■SOUTH KOREA
GPS beepers to guard kids
In a bid to combat sex crimes against minors, children will be supplied with GPS-embedded beepers to warn police of dangers and activate surveillance cameras, officials said yesterday. About 1,200 elementary-school children in Anyang City Seoul will receive the beepers in a test run from October. Authorities will then consider adopting the system nationwide. Each child will be able to use their matchbox-sized beeper, fitted with GPS technology, to activate any nearby cameras and alert parents and police via mobile phone.
■JAPAN
Rampage blamed on Web
A man on trial for killing seven people in a 2008 stabbing frenzy in Tokyo said on Tuesday he went on the rampage because he was harassed on an Internet bulletin board. Auto plant worker Tomohiro Kato told the Tokyo District Court he was “fully responsible” for the attacks in which 10 people were wounded in Akihabara district. “By causing the incident, I wanted people to know that I seriously wanted to stop the harassment on the Internet bulletin board that I used,” Kato, 27, told the court, according to Jiji Press.
■CHINA
Panda poisoner detained
A man has been detained over the poisoning death of a panda, Xinhua reported yesterday. The panda, a 21-year-old female named Quan Quan, died last Thursday after inhaling toxic gas that leaked into her enclosure at the Jinan Zoo in Shandong Province through a vent connected to a former air-raid shelter next to the zoo. The man, identified only by his surname, Yang, had hired workers to disinfect the air-raid shelter, which he had rented to grow mushrooms in. The vent had been drilled in 1995 to help cool the panda enclosure in the summer.
■ROMANIA
Helicopter crash kills seven
All seven people aboard an Israeli military helicopter — one Romanian and six Israelis — were killed when it crashed into a mountain in the center of the country, officials said on Tuesday. The helicopter, a Sikorsky CH-53 Sea Stallion, crashed on Monday during a military exercise in which crews are trained to fly at low altitudes. The joint exercises, which were due to end today, were suspended after the crash. The Israeli military said the helicopter’s black box was found and will shed light on the circumstances that led to the accident.
■SOUTH AFRICA
Tiger escapes from truck
A tiger escaped from the back of a truck on Tuesday and remained on the run as police used helicopters to hunt it down. The 17-month-old tiger called Panjo escaped while it was being driven by its owner to a veterinary clinic in the town of Springs east of Johannesburg. The tiger’s owner, Rose Fernandes, told local radio she did not know how the tiger had managed to escape. Tigers, who are native to Asia, are only found in zoos in South Africa. The 140kg tiger remained on the run and police used helicopters and microlight aircraft to locate it. Fernandes said anyone who came across the tiger should treat it “like a dog” by picking up a stick and saying “No” in a loud voice. She added that giving it meat, especially chicken, would also be likely to keep it happy.
■INDONESIA
‘Fatwa’ bans gossip shows
The country’s highest Islamic body has issued a fatwa banning Muslims from watching gossip shows or having sex change operations, an official said yesterday. The increasingly assertive Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) said gossip shows about the intimate details of people’s private lives — a popular genre on Indonesian television — were immoral and threatened society. Profiting from infotainment shows is also forbidden under the edict, posing a theological conundrum for the media industry in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country. Another fatwa passed at an MUI meeting late on Tuesday forbade receiving or conducting a sex-change operation unless there is a good medical reason.
■INDIA
Riot deaths probed
The state government in Kashmir said yesterday it had ordered a judicial probe into the recent deaths of 17 people in clashes between anti-India protesters and security forces. The Muslim-majority Kashmir valley has been wracked by angry demonstrations since June 11, when a 17-year-old boy died after being hit by a police tear gas shell. Since then another 16 people, many of them teenagers, have been killed. Two retired judges will “inquire into all the 17 incidents ... in which fatalities had occurred on account of action by the security forces,” a government statement said. The inquiry will submit its report within three months.
■MALAYSIA
New twist to Anwar trial
A prosecutor who is speculated to have had an affair with the man who accused opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim of sodomy has been removed from Anwar’s trial in a twist that lawyers warned yesterday could undermine the prosecution’s integrity. Attorney General Abdul Gani Patail was reported as saying late on Tuesday that deputy public prosecutor Farah Azlina Latif has been removed not because she is guilty of any wrongdoing, but to protect the credibility of the eight-member prosecution team in Anwar’s trial.
■MEXICO
Eight human heads found
Eight human heads were found on Tuesday in four separate places near roadsides outside Durango. Police found the heads within the space of two-and-a-half hours due to anonymous tip-offs, “but had not identified the victims, nor located the bodies,” the Durango state prosecutor’s office said in a statement. The victims were males thought to have been aged between 25 and 30, the statement said. Meanwhile, the National Human Rights Commission urged the government to find four journalists reported missing in the Laguna region, which includes Durango and areas of the neighboring state of Coahuil. They include two cameramen from the Televisa network, a reporter for Multimedios TV and a reporter for the newspaper El Vespertino. Three of them were “picked up” — a tactic frequently used by drug gangs in which victims are forced into waiting vehicles — around noon on Monday, and the fourth was snatched that night, the commission said.
■COLOMBIA
Journalist receives US visa
The US State Department has reversed its decision to deny a visa to a journalist whose reporting has been critical of President Alvaro Uribe. “Happy, happy! This was terrible,” said Hollman Morris, a TV producer and reporter, after he and two children picked up their visas at the US embassy on Tuesday. The family can now travel to Harvard, where Morris has a yearlong Nieman Foundation fellowship. A US consular officer in Bogota told Morris last month he was ruled permanently ineligible for a visa under the “terrorist activities” clause of the USA Patriot Act. Morris said he was not given an explanation for the denial or the reversal, but he expressed deep gratitude for support from fellow journalists, US lawmakers and organizations such as Human Rights Watch, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the InterAmerican Press Association and the American Civil Liberties Union.
■UNITED STATES
NYC settles 50-bullet lawsuit
New York City has settled a lawsuit with the fiancee and friends of a man fatally gunned down in a 50-bullet police shooting for more than US$7 million. The settlement filed in Brooklyn federal court on Tuesday pays US$3.25 million to the estate of Sean Bell, US$3 million to Joseph Guzman and US$900,000 to Trent Benefield. Bell was killed and Guzman and Benefield were wounded outside a strip club in 2006 while leaving a bachelor party on what would have been Bell’s wedding day. Three police officers were acquitted of manslaughter and other charges in 2008.
■SOUTH AFRICA
Students plead guilty
In a surprise move, four white former Free State University students pleaded guilty on Tuesday to humiliating five black workers in a 2007 Internet video. The video showed five black university employees being forced to re-enact initiation rights for students. The four women and one man were made to drink bottles of beer and perform athletic tasks. One scene appeared to show a white male urinating on food, then compelling the employees to eat it and causing them to vomit. Roelof Malherbe, Schalk van der Merwe, Danie Grobler and Johnny Roberts pleaded guilty to illegally and deliberately injuring another person’s dignity. Their lawyer, Kemp Kemp, said that while the workers voluntarily took part in a mock initiation, his clients realized the video had degraded them. However, he insisted the four had not urinated in the mixture that the workers drank.
‘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