PHILIPPINES
Fifteen saved in landslide
The number of people found alive after a landslide buried workers in mining tunnels in a gold-rich area in the south of the country rose to 15 yesterday, military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Camilo Ligayo said. However, the depth of the collapsed earth has reduced the prospect of finding more survivors, regional civil defense chief Liza Mazo said. “We are pessimistic. It is difficult [to dig] because the landslide is 15m to 20m deep,” she said. So far, only three dead bodies have been found in the rubble, but officials told reporters there are at least 21 people confirmed missing.
HONG KONG
Rail operator apologizes
A government-owned rail operator made a public apology after its media consultant threatened to withdraw ads from local papers if they ran negative reports on it. The Mass Transit Rail Corporation said it “deeply regrets” the letter sent by its media planning agency, OMD, which caused an uproar among journalists who said it was an infringement on media freedom. “It is a brutal interference with press freedom,” chairwoman of the Hong Kong Journalists Association Mak Yin-ting (麥燕庭) told the South China Morning Post. Several newspapers also ran editorials criticizing the OMD letter.
CHINA
Confucius statue disappears
The mysterious removal of a statue of Confucius opposite Beijing’s Tiananmen Square has left many Chinese looking for an explanation. One report says the monument was simply moved inside a nearby museum. The statue of the 2,500-year-old sage was unveiled just three months ago in the communist government’s most visible endorsement yet of a cultural icon it once reviled. However it was gone yesterday from outside the recently reopened National Museum of China. Online forums were abuzz with speculation as to its fate. The news portal sina.com quoted a museum staffer as saying it had been moved inside to a new sculpture garden. Museum officials would not comment and said that no tickets were available yesterday to go inside and check.
NEW ZEALAND
Temblor hits South Pacific
The US Geological Survey said that a magnitude 6.9 quake struck yesterday about 160km southeast of the Solomon Islands’ capital, Honiara, and at a depth of 80km. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said no tsunami was expected and there were no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The Solomon Islands is a country of nearly 1,000 islands that lie on the “Ring of Fire” — an arc of earthquake and volcanic zones that stretches around the Pacific Rim.
FRANCE
Border controls mulled
Paris is looking to make it easier to set up temporary border controls with its EU partners to stem an increase in migrants, a source close to the presidency said, a rise caused in part by uprisings in Tunisia and Libya. “It seems to us that we need to think about a mechanism that would allow us, when there is a systematic disruption at one of the EU”s external borders, to intervene with a temporary suspension for as long as the disruption lasts,” the source close to President Nicolas Sarkozy’s office said on Friday. Paris recently shut its borders to trains carrying African migrants from Italy, triggering a dispute between the two governments, with Italy accusing its neighbor of breaking the EU’s Schengen treaty on border-free travel.
UNITED KINGDOM
Drinking a national trait
More than a quarter of Britons think getting drunk abroad is a national characteristic, according to a survey marking England’s national day yesterday. An Opinium Research poll of 2,012 British adults found that 60 percent thought drinking tea was a national trait, closely followed by talking about the weather. Forty percent associated a “stiff upper lip” mentality with being British. Meanwhile 32 percent thought supporting the royal family was a British characteristic. Twenty-eight percent thought that getting drunk abroad was a British attribute, while fewer than one in three thought working hard made people British. “Our research has revealed that it’s hard to pin down what it means to be British,” Opinium Research director James Endersby said.
FRANCE
Police hunt dad in shooting
Police hunting a man suspected of shooting dead his wife and four children and burying them under the garden patio turned their attention to the Riviera on Friday after his car was found. Officers traced the use of the suspect’s bank card to the Mediterranean coast. The father withdrew cash in Roquebrune-sur-Argens outside Frejus a week ago, and police found his missing car, a metallic blue Citroen C5, at a hotel where he stayed on April 14. The suspect, Xavier Dupont de Ligonnes, 50, may have returned to the Var area and may be linked to the disappearance of a local woman in her fifties, Colette Derome, police said.
VATICAN CITY
Pope conducts TV chat
Pope Benedict XVI said on Friday he had no answers to suffering in the world during an unusually candid televised question-and-answer session in a first for a leader of the Catholic Church. Asked by a seven-year-old Japanese girl why she was hit by an earthquake and tsunami, the pope answered: “I also have the same questions: Why is it this way? Why do you have to suffer so much while others live in ease? And we do not have the answers, but we know that Jesus suffered as you do,” the 84-year-old pontiff told the young girl. Sitting in a white armchair in a Vatican study and speaking in a hoarse voice, the pope faced the camera head on and fielded seven pre-selected questions — two of which were recorded in Iraq and Ivory Coast. The relatively informal interview broadcast during a religious chat show, is unprecedented for the normally ceremony-bound papal office.
FRANCE
Chairman accused of sexism
The chairman of defense company Safran hailed the arrival of the “weaker sex” on the company’s board on Thursday, triggering accusations of sexism from the nation’s best-known shareholder activist. “It will not have escaped your attention that ... we will be in a situation where the so-called weaker sex will be making a deafening entry into our board,” Francis Mer, 71, chairman of the state--controlled firm, told a shareholder meeting. The changes will increase the number of female board members from one to five, a figure Mer described as “close to the record.” “Breaking records ... in this area is easier and less dangerous than in aviation or safety matters,” he said. His comments drew immediate flak from a staunch campaigner for investor rights. “I completely reject these terms, the mere use of which says a lot about attitudes to women,” said Colette Neuville, president of the ADAM association of minority shareholders. “Coming from the head of a company which insists on equality, they are completely unacceptable.”
UNITED STATES
Social media to aid Jesus
Evangelist Franklin Graham thinks the second coming of Jesus Christ could be a social media event captured by millions of mobile phones. “The Bible says that every eye is going to see it” and that Christ will “come on the clouds,” Graham, the oldest son of preacher Billy Graham, who used the media to make Christian evangelism a global phenomenon, told ABC News presenter Christiane Amanpour, host of This Week. “How is the whole world going to see him at one time? I don’t know, unless all of a sudden everybody’s taking pictures [with their cellphones] and it’s on the media worldwide,” he said in the interview, which is to be aired today. “I don’t know. Social media could have a big part in that,” the 58-year-old Graham said, noting the role cellphones have played in spreading the word about the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa.
UNITED STATES
Mystery donor leaps to help
An anonymous donor has purchased a US$50,000 insurance policy to help an Oklahoma woman keep her pet kangaroo as a therapy pet. The Broken Arrow City Council is considering an exotic animal ordinance exemption that would allow Christie Carr to keep the partially paralyzed red kangaroo named Irwin within city limits. The council could vote on May 3 on a proposal that would allow exotic animal owners to keep their pets if they obtain a newly created permit. The permit would require them to have a liability insurance policy for any injuries inflicted by the animal, certification that the animal has adequate housing for its health and meet all federal