SINGAPORE
‘Softie’ soldier counseled
A soldier who was photographed with a maid carrying his rucksack has undergone counseling and is “remorseful” over his behavior, the defense ministry said. The picture, circulated by local media then seen around the world after spreading on the Internet, had sparked outrage and concern that recruits the armed forces are “softies.” “The serviceman concerned has identified himself to his commander,” defense ministry director of public affairs Colonel Desmond Tan said in a letter published in the Straits Times on Tuesday. The photograph showed the young soldier in fatigues and combat boots walking on a footpath, with his female domestic helper following behind with his military--issue rucksack. There has been criticism that current training drills for the mandatory military service are not as tough as before because of complaints from parents.
NEPAL
‘Rude’ police trained
Top film stars have been enlisted to help train police in Kathmandu to be more polite after complaints about officers’ rude manners, police said on Tuesday. “We’ve received many complaints saying police behave badly towards drivers,” Kathmandu’s traffic police chief Bigyan Raj Sharma said. Sharma said police officers frequently lose their tempers with drivers and sometimes swear when they stop traffic violators. Madan Krishna Shrestha, Haribansha Acharya and Arunima Lamsal, who are leading Nepali movie actors, will hold “interactive sessions” with the Kathmandu valley’s 700 traffic officers to teach them courtesy, Sharma said. “They will instruct our traffic police how to be polite,” Sharma said. About 500,000 buses, trucks, cars and other vehicles ply the congested roads of Kathmandu.
NEPAL
Buddha’s birthplace cleaned
An international conservation team has begun work on restoring three endangered monuments at Buddha’s supposed birthplace, officials said on Tuesday. The team, led by Italian conservation expert Costantino Meucci, will restore the marker stone, nativity sculpture and Ashoka pillar in Lumbini, 250km southwest of Kathmandu. Lumbini, declared a UNESCO world heritage site in 1997, is visited by Buddhist pilgrims from around the world, and the month-long restoration campaign is funded by the Japanese government. The marker stone is believed to be the exact site of Buddha’s birth, while the nativity sculpture is a carving that shows Buddha’s mother holding a tree branch for support during his birth. The Ashoka pillar was built by an Indian king in the third century BC. “Offerings such as sugar and oil by devotees have probably caused changes in the color of the marker stone,” Meucci said. Gautama Siddhartha, who later became known as Buddha or the Enlightened One, is believed to have been born about 500 BC.
NEPAL
Sherpa to collect trash
A top mountaineer who holds the record for the number of successful summits of Everest left for another attempt yesterday on a mission to clean garbage from the world’s highest peak. Apa Sherpa, 51, who has climbed the mountain a record 20 times, is leading the Eco Everest Expedition 2011, which aims to collect 4 tonnes of garbage under a “Cash for Trash” program funded by a private trekking company. A team of 58 people, including 23 foreigners, will take part, earning 100 rupees (US$1.40) per kilogram of garbage brought to the base camp.
FRANCE
Sewer to heat palace
The Paris sewers are at the center of a renewable energy experiment to harness heat for buildings, including the presidential palace. A new heating project at an elementary school is the city’s first using power from sewers. The technology takes advantage of the warm waste water flowing into the sewers from showers, dishwashers and washing machines. A steel plate containing heat-conveying fluid is submerged in the waste and feeds a heat exchanger pump which circulates heat through an existing network of radiators. Engineers say the process is safe, non-polluting and — more importantly, does not smell. Another future beneficiary of sewer-generated heat will be French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose Elysee Palace plans to use its own sewer heat system.
GERMANY
Bench for teens proves a hit
A mayor is attracting interest from other cities after he installed a special park bench for town teens who refuse to sit properly. After residents of the city of Eppelheim complained teenagers always sat on the top of benches, rather than on the seat itself which they dirtied with their shoes, Mayor Dieter Moerlein came up with the idea of putting the seat on top. The first of Moerlein’s benches was installed last week and he is fielding calls from interested cities in Germany, he said on Tuesday. “The reception has been overwhelming,” Moerlein said. “Whoever wants to build one, be my guest.” The mayor calls them “no-interest” benches because teens have “no interest in following etiquette. They all sit on the new benches like sparrows on a branch,” he said. In a country reputed for its orderliness, putting your shoes on a public seat often earns a quick rebuke. In one extreme case, a 69-year-old wounded an 18-year-old man with a knife on Sunday after the teen would not take his feet off a seat on a train.
AUSTRIA
Nazi cakes leave bad taste
A Holocaust survivors’ group has filed a criminal complaint against a pastry maker for baking cakes decorated with Nazi designs, prosecutors said. The public prosecutors’ office in Wiener Neustadt said on Tuesday it had received a complaint by the MKOe Mauthausen Committee against the bakery, Tortendesign, in the village of Maria Enzersdorf, for offering customers cakes decorated with swastikas or a baby raising its right hand in a Nazi salute. While the cakes are not actually put on display in the shop window, a catalogue containing photographs of the designs is freely available to customers, MKOe said in a statement on its Web site. The group’s chairman Willi Mernyi said: “This is a particularly abhorrent example of how money is made from Nazi filth. We’re going to file a criminal complaint.” Pastry chef Manfred Klaschka told ORF public television: “If someone orders it, I make it. I don’t really think about it. Basically, it doesn’t interest me what the customers do with the cakes. I have to make a living.”
SWEDEN
Queen hurt dodging snapper
Sweden’s Queen Silvia has injured her foot and wrist while dodging a persistent photographer who tried to take snapshots of her and Princess Madeleine in New York. A statement from the Royal Court said the 67-year-old queen was shopping with her daughter on Monday when a Swedish photographer tried to take their pictures. Yesterday’s statement says the queen tried to use a side door to leave the shop, after the photographer was standing at the shop’s main entrance. On her way to a parked car, the queen fell, “injuring both her foot and wrist.”
UNITED STATES
Bank robbers prefer Fridays
Bank robberies in the country take place most often in mid-morning, on Fridays and in southern and western states, according to FBI statistics released on Tuesday. Robbers stole slightly more than US$43 million last year nationwide in 5,546 robberies of banks, credit unions and other financial institutions, the statistics showed. The south led the way with 1,790 bank robberies, followed by the west with 1,691. California had the most robberies at 805, followed by Texas with 464. North Dakota, where there were two bank robberies, had the least. Overall, there were 5,628 reported bank crimes — the 5,546 robberies along with 74 burglaries, eight larcenies and 13 extortions of financial institutions. That marked a decrease from 2009, when there were 6,065 such crimes reported, the FBI said.
UNITED STATES
Thief has ‘good taste’
A masked, quick-moving thief smashed a liquor store window in suburban Portland, Oregon, and walked off with a bottle of cognac valued at more than US$2,300. “He has good taste,” Hillsboro police spokesman Lieutenant Mike Rouches said. “He knew exactly what he was after.” The robber took the US$2,363.45 bottle of Remy Martin Louis XIII cognac, 11 fine — but cheaper — bottles of cognac and 12 packs of menthol cigarettes at about 3:15am on Monday, Rouches said. “I’ve not seen a theft like this. Usually they grab whatever they can,” Rouches said. The police arrived quickly and the posh pilferer had already disappeared, another indication that he knew what he was after, Rouches said.
UNITED STATES
Vote reveals best beach
The tiny island of Providenciales in the Turks and Caicos has been voted the top beach destination in the world, according to the travel Web site TripAdvisor. It ranked above such renowned beach destinations as Honolulu, Hawaii, and Miami Beach, Florida, in the report based on travelers’ reviews and ratings to select the best destinations around the world. Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, was the only US destination to make the top five. Providenciales, which has experienced a boom in high-end resorts with total visitors tripling since the mid-1990s, was praised for its pristine white-sand beaches, calm, clear water and a healthy barrier reef appealing to snorkelers and divers. Rounding out the top five were Boracay in the Philippines, Aruba’s Palm/Eagle beach, Negril in Jamaica and Tulum, Mexico. The quaint, Victorian-tinged Cape May, at the southern tip of New Jersey, was the only other US beach among the top 10.
UNITED STATES
‘Grim Sleeper’ case deepens
Police said on Tuesday they have identified eight more potential victims of a serial killer known as the “Grim Sleeper,” who terrorized Los Angeles for years. Detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department showed photographs at a press conference of the suspected victims of Lonnie David Franklin Jr, 57. Six of the women were reported missing, one identified as Inez Warren was confirmed killed and another remains unidentified. Franklin, who was arrested at his Los Angeles home in July 2007, already stands accused of killing 10 women in south Los Angeles more than 20 years, most of them prostitutes. He has pleaded not guilty. The authorities had initially suspected Franklin had actually committed more than a hundred crimes during the past three decades. Police dubbed him the Grim Sleeper because he apparently put a hold on his killings between 1988 and 2002.
‘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
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
RIVER TRAGEDY: Local fishers and residents helped rescue people after the vessel capsized, while motorbike taxis evacuated some of the injured At least 58 people going to a funeral died after their overloaded river boat capsized in the Central African Republic’s (CAR) capital, Bangui, the head of civil protection said on Saturday. “We were able to extract 58 lifeless bodies,” Thomas Djimasse told Radio Guira. “We don’t know the total number of people who are underwater. According to witnesses and videos on social media, the wooden boat was carrying more than 300 people — some standing and others perched on wooden structures — when it sank on the Mpoko River on Friday. The vessel was heading to the funeral of a village chief in