SOUTH KOREA
Death sparks succession talk
The death of a North Korean military official and the naming of leader-in-waiting Kim Jong-un to the funeral preparation committee was jumped on by South Korean media yesterday as showing he had risen to second-in-command. South Korean media concluded that by being named immediately after leader Kim Jong-il to the funeral committee by the North’s state-run news agency KCNA, the leader’s third son had been elevated to the second highest position in the secretive state. The latest sequence is the clearest signal yet that he is officially in line to take over from his ailing 68-year-old father, Yonhap news agency reported.
AFGHANISTAN
Poll workers investigated
Hundreds of part-time workers used by an election body in a disputed September parliamentary vote are being questioned by a UN-backed watchdog for possible involvement in fraud, officials said yesterday. The Independent Election Commission has already thrown out almost a quarter of the 5.6 million votes cast in the Sept. 18 ballot. Final results still have not been announced. The commission said the names of almost 1,100 of its part-time workers had been given to the UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission for checks into their possible involvement in fraud.
NEW ZEALAND
Man lives with rotting corpse
A man murdered his Thai girlfriend then lived with her rotting corpse in the lounge for almost a month as he read jokes to cheer himself up, a court was told yesterday. Gordon Hieatt, 47, pleaded not guilty in Auckland High Court to strangling Nuttidar Vaikaew in April last year, news agency NZPA reported. Prosecutor Rachael Reed said Hieatt killed Vaikaew, a Thai sex worker, during an argument in her Auckland apartment, then left her body on a bed in a curtained-off corner of the lounge. She said Hieatt’s computer records showed he allegedly admitted the killing and said he read jokes all day to cheer himself up.
VIETNAM
Boy crushed by elephant
A 14-year-old boy was trampled to death by a wild elephant in southern Vietnam, a local official said yesterday. The boy was traveling to a jungle fishing area in Dong Nai Province with his stepfather and cousin on Sunday when the elephant attacked, official Ngo Van Son said. “The elephant got mad when hearing the noise of the motorcycles. The two adults ran away as the elephant approached, but the boy was stuck with the motorcycles,” he said. Son said the boy became trapped underneath the bikes and was crushed by the elephant.
SOUTH KOREA
MP3 jail sentence upheld
A court ruled yesterday that possession of instrumental music with titles praising North Korea violates a tough national security law. The supreme court upheld a two-year jail term, suspended for four years, given to a female activist identified only as Song. Song was charged in 2008 with storing 14 MP3 music files with titles praising North Korea on a USB storage device.
PHILIPPINES
Rebels angry over statement
Muslim separatist rebels urged the government yesterday to retract a statement blaming them for a deadly bus bombing. Moro Islamic Liberation Front spokesman Von al Haq said the comments by Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin were meant to discredit the group ahead of the planned resumption of negotiations.
GEORGIA
Guilty plea in uranium case
Two Armenian men have pleaded guilty during a secret trial to smuggling highly-enriched uranium into Georgia and trying to sell it to an undercover agent, the Georgian interior ministry said yesterday. Sumbat Tonoian and Hrant Ohanian were arrested in a sting operation in March after they smuggled the 18g of uranium from Armenia into Georgia, Interior Ministry spokesman Shota Utiashvili said. He said they tried to sell it for US$1.5 million to an agent they believed represented Islamic radicals. Utiashvili called the operation “a big success for our nuclear smuggling unit,” after Georgia in recent years received nearly US$50 million in aid from Washington to help it combat trafficking in nuclear materials.
GERMANY
Nuclear waste train arrives
A train carrying 123 tonnes of nuclear waste completed its journey to Dannenberg yesterday, setting up a final showdown between police and protestors before the radioactive cargo is dumped underground. The consignment arrived after police spent Sunday night removing some 3,000 protestors blocking the tracks, authorities said. The 11 white containers must now be loaded onto trucks for the final 20km stretch by road to the storage facility in nearby Gorleben. A police spokesman said authorities did not expect any disruption during the loading operation, since the unloading station is surrounded by a high fence.
RUSSIA
Putin mans up, again
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin just cannot stay away from manly pursuits. He took a Formula One race car out for a spin on Sunday, reaching speeds of about 240kph. Putin signed a deal last month with Formula One chief Bernie Ecclestone to bring F1 racing to Russia starting in 2014 and his televised test drive could help raise the profile of the sport in Russia. The stunt also matches the action-man image Putin has cultivated over the years, beginning with his startling flight into Chechnya in 2000 in a fighter jet. Over the years, Putin has been seen flipping opponents on the judo mat, riding a horse bare-chested through the mountains and swimming in a Siberian river.
ISRAEL
Nonagenarian has bar mitzvah
A 91-year-old Dutch Jew who fought the Nazis in World War II has marked his bar mitzvah, the Jewish coming-of-age ceremony — decades after the traditional date. Hans De Leeuw says he was “shaking” during the service — usually meant for 13-year-olds — at Jerusalem’s Western Wall on Sunday. De Leeuw put on phylacteries, ritual objects strapped to the arm and forehead, and donned a prayer shawl. He called the ceremony “a tremendous event,” saying he didn’t do it earlier because of his secular upbringing and the war.
UNITED KINGDOM
Queen joins Facebook
Queen Elizabeth II is now on Facebook. The queen has launched a series of official pages offering the Web site’s 500 million users daily updates on her engagements, the royal household said on Sunday. The 84-year-old monarch will be featured in videos, photos and news items on the site, which launched yesterday, alongside other members of the country’s royal family, including Princes William and Harry. However, because the pages will be corporate, people won’t be able to request to become friends with the queen. A royal official said the queen had personally approved the plan, but has not used the site herself.
UNITED STATES
Leaky nuclear plant shuts
Workers at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Montpelier, Vermont, detected radioactive water seeping from a leaky pipe in the complex on Sunday, forcing the plant to shut down to make repairs. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said the public was not in any danger. Plant spokesman Larry Smith said the nuclear reactor was taken out of service at 7pm and estimated it would take 13 hours for it to cool down enough so technicians could enter the area to make repairs. Work to fix the pipe was to begin yesterday morning, he said. The cause of the leak was not immediately known. Smith said the leak of about 60 drops a minute was spotted earlier on Sunday during routine surveillance. It was coming from a 60cm wide pipe that was part of the circulation system involving the reactor. The water was being collected by a sump pump and cycled back through the system, he said. It was the second shutdown within the hour at a plant owned by New Orleans-based Entergy Corp. A transformer exploded at a nuclear power plant north of New York City, forcing an emergency shutdown of one of its reactors.
MEXICO
Media condemn Chavez
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez tries to control ideas and restrict news with techniques that recall Cold War-era eastern Europe or Cuba, the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) in Merida, Mexico, said on Sunday. “Chavez seeks to control ideas, and to impose silence” for those critical of his leftist government, said David Natera, who delivered a report on the state of press freedom in the South American nation at the IAPA annual meeting. There have been 113 reported incidents of assaults on reporters in the past year in Venezuela, the report found. Natera said Chavez has shut down and harassed some media and expropriated others as a “social control strategy” so that “the people will have to depend on the state exclusively to get jobs or food.”
CANADA
Afghan troop request mulled
Canada’s defense minister said in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Sunday that the country was considering a US request to keep troops in Afghanistan past next year, but switch them from a combat to a training role. Defense Minister Peter MacKay said the troops would not remain in Afghanistan’s volatile southern Kandahar Province. Parliament has mandated that the combat mission end next year. Ottawa has about 2,900 troops in Afghanistan. More than 150 soldiers have been killed and more than 1,500 have been wounded since the country first sent troops to support the US-led invasion after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. MacKay said Ottawa is not prepared to say how many troops might stay, but said NATO has identified a shortfall of about 900 troops to conduct training.
MEXICO
Twenty killed in shootouts
At least 20 people were killed in drug-gang violence over the weekend in Ciudad Juarez, including seven found dead outside one house. The seven men were believed to have been at a family party when they were gunned down on Saturday night, said Arturo Sandoval, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office in Chihuahua state, where Ciudad Juarez is located. Five were found dead in a car and the other two were shot at the entrance of the home. Eleven other people were killed on Saturday in the city, including two whose bodies were found dismembered, Sandoval said.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
‘DELUSIONAL’: Targeting the families of Hamas’ leaders would not push the group to change its position or to give up its demands for Palestinians, Ismail Haniyeh said Israeli aircraft on Wednesday killed three sons of Hamas’ top political leader in the Gaza Strip, striking high-stakes targets at a time when Israel is holding delicate ceasefire negotiations with the militant group. Hamas said four of the leader’s grandchildren were also killed. Ismail Haniyeh’s sons are among the highest-profile figures to be killed in the war so far. Israel said they were Hamas operatives, and Haniyeh accused Israel of acting in “the spirit of revenge and murder.” The deaths threatened to strain the internationally mediated ceasefire talks, which appeared to gain steam in recent days even as the sides remain far
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of