■PAPUA NEW GUINEA
UN condemns police torture
Prisoners are routinely beaten by police while those who escape risk having tendons cut to disable them, UN special rapporteur on torture Manfred Nowak said yesterday. He said that during his 10-day investigation into the impoverished country’s police cells and prisons, he found evidence of torture and “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment.” Prisoners who escaped were severely punished on recapture, he said. Punishment included cutting tendons with axes and knives, shooting prisoners at close range and beating them with gun buts, Nowak said. The prisoners were usually kept in punishment cells without medical treatment and sometimes died, he said.
■CHINA
Parents join school patrols
Beijing police are recruiting parents to join patrols of school grounds as cities nationwide beef up security following a spate of attacks on children, the China Daily said yesterday. Authorities in Shunyi District in north Beijing have already recruited more than 700 people for a “joint parents school protection” force, with some of them armed with sticks, it said. With not enough police to guard every school fully, another district is recruiting a similar force and Beijing police hope to take the model city-wide, it said.
■PAKISTAN
Two dead in bomb blast
Two people were killed and a dozen wounded, including several wedding party guests, when a bomb exploded in a rickshaw in Baluchistan province on Monday, police said. “It was an improvised explosive device which went off in a rickshaw,” senior police officer Shabbir Sheikh said. Another police officer, Mohammad Riaz, said two people — the rickshaw driver and a passenger — were killed while about a dozen people traveling in a passenger van were wounded. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but similar bombings have been blamed on separatist, secular tribal rebels in Baluchistan.
■AUSTRALIA
Asylum boat likely sunk
A boat carrying about 100 asylum seekers from Indonesia to Australia in October last year vanished without a trace and may have sunk, officials said yesterday. The government received intelligence that the boat left an Indonesian port on Oct. 2 bound for Australia but it never arrived, Customs and Border Protection Service chief executive Michael Carmody told a routine Senate inquiry into government operations. Carmody declined to identify the sources of the intelligence. Australia alerted the Indonesian authorities the next day of information that the boat could be in distress in Indonesian waters. Indonesia reported “they had not been able to identify any vessel in distress in the relevant area,” Carmody told the inquiry, without identifying the area.
■AUSTRALIA
Minister slams Google
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has called Google’s privacy policy “a bit creepy” in personal attacks against the head of the company and fellow Web giant Facebook in an Internet filtering row. Conroy said Google had committed the “single greatest breach in the history of privacy” by collecting private wireless data while taking pictures for its “Street View” mapping service, and dismissed claims it was an accident. Google has led criticism of Conroy’s plan for a nationwide Internet filter, warning it could damage the nation’s reputation as a liberal democracy and set a dangerous global precedent.
■TURKEY
Tourists killed in bus crash
A bus carrying Russian tourists skidded off a highway and fell off a bridge yesterday, killing 16 passengers and injuring 25 others, officials and news reports said. The bus flipped over and fell about 6m into a river bed, NTV television footage showed. Antalya Deputy Governor Mehmet Seyman said rescue workers struggled to pull the bodies and injured from the wreckage. NTV, citing local authorities, said the driver fell asleep on the wheel.
■SWEDEN
Drug abuse rising in Africa
A rise in drug abuse, especially heroin, in eastern and southern Africa is threatening advances made there in bringing HIV and AIDS infections under control, experts said at a conference in Stockhom on Monday. “I think one of our largest concerns in Kenya is the large number of people who are addicted to heroin, and many of them are actually injecting themselves,” said Jennifer Kimani, who heads up Kenya’s National Campaign Against Drug Abuse. “Among the injecting drug users, 68 to 88 percent are HIV positive,” she told the World Forum Against Drug conference in Stockholm. The cause of the hike in drug abuse in the region, experts say, is that eastern and southern African nations have increasingly become transit countries for the international drug trade.
■FRANCE
Couple win record jackpot
A couple struck lucky on their 13th wedding anniversary on Monday, picking up a record jackpot of 5,512,448 euros (US$6.8 million) from a slot machine in the Pyrenees mountains, the casino said. The couple pocketed the winnings from a one-arm bandit in a casino in Bagneres-de-Bigorre, part of a network of 100 casinos that are hooked up to offer mega-jackpots. The last French record for a slot machine jackpot was just more than 3 million euros.
■GREECE
Relic traffickers nabbed
Police in Thessaloniki said on Monday they had arrested a Swiss national and a Greek Orthodox deacon for trafficking in what they claimed were holy relics. Police said they arrested the 43-year-old Swiss man on Sunday at Thessaloniki airport and seized 197 bone fragments and three skulls sprayed with fragrance and bearing stickers labeling them with names of saints. The man said he had obtained the relics from a Greek Orthodox Church deacon and he was going to deliver them to a Russian Orthodox priest in Germany who planned to open a church in India, police said. Early on Monday, police said they arrested the 24-year-old deacon at his home in the town of Sidirokastro, northeast of Thessaloniki, where they found 505 bone fragments, 15 skulls, a number of Byzantine icons, coins and crosses.
■ITALY
‘Pink Hitler’ upsets Sicilians
A fashion ad campaign showing a pink-clad Adolf Hitler has outraged locals in Sicily, where former anti-fascist fighters on Monday demanded the giant posters be torn down. One of the outsized pictures of the Nazi dictator, his swastika armband replaced with a heart, is plastered above a street junction in Palermo above the caption, “Change Your Style. Don’t Follow Your Leader.” The local association of former resistance fighters wrote the mayor of Palermo, the regional governor, the state prosecutor and the media to voice their anger. The association said the posters were a “serious” offense against all “those who fought fascism, and violate our democratic and constitutional principles.”
■BRAZIL
Tourist robbed and killed
An Italian tourist whose car broke down in the coastal city of Fortaleza was fatally shot by a teenaged boy who robbed him and his friends, police said on Monday. Fifty-two-year-old Giuseppe Paparone died in hospital of the bullet wound to the chest he received in the attack late on Sunday. The 13-year-old boy and an adult male accomplice who stopped on bicycles and robbed Paparone and the three other Italian tourists in the car were arrested on Monday in a slum close to the crime scene. They confessed to the murder and were identified by the surviving Italians, officers said. The teen shot Paparone as he rode off with the tourists’ mobile telephones and the equivalent of US$25.
■UNITED STATES
Burglar steals sub fixings
Police say a burglar broke into a Subway sandwich store in Des Moines, Iowa, helped himself to a smorgasbord of cold cuts and made sandwiches for the journey home — but left the store’s cash behind. Police Sergeant Lori Lavorato says the thief got inside the shop through a drive-up window on Saturday night or Sunday morning. Lavorato says the burglar made some sandwiches and took a significant amount of cold cut meats, bread and cookies, but that he failed to find the cash, which was hidden.
■BRAZIL
Lula opens ‘good news’ TV
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Monday launched TV Brasil, a new Portuguese-language network based in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, and tasked with “saying good things” about Brazil. “We want a network that talks about politics in quality terms, leaving aside prejudices because this will be a public network showing how Brazilians are beyond our borders,” he said in a ceremony in Brasilia. From Maputo, the new channel will be broadcast to more than 40 countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America. Mozambique President Armando Emilio Guebuza sent a pre-recorded message hailing the channel’s mission to “enrich communication between Brazil and Africa,” especially Portuguese-speaking African nations.
■UNITED STATES
Horror house up for sale
The house made famous in the 1979 film The Amityville Horror is up for sale in Amityville, New York. The five-bedroom Dutch Colonial went on the market on Monday for US$1.15 million. The film is based on the story of the Lutz family’s brief stay in the house in 1975 after six members of the DeFeo family were shot and killed as they slept in the home. Eldest son Ronald DeFeo Jr was convicted of the murders. The crime spawned a book and a series of movies that chronicled various supernatural horrors, including visions of walls oozing slime, moving furniture and a visit from a demonic pig named Jodie.
■BRAZIL
Few notice big quake
A strong magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck on Monday in a jungle area near the mountainous border with Peru but was barely felt on the surface and caused no damage, US and Brazilian experts said. The temblor was centered about 127km east-southeast of Cruzeiro do Sul. The quake originated a relatively deep 580km under the surface. A spokesman for the civil defense service in Cruziero do Sul said the quake almost went unnoticed, and added such activity was not unusual in the region. “This zone suffers a lot of earthquakes, but the last one we really felt was 20 days ago. We didn’t register any disorder or damage on the surface” he said.
China’s military news agency yesterday warned that Japanese militarism is infiltrating society through series such as Pokemon and Detective Conan, after recent controversies involving events at sensitive sites. In recent days, anime conventions throughout China have reportedly banned participants from dressing as characters from Pokemon or Detective Conan and prohibited sales of related products. China Military Online yesterday posted an article titled “Their schemes — beware the infiltration of Japanese militarism in culture and sports.” The article referenced recent controversies around the popular anime series Pokemon, Detective Conan and My Hero Academia, saying that “the evil influence of Japanese militarism lives on in
ANTI-SEMITISM: Some newsletters promote hateful ideas such as white supremacy and Holocaust denial, with one describing Adolf Hitler as ‘one of the greatest men of all time’ The global publishing platform Substack is generating revenue from newsletters that promote virulent Nazi ideology, white supremacy and anti-Semitism, a Guardian investigation has found. The platform, which says it has about 50 million users worldwide, allows members of the public to self-publish articles and charge for premium content. Substack takes about 10 percent of the revenue the newsletters make. About 5 million people pay for access to newsletters on its platform. Among them are newsletters that openly promote racist ideology. One, called NatSocToday, which has 2,800 subscribers, charges US$80 for an annual subscription, although most of its posts are available
GLORY FACADE: Residents are fighting the church’s plan to build a large flight of steps and a square that would entail destroying up to two blocks of homes Barcelona’s eternally unfinished Basilica de la Sagrada Familia has grown to become the world’s tallest church, but a conflict with residents threatens to delay the finish date for the monument designed more than 140 years ago. Swathed in scaffolding on a platform 54m above the ground, an enormous stone slab is being prepared to complete the cross of the central Jesus Christ tower. A huge yellow crane is to bring it up to the summit, which will stand at 172.5m and has snatched the record as the world’s tallest church from Germany’s Ulm Minster. The basilica’s peak will deliberately fall short of the
Venezuelan Nobel peace laureate Maria Corina Machado yesterday said that armed men “kidnapped” a close ally shortly after his release by authorities, following former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro’s capture. The country’s Public Prosecutor’s Office confirmed later yesterday that former National Assembly vice president Juan Pablo Guanipa, 61, was again taken into custody and was to be put under house arrest, arguing that he violated the conditions of his release. Guanipa would be placed under house arrest “in order to safeguard the criminal process,” the office said in a statement. The conditions of Guanipa’s release have yet to be made public. Machado claimed that
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