■CHINA
Fireworks destroy landmark
Fireworks set off to mark the Lunar New Year started a blaze that destroyed a 1,600-year-old city gate. No deaths or injuries were reported in Friday’s fire, which gutted the restored structure on the city wall of Zhengding, about 250km southwest of the capital Beijing, the China Daily newspaper reported yesterday. Financial losses were estimated at 1 million yuan (US$150,000), the paper said. The gate was originally built in the fifth century and restored in 2001 at a cost of 4 million yuan, the paper said. Zhengding, Hebei Province, is famed for its ancient houses and Buddhist temples.
■VATICAN
Aussie nun to become saint
A 19th-century nun who was briefly excommunicated is to become Australia’s first saint, Pope Benedict XVI said on Friday. Mother Mary MacKillop, whose work building schools, orphanages and clinics for impoverished people did much to help spread Roman Catholicism in Australia and New Zealand, will be formally canonized at the Vatican in October, Benedict said. MacKillop was born in Melbourne in 1842, the eldest of eight children of Scottish migrants, and after working as a governess became convinced of the need for secular and religious education for children in the outback. She adopted her religious name of Sister Mary of the Cross in 1866, founding a school in a disused stable in Penola, South Australia, and, with other women following her example, became part of the Congregation of the Sisters of St Joseph. They founded dozens more schools in small settlements and cities. Tension with ecclesiastical authorities led to her brief excommunication by a bishop for alleged insubordination in 1871, although he soon retracted the sentence.
■SPAIN
Weather hits bullfighting
As bullfighting aficionados await the pageantry and trumpet blasts of a new season, breeders are fretting their beasts might not be up to snuff: skinny, tender-footed and sporting longer hair, all because of a miserably wet winter. The rain in Spain is usually good news, but it’s been coming down hard pretty much every day for two months in the south, where most of the country’s bull ranches are. Among the problems, too much rain causes bulls’ hooves to swell and soften and makes their joints sensitive, sapping their mobility. Furthermore, bulls won’t eat wet feed pellets, meaning the first ones to head into the ring this year will be 25kg lighter on average.
■RUSSIA
‘Gnome’ poster censored
Posters proclaiming “We await you, merry gnome” were taken down in a town shortly before a visit by President Dmitry Medvedev, a Web site reported on Friday. The ads were for a children’s theater, but were removed from a street that the president’s convoy was due to use on his visit to Omsk on Feb. 12, the nr2.ru Web site said. Media reports say Medvedev is 1.62m tall.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Lionel Jeffries passes on
Actor and film director Lionel Jeffries, who wrote the screenplay for and directed The Railway Children, has died at the age of 83, his agent said on Friday. The London-born actor, who trained at The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, had a long career spanning theater, film and television. One of his best known appearances was in the 1968 film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, in which he played Dick Van Dyke’s father, despite being six months younger than the US actor.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Drunk pilot sentenced
A United Airlines pilot who turned up at London’s Heathrow Airport to fly the Atlantic while three times over the alcohol limit was given a 10-month suspended jail sentence on Friday. Erwin Washington, 51, of Lakewood, Colorado, had been due to captain a Boeing 767 bound for Chicago in November with 124 passengers and 11 crew members when a colleague smelled alcohol on his breath. The flight was “imminent” when police arrived and arrested him. A breath test recorded a reading of 31 micrograms of alcohol per 100ml of breath. The legal limit is 9 micrograms.
■SWEDEN
Kennedy letters for sale
A Swedish aristocrat who put her love letters from John F. Kennedy up for auction this week said she wanted to show the public just how romantic the former US president could be. “He was unbelievably warm, sensitive, romantic and witty, a good listener and charming — and deep,” Gunilla von Post told Swedish radio on Friday. The two met in the summer of 1953 on the French Riviera when she was 21 years old, just a month before the then-senator would marry Jacqueline Bouvier and years before he became the 35th president of the US. Von Post said she had never heard of Kennedy prior to the meeting and was surprised to hear from him months later when he told her he could not stop thinking of his “Swedish girl.” Hand-written, they are signed “Best, Jack”, “Your Jack” and “All love, Jack” and document a long-distance affair that stretched over years. “I thought I might get a boat and sail around the Mediterranean for two weeks — with you as crew. What do you think?” Kennedy wrote.
■FRANCE
Mayor slams burger chain
Police are investigating claims that a burger chain serving only halal meat in restaurants with a strong Muslim clientele is discriminating against other customers. Prosecutors in Lille ordered the probe on Friday, a spokesman said, after the socialist mayor of the nearby town of Roubaix sued the Quick chain for switching to Muslim dietary laws in eight of its 350 branches. Quick — a rival to global chains like McDonald’s in parts of Europe — offers turkey and halal beef instead of pork in those branches. “Why should the people of Roubaix be forced to go to Lille or elsewhere to find bacon?” said Franck Berton, the mayor’s lawyer.
■UNITED STATES
Poll shows faith in Web
An online survey of 895 Web users and experts found more than three-quarters believe the Internet will make people smarter in the next 10 years, according to results released on Friday. Most of the respondents also said the Internet would improve reading and writing by 2020, according to the study, conducted by the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University in North Carolina and the Pew Internet and American Life project. But 21 percent said the Internet would have the opposite effect and could even lower the IQs of some who use it a lot.
■UNITED STATES
Penn charged with battery
Oscar-winner Sean Penn, as infamous for problems with paparazzi as he is famous for acting, has been charged with two crimes after a run-in with a photographer last year and could face jail time if convicted, Los Angeles prosecutors said on Friday. Penn, 49, was charged with misdemeanor battery and vandalism after allegedly kicking a photographer in the leg and breaking his camera last October at an upscale shopping center.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
‘POLITICAL EARTHQUAKE’: Leo Varadkar said he was ‘no longer the best person’ to lead the nation and was stepping down for political, as well as personal, reasons Leo Varadkar on Wednesday announced that he was stepping down as Ireland’s prime minister and leader of the Fine Gael party in the governing coalition, citing “personal and political” reasons. Pundits called the surprise move, just 10 weeks before Ireland holds European Parliament and local elections, a “political earthquake.” A general election has to be held within a year. Irish Deputy Prime Minister Micheal Martin, leader of Fianna Fail, the main coalition partner, said Varadkar’s announcement was “unexpected,” but added that he expected the government to run its full term. An emotional Varadkar, who is in his second stint as prime minister and at
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia