■SOUTH KOREA
Exercise to be scaled down
The US and South Korea will go ahead next month with a major annual military exercise but fewer US troops than last year will take part, officials said yesterday. North Korea denounces the exercise and other annual military drills in the South as a rehearsal for invasion, a claim denied by Seoul and Washington. The Key Resolve and Foal Eagle exercise, slated for March 8 to March 18, will draw 18,000 US troops including 10,000 stationed in South Korea and 8,000 from abroad, said Combined Forces Command spokesman Kim Yong-kyu. Some 26,000 US troops took part in the exercise last year. “An aircraft carrier which came last year will not participate this time,” the spokesman said, adding that the scaling-down of the exercise was governed only by operational considerations.
■CANADA
Social network slammed
The nation’s privacy commissioner accused Google on Wednesday of breaching privacy laws when it launched its new online social network Buzz last week, and demanded compliance. “We have seen a storm of protest and outrage over alleged privacy violations and my office also has questions about how Google Buzz has met the requirements of privacy laws in Canada,” commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said in a statement. Buzz was added last week as a feature on Google’s Gmail. Some Gmail users complained that they were automatically assigned a network of “followers” based on those with whom they communicated with most using Google’s e-mail and online chat services, without notice or consent. The list of “followers” was also included in a widely available online profile. Stoddart said she reminded Google officials that the company must abide by Canadian privacy laws when launching products in Canada.
■CHILE
Astronomers find old stars
European Southern Observatory (ESO) astronomers said on Wednesday they had uncovered the oldest stars in our galactic neighborhood thanks to a massive telescope in Chile. Finding the most primitive stars outside the Milky Way galaxy “is crucial for our understanding of the earliest stars in the universe,” ESO said in a statement. ESO’s Very Large Telescope, which measures 8.2m in diameter and is installed in the Atacama desert, located the stars. According to cosmologists, primitive stars, also called “extremely metal-poor stars,” formed shortly after the Big Bang, around 13.7 billion years ago. These extremely rare stars had been difficult to locate. But a new technique allowed the European astronomers to “uncover the primitive stars hidden among all the other, more common stars,” said Else Starkenburg, lead author of the paper reporting the study.
■CANADA
Terror plot man gets life
A judge sentenced a man to life in prison on Wednesday for his role in a terror plot against Germany and Austria. Said Namouh, a Moroccan who has lived in Quebec since 2003, was found guilty in October of four terrorism-related charges stemming from a plan to bomb targets in Germany and Austria. Namouh, 37, was arrested in 2007 for his alleged role in making threats in an Internet video that warned Germany and Austria would be attacked if they did not pull their troops out of Afghanistan. Namouh was found guilty of one count each of conspiracy to detonate an explosive device, participating in a terrorist act, facilitating an act of terrorism and committing extortion for a terrorist group.
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