■VIETNAM
Thousands honor whale
Thousands of fishermen are giving a royal send-off to a 15 tonne dead whale, gathering at a southern village to pay homage at a funeral for the creature they call “Your Excellency.” Nearly 10,000 people have converged in Bac Lieu Province to bid farewell to the 16m whale since he was dragged ashore by several fishermen on Monday, coast guard official Do Tien Ha said. In Vietnam’s fishing culture, whales are considered sacred. They are referred to by the title ngai, the same honorific used for kings, emperors and other esteemed leaders.
■NEW ZEALAND
McCully mulls Fiji meet
Foreign Minister Murray McCully said yesterday he hopes to meet Fiji’s military ruler in Hong Kong next month as part of a thaw in relations between the Pacific neighbors. McCully aims to meet Voreqe Bainimarama during the Hong Kong Sevens rugby tournament, which starts on March 26. New Zealand and Australia have been at the forefront of international condemnation after Bainimarama toppled the elected government in a December 2006 coup.
■MALAYSIA
Caning conference planned
Kuala Lumpur may organize an international conference on the issue of caning and whether it is an appropriate punishment for women under Islamic law. Women’s Minister Shahrizat Abdul Jalil said in a statement seen yesterday that she would seek Cabinet approval to hold such a conference. Malaysia announced last week that prison authorities had caned three unmarried Muslim women on Feb. 9 after a Shariah, or Islamic, court found them guilty of having “sex out of wedlock.”
■PHILIPPINES
Condom row escalates
Catholic bishops yesterday called for the health secretary to be sacked as they sought to escalate a row over the government’s promotion of condoms. The sensitive birth-control issue in the Roman Catholic nation flared last week after Health Secretary Esperanza Cabral led a campaign to hand out free condoms on Valentine’s Day as part of the battle against HIV and AIDS. The statement, signed by three bishops, urged President Gloria Arroyo to dismiss Cabral, saying she should not be allowed to influence the nation’s young.
■VIETNAM
‘Relatives’ swarm winner
A poverty-stricken 97-year-old man won up to US$400,000 in a lottery, a report said yesterday, sparking a frenzy among relatives eager to get a piece of his new-found wealth. A neighbor in southern Ho Chi Minh City and local officials had to step in to stop the elderly man from giving away the windfall to people who had swarmed to his home, Thanh Nien newspaper said. What was left of the money has gone into a bank account, the newspaper reported. Nguyen Van Het bagged the prize after spending 100,000 dong (US$5) on lottery tickets from “lucky money” he received ahead of the Lunar New Year, Thanh Nien said. The annual per capita income in Vietnam is about US$1,000.
■CHINA
Charges filed for CCTV fire
The government will prosecute 23 people for a blaze at its new state television headquarters that engulfed a hotel, killed a fireman and left a US$24 million clean-up bill, a court official said yesterday. An official at Beijing Number Two Intermediate Court confirmed 23 people had been charged in the incident, but said the hearings had not yet begun.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Dog handler found guilty
A police dog handler who left his two German Shepherds to bake to death in his car last year when he became distracted by paperwork was found guilty on Monday of animal cruelty. Police constable Mark Johnson, 39, who denied the charge, said he was suffering from depression and obsessive compulsive disorder leading him to forget his dogs for seven hours on one of the hottest days of the year. Temperatures reached 29.3°C and the dogs died from heatstroke.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Worms, spoons and robots
Worm hunters, lethal robots and Nazi spoons are in the running for Britain’s quirkiest literary award, the Diagram Prize for year’s oddest book title. The six finalists are Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter; Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich; Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots; The Changing World of Inflammatory Bowel Disease; Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes; and What Kind of Bean is This Chihuahua? The prize was founded in 1978 and is run by trade magazine The Bookseller. The winner will be announced on March 26.
■HUNGARY
Holocaust denial a crime
Parliament on Monday approved a bill making Holocaust denial punishable by up to three years in prison, but the measure may be unconstitutional. Lawmakers passed the bill submitted by Attila Mesterhazy, the prime ministerial candidate of the governing Socialist Party, by 197-1, with 142 abstentions. Earlier attempts to ban Holocaust denial have been rejected by the courts for infringing on freedom of speech.
