ethnic Uighur man was attacked by a Han Chinese man in a restaurant in Shenzhen, a city close to Shaoguan in Guangdong Province where a massive brawl broke out at a factory between a group of Han Chinese and Uighur workers from Xinjiang last June, the South China Morning Post reported. The Shaoguan incident triggered serious ethnic rioting in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi when Uighurs attacked Han Chinese, killing at least 197 people. Seven Han Chinese men were arrested and reportedly fired from their jobs afterwards.
■INDIA
Troops report border rockets
Frontier troops yesterday accused their Pakistani counterparts of firing at least four rockets across the border into northern Punjab, but said there were no casualties. The incident is the second since September when two rockets allegedly fired by Pakistani troops landed near the popular tourist attraction of Wagah in Indian Punjab. Border Security Force (BSF) officials said two of the cross-border rockets exploded in farms while the remaining two did not detonate. Frontier commanders from both sides met to discuss the alleged shelling, a BSF official said in the Sikh pilgrimage city of Amritsar. There was no immediate comment available from Islamabad, but the BSF official said Pakistani commanders at the meeting denied firing the rockets. Tensions between the neighbors flared in the wake of the Mumbai attacks in November 2008, which Delhi blamed on Pakistan-based militants and “official agencies” of Pakistan, a charge Islamabad has denied.
■FRANCE
New device at airport
Body scanners will be used on an experimental basis at the country’s busiest airport later this month for flights headed to the US, the deputy director of transportation at the General Direction for Civil Aviation said on Friday. President Nicolas Sarkozy had ordered this week a study of the possible use of scanners following the failed effort, allegedly by a Nigerian man, to blow up a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas. The scanners will be put in place at Charles de Gaulle airport, north of Paris, before the end of the month, Jacques Le Guillou said. To start with, one scanner will be set up at Charles de Gaulle airport, but ideally six or seven will be deployed eventually, Le Guillou said.
■RUSSIA
Four killed in avalanche
An avalanche in the southern region of Kabardino-Balkaria in the North Caucasus killed four mountain climbers on Friday, state-run RIA news agency reported, citing the local emergencies ministry. “As a group of tourists were reaching the top of Gedan-tau [mountain], an avalanche came down on them,” RIA quoted ministry spokesman Kantimer Davydov as saying. He said four people were killed and five injured by the avalanche, which took place at about 5pm on the mountain, which is 3,700m high.
■SERBIA
Croat leader visits Kosovo
The Croat president moved on Friday to defuse tensions with Belgrade, saying his visit to newly independent Kosovo was not aimed at its Balkan rival, which continues to claim ownership of its former province. Kosovo declared independence in 2008, nearly a decade after a bloody war between its ethnic Albanian majority and Serb forces ended with the Serb military pulling out and NATO moving in. While the US and most EU states have recognized Kosovo’s independence, Belgrade, backed by Russia and a majority of the other countries in the world, do not. Croat President Stipe Mesic said his visit was aimed at “strengthening regional stability and cooperation.”
■SUDAN
Artists drum for peace
Drummers from Pink Floyd, Radiohead and The Police are joining other musicians to drum for peace in the country as part of an international campaign to press world leaders to prevent more bloodshed in Africa’s largest country. The Sudan 365 campaign launched yesterday calls “on global leaders to take urgent diplomatic action over the next 365 days to prevent all-out conflict returning to Sudan,” a statement by the organisers said. It comes as the country marks the fifth anniversary of the North-South Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which ended a devastating 22-year war between majority Muslim north Sudan and the mainly Christian and animist south.
■SPAIN
Illegal downloads targeted
Madrid approved a plan on Friday to quickly shut down Web sites offering illegal entertainment downloads, joining Britain and France in moving to implement new crackdowns on Internet piracy. Justice Minister Francisco Caamano said the measure would create a panel of experts to hear complaints against suspect sites. The panel can then call on a judge, who will have four days to hear arguments from the parties involved before ruling on whether to shut down a site. The measure, which must be approved by parliament, is aimed at placating entertainment industry groups that claim they are losing millions of euros through Internet piracy of copyright-protected material.
■UNITED STATES
Chinese student released
Authorities said the Chinese graduate student who faces a trespassing charge in a security breach that resulted in major delays last weekend at Newark Liberty Airport in New Jersey had been released from custody. Port Authority spokesman Ron Marsico says 28-year-old Jiang Haisong of Piscataway was released shortly after midnight on Friday. The Port Authority says Jiang, a Rutgers University doctoral student from China, was arrested on Friday night at his home. Surveillance video shows a man taking advantage of a guard’s absence to sneak past a security checkpoint at the airport last Sunday and walk arm-in-arm with a woman.
■UNITED STATES
Officials accuse art dealer
A Los Angeles antiques dealer was accused of fraud after she allegedly sold a fake Pablo Picasso painting for US$2 million, federal officials announced Friday. Tatiana Khan was informed of the charges Friday by FBI agents, who also seized a US$700,000 Willem de Kooning painting that prosecutors allege was purchased with proceeds derived from the sale of the bogus Picasso. Khan, who owns a gallery in West Hollywood, allegedly hired an artist to fabricate the Picasso drawing — a 1902 pastel called The Woman in the Blue Hat — by giving the artist a photo of the drawing and US$1,000.
■UNITED STATES
Young convicts report abuse
About one in eight youths in prison in the US, some as young as 12, have been sexually abused by another inmate or jail staff, a first-ever survey by the Department of Justice shows. Eighty percent of abuse cases involved a member of the prison staff, and in nearly all those cases, the alleged offenders were women — even though less than half the staff in US juvenile prisons are women — said the first National Survey of Youth in Custody report, which was published on Thursday. In more than a third of cases where a member of prison staff abused a youngster, force was used or threatened, the survey showed. Boys, who make up the majority of young prison inmates in the US, were more likely than girls to report unwanted sexual activity with a member of prison staff: 10.8 percent of the boys surveyed said they had been sexually abused by prison staff compared with less than 5 percent of girls.
■UNITED STATES
Gluer reaches plea deal
A third Wisconsin woman accused of seeking revenge against a cheating lover by gluing his penis to his stomach has reached a plea deal with prosecutors. Forty-four-year-old Wendy Sewell, of Kaukauna, had faced a felony charge of being party to the crime of false imprisonment. She pleaded no contest on Friday to a lesser charge of disorderly conduct. The misdemeanor carries a maximum penalty of 90 days in jail and a US$1,000 fine. Most likely she’ll avoid jail time.
■UNITED STATES
Cops search for teen robbers
Police were searching on Thursday for two adolescent girls suspected of robbing a bank in the northeastern state of Ohio. The girls, one believed to be between the ages of 14 and 16 and the other a couple of years younger, pulled off the unarmed heist on Tuesday at a bank in a suburb of Cincinnati. Police said the juvenile suspects, wearing hooded sweatshirts that partly concealed their faces, passed a note to a teller demanding money and walked out with an unknown amount of what is called “bait money.” The money can be easily identified as coming from the bank.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese