SINGAPORE
Lennon suit up for grabs
The white, two-piece suit John Lennon wore on the cover of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album will be among items auctioned less than a month after the 30th anniversary of the singer-songwriter’s death. The suit and the blazer Lennon wore in the Imagine music video are among the memorabilia being auctioned by Braswell Galleries in Connecticut on New Year’s Day. Auction house co-owner Gary Braswell told the Hour newspaper that the suit’s current owner decided to sell after experiencing some economic hardship.
SWEDEN
Students autopsy teacher
It was their first ever autopsy, but students at one of the country’s top medical schools were faced with a familiar sight in the classroom: The body on the table belonged to their late teacher. “The first autopsy is really, really emotional, and we autopsied someone we knew!” one of the students told news agency on TT Friday. According to a student, the class did not find out who they were going to autopsy until they saw their teacher’s name on the body’s toe tag.
UNITED STATES
Captain Beefheart dies
Don Van Vliet, better known as pioneering blues and rock musician Captain Beefheart, has died in California from complications of multiple sclerosis at age 69, a representative for the artist said on Friday. The Michael Werner Gallery in New York, which handles Vliet’s paintings, made the announcement. Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band rose to prominence during the 1960s with an experimental brand of rock music that was inspired by the blues. While band members would change over the years, the group continued to crank out music up to 1982 when Vliet retired from music and turned to painting.
UNITED STATES
Bones may be Earhart’s
Tiny bones along with artifacts from the 1930s found on a remote Pacific island may reveal the fate of pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart. In one of aviation’s most enduring mysteries, Earhart took off from Lae, in what is now Papua New Guinea, while attempting to circumnavigate the globe in 1937 and was never seen again. A massive search at the time failed to find the flyer and her navigator Fred Noonan, who were assumed to have died after ditching their aircraft in the ocean. Now aviation enthusiasts from US-based group The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) say they have evidence suggesting the pair made it safely to Nikumaroro Island in Kiribati and lived as castaways. TIGHAR executive director Rick Gillespie said the group, which has carried out 10 expeditions to Nikumaroro over the past 22 years, found three small bone fragments on the uninhabited island earlier this year. Gillespie said the bones appeared to be part of a human finger, although they could also be from a turtle, and had been sent for DNA analysis. TIGHAR also found artefacts dating from the 1930s, including a woman’s make-up compact, broken mirror and small US-made bottles.
UNITED STATES
Scientists find oldest raptor
Scientists have discovered the oldest reported raptor-like dinosaur in eastern Utah. The Bureau of Land Management said on Thursday that the Geminiraptor suarezarum is believed to be 125 million years old. Most known raptors discovered in North America date to between 72 and 75 million years ago. The dinosaur was found on land near Green River, an area about 290km southeast of Salt Lake City.
SINGAPORE
Toilet campaign launched
Squeaky-clean Singapore needs cleaner toilets and public awareness is one way to achieve this, a civic group said at the launch of the latest stage of its LOO campaign — Let’s Observe Ourselves. The city-state has 30,000 public restrooms and is pushing to make 70 percent of them at least “three-star” clean by 2013. However, a survey by the Restroom Association (Singapore) (RAS) found that only some 500 of the island’s public toilets overall were up to its standards of working facilities, lack of litter and odor, and the provision of basic amenities such as hand soap and toilet paper. “For us, toilet etiquette reflects Singaporeans’ culture. It tells people how civilized we are,” RAS president Tan Puay Hoon told reporters on Thursday.
GERMANY
Hitler taken from honor roll
It may have come 65 years too late, but a town in western Germany has finally struck off Adolf Hitler from its roll call of honorary citizens. Dulmen town council, in North Rhine-Westphalia, has removed the title after years of deliberation and two failed attempts to push the motion through. Hitler was awarded honorary status in April 1933, when city officials — led by the local Nazi party leader, Julius Bielefeld — voted unanimously to bestow the title on him. The then Reich chancellor, Franz von Papen, and its president, Paul von Hindenburg, were also awarded the honor. Dulmen is not alone. Historians estimate about 4,000 German towns and cities awarded similar titles to Hitler and other senior Nazis. Archivists began researching the topic in the 1990s when councils debated whether to leave Hitler’s name on their lists for historicity or to remove it out of respect for others who had been given similar recognition. Communities have generally been slow to act.
ISRAEL
Illegal organ trade thrives
It is fitting that the man described as the “fixer” in Kosovo’s alleged organ ring was an Israeli of Turkish descent. Moshe Harel, a fugitive wanted by Interpol in connection with the case, is accused of matching potential donors recruited in Turkey with recipients, many if not all of whom had connections with Israel. The Israeli market for donor livers has been well-documented, and most international trafficking rings have involved wealthy Israeli patients on so-called “transplant tours.” Organ donation in Israel is low because of concerns in the Orthodox community about the body after death. Last month the recipients of organs illegally transplanted in a private hospital in South Africa were described as Israelis. The donors — said to have included children — were paid US$6,000 for a kidney. Netcare of South Africa admitted in court to receiving 3.8 million rand (US$554, 382) from an illegal organ trafficking syndicate.
KAZAKHSTAN
Three sent to space station
The International Space Station got three new tenants on Friday, doubling in crew size with the arrival of a Russian Soyuz capsule. The Soyuz delivered an American, an Italian and a Russian for a five-month stay. They floated into the orbiting lab two days after their launch from Kazakhstan. Officials at Russia’s Mission Control outside Moscow radioed congratulations, as did the families of the new residents. The docking took place 355km above Mali in western Africa, just as NASA was wrapping up a fueling test of space shuttle Discovery on its Florida launch pad. Discovery should have flown to the space station last month, but is grounded until February because of fuel tank cracks.
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
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was