■PORTUGAL
Landslide missing toll rises
The number of missing on Madeira has jumped to 32, authorities said, after weekend landslides crashed down the vacation island’s steep slopes, smashing into homes and leaving 42 people confirmed dead. The missing may never be found because they were most likely swept out to sea, officials said on Monday. Rescue teams were using sniffer dogs to scour debris and dug cars out of mounds of sludge to see if anyone was inside.
■ITALY
Facebook group shut down
A Facebook group proposing that children with Down’s syndrome be used for target practice has been shut down and Italy’s equality minister threatened the “thousands of idiots” involved with legal action yesterday. The page, which showed a photo of a baby with Down’s with the word “imbecile” written on its forehead, said an “easy and amusing solution” for ridding the world of “these foul creatures” was to use them as target practice. Police are trying to track down those who set up the page. They could face up to four-and-a-half years imprisonment for incitement to committing a crime.
■DENMARK
Major reshuffle announced
The center-right government, whose ratings have slipped in opinion polls lately, announced a major reshuffle yesterday that includes a change of foreign and defense ministers. The overhaul by Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen came a day after Defense Minister Soren Gade resigned, saying he had become the focus of too much media attention amid a probe into a 2007 leak of information about Danish troops in Iraq. Rasmussen chose Minister of Economic and Business Affairs Lene Espersen, leader of the Conservative Party, to replace fellow Conservative Per Stig Moller as foreign minister.
■UNITED STATES
Haig passes away at 85
Former secretary of state Alexander Haig, a blunt-talking top aide to three presidents, died at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, a hospital spokesman said on Saturday. He was 85. The spokesman did not offer an official cause of death. Haig served as secretary of state under president Ronald Reagan after being a top adviser to presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. “Today we mourn the loss of Alexander Haig, a great American who served our country with distinction,” President Barack Obama said in a statement. Haig “enjoyed a remarkable and decorated career, rising to become a four-star general and serving as supreme allied commander of Europe before also serving as secretary of state. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family,” Obama added.
■UNITED STATES
Cheney hospitalized
Former US vice president Dick Cheney, who has a long history of heart problems, was hospitalized on Monday after experiencing chest pains, his office said. He was “resting comfortably” at George Washington University Hospital in Washington and his doctors were evaluating the situation, his office said in a statement. Hospital doctors told NBC News that the former vice president was stable and might receive additional treatment yesterday. The TV network said Cheney, 69, apparently received an angiogram test so that doctors could look into his coronary arteries, and that the results showed he may need more treatment.
■MEXICO
Key cartel figure arrested
Police have captured a man described as a key operator of the powerful Sinaloa cartel who served briefly in the US army before taking on the trafficking of 1.8 tonnes of cocaine a month into the US. Jose Vasquez Villagrana, 40, was arrested on Sunday in his hometown of Santa Ana, Sonora, which borders Arizona, authorities said on Monday. Vasquez is accused of smuggling Colombian cocaine through Panama and other countries to the Mexican state of Sonora. The drugs were stored at his ranch and then sent to the US.
■BRAZIL
Mayor appeals conviction
Sao Paulo Mayor Gilberto Kassab was preparing an appeal on Monday against a judge’s ruling to strip him of his mandate because of illegal campaign financing. Kassab’s lawyer, Ricardo Penteado, told reporters a challenge would be lodged to the verdict declaring Kassab and his deputy, Alda Marco Antonio, received US$5.5 million in “irregular donations” for their 2008 campaign. According to a statement from Sao Paulo’s state electoral tribunal scrapping the mandates, the amount was enough to “contaminate the electoral process” or influence voters’ choices by representing “abuse of economic power.” Kassab, a member of the opposition center-right Democrats party whose term is scheduled to end in 2012, will be able to remain in office until the appeal is decided.
■SWITZERLAND
Freed Swiss leaves Libya
One of two Swiss businessmen held in Libya for 19 months amid a diplomatic spat has left the country, the Swiss foreign ministry said yesterday. “The foreign ministry confirms that Rashid Hamdani has left Libya,” the ministry said in a statement, expressing delight for his family. It said its concerns were now focused on the other businessman, Max Goeldi, who surrendered to Libyan authorities outside the Swiss embassy in Tripoli on Monday.
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
‘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
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