AUSTRALIA
Visitors should declare porn
Australia has ordered visitors to reveal illegal pornography to customs officers in a move criticized as “totally confusing” and an invasion of privacy yesterday. Justice Minister Brendan O’Connor on Monday said illegal material must be declared on arrival, watering down recent rules that asked for all pornography to be revealed. However, he said anyone who is not sure whether they have illegal pornography should reveal it just in case. The revamped rule is outlined on arrival cards filled in by travelers visiting the country. Australian Sex Party leader Fiona Patten said the measure amounted to an invasion of privacy, and warned that many tourists and even Australians would not know what was illegal. “They are still totally confusing,” she said of the arrival cards. “What is illegal to import to our country is not necessarily illegal to possess.” Patten said while Australians were rightly concerned about child porn, travelers should not have to declare all erotic material to customs officers just to be safe. “It’s a breach of people’s privacy,” she said.
MALAYSIA
Orangutans use ‘bridges’
Endangered orangutans on Borneo Island are using fire hoses slung across rivers by humans to help them move around isolated forests to potentially meet new mates and boost the species’ chances for survival, an environmental group said on Monday. Authorities are building more of the makeshift bridges after some orangutans were spotted using them over the past year, said Marc Ancrenaz, co-founder of French-based conservation group Hutan. Conservationists estimate about 11,000 orangutans live in Sabah state in Borneo, but many are isolated from each other because swaths of forest have been cut for development, logging and oil palm plantations. Environmental groups and wildlife authorities have been hooking up old fire hoses strung together between trees on different sides of rivers to help orangutans — which cannot swim — swing or walk across them. The first bridge was set up seven years ago, but it was only last year that an orangutan was captured on camera using one of them. The bridges are “just a quick fix” because the long-term solution would be reforestation, Ancrenaz said.
CHINA
Miners found dead
All 37 missing and trapped miners in China’s latest colliery disaster have been confirmed as dead, state media reported yesterday. A gas leak occurred early on Saturday morning in a pit owned by Pingyu Coal & Electric Co Ltd based in Yuzhou City in Henan Province, although 239 people escaped. Rescuers had said they expected there to be little chance of any of the missing miners being found alive and have now found the last five bodies, Xinhua news agency reported, bringing the final death toll to 37.
CAMBODIA
Duch sentence appealed
Prosecutors at the UN-backed war crimes court yesterday demanded an increased sentence of life imprisonment for a former Khmer Rouge prison chief who was jailed for 30 years in July. Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch, was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity for overseeing the mass murder of 15,000 men, women and children at Tuol Sleng prison in the late 1970s. Duch was initially handed 35 years, but the court reduced the sentence on the grounds that he had been detained illegally for years before the UN-backed tribunal was established.
RUSSIA
Sleeper agents honored
President Dmitry Medvedev on Monday awarded the highest state honors to a group of sleeper agents who were deported from the US in a Cold War-style spy swap in July. Kremlin spokeswoman Natalya Timakova said the spies were honored at a Kremlin ceremony along with other members of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service. The agents have kept a very low profile since they were exchanged in Vienna for four individuals who had been imprisoned in Russia for contacts with Western intelligence agencies, but Moscow has promised they would be looked after. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin met the spies soon after they returned and promised them a bright future.
ISRAEL
PM wants Jews to take oath
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to extend a loyalty oath for candidates for Israeli citizenship to include Jews as well as non-Jews, his office said on Monday. The original amendment, which required only non-Jews to take a loyalty oath to the “Jewish and democratic state of Israel,” was denounced as racist by Israeli Arab lawmakers after it was approved by Netanyahu’s government last week. Parliament must ratify the amendment before it becomes law. Thousands of Jews and Arabs demonstrated on Saturday in Tel Aviv against the proposal, saying it went against democratic principles. Under Israel’s current immigration laws, Jews are granted automatic citizenship and non-Jews have to pledge loyalty to the state.
GEORGIA
Russian troops leave village
Russian soldiers have withdrawn from a village near the rebel-held region of South Ossetia they had held since the 2008 Russia-Georgia war. Georgian Foreign Ministry spokesman Shota Utiashvili said in televised comments that the troops left the village of Perevi on Monday and a Georgian army unit had moved in. Russian border guards dismantled a checkpoint, withdrew from the town and moved inside the de facto borders of South Ossetia, Georgian and EU officials said. Thousands of Russian soldiers remain stationed in South Ossetia and another breakaway region, Abakhzia, since the war. Monday’s troop withdrawal was mediated in Geneva, where multiparty talks continue over Georgia’s future.
UNITED KINGDOM
Eighty-six needled to death
Eighty-six people have been accidentally killed by badly trained acupuncturists over the past 45 years, according to Britain’s leading expert on alternative medicine. A review of patients who died soon after acupuncture found a history of punctured hearts and lungs, damaged arteries and livers, nerve problems, shock, infection and hemorrhage, largely caused by practitioners placing their needles incorrectly or failing to sterilize their equipment. Many of the 86 patients, aged between 26 and 82 years old, died after being treated in China or Japan, but a handful of fatalities were recorded in the US, Germany and Australia. The most recent death, of a 26-year-old woman in China, occurred last year. Describing his research in the International Journal of Risk and Safety in Medicine, Edzard Ernst, professor of complementary medicine at the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, said: “These fatalities are avoidable and a reminder of the need to insist on adequate training for all acupuncturists.” The number of deaths was likely to be “the tip of a larger iceberg,” he added.
MEXICO
Cancun climate deal unlikely
Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa said on Monday that “conditions have not been met” for a new climate deal on reducing greenhouse gas emissions at a worldwide summit in December. “For Cancun, the conditions have not been met to adopt a new protocol” to replace the Kyoto accord, she said. The Cancun meeting, from Nov. 29 to Dec. 10, aims to firm up “a basic agenda” for the continuation of negotiations, she said, with delegates coming from more than 200 countries.
UNITED STATES
Drunk father forgets toddler
Californian police found a three-year-old abandoned in his father’s car, 24 hours after the man was arrested for being drunk but failed to mention his son, police said on Monday. Dillon Kurihara was found sleeping peacefully in the vehicle in Pasadena on Sunday night, less than a kilometer from where his 23-year-old father Joe had been detained for being intoxicated and resisting arrest on Saturday night. Officers had launched a hunt for the boy after his mother — who attended a wedding on Saturday with the boy and his father — sounded the alert on Sunday morning. When they detained him, “officers had no way of knowing that he had been or was supposed to have been with Dillon. Kurihara could not recall being with the child because of his inebriated state,” a police spokeswoman said.
UNITED STATES
Border arrests decline
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says a 17 percent drop in Border Patrol arrests along the border with Mexico shows heightened enforcement is working. Napolitano told reporters on Monday in San Diego that the Border Patrol made about 463,000 arrests along the border during the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30. That’s down from more than 556,000 the previous 12 months. It marks the fifth straight year of declines. Napolitano said the weak economy helps explain why fewer people are getting caught crossing the border illegally, and she also credits enforcement against employers. However, a big reason was enforcement — including more Border Patrol agents and 1,200 National Guard troops, she said.
UNITED STATES
Church files for bankruptcy
Crystal Cathedral, the landmark megachurch in Orange County, California, where the Hour of Power is taped, filed for bankruptcy protection, church officials said on Monday. “Budgets could not be cut fast enough to keep up with the unprecedented rapid decline in revenue due to the recession,” Sheila Schuller Coleman, the church’s senior pastor, said in a statement. Coleman said that “outreach and operations” would continue, as would the weekly Hour of Power, which is the country’s longest-running religious TV broadcast. But the church, which is US$55 million in debt, has reduced the number of stations that it pays to broadcast the show.
HAITI
Heavy rains kill 10
Ten people were killed and three others were missing after several days of heavy rains, officials said on Monday. Among the eight bodies found in Port-au-Prince after several days of heavy rains were a two-year-old girl and an 11-month-old baby, said Nadia Lochard, the head of the civil protection unit. She said it appeared the eight had been killed when a large pile of sand gave way, burying them. The bodies were then washed down the street. Two more bodies were found in the district of Fontmara, the site of a large camp sheltering those who lost their homes in the Jan. 12 quake.
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
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
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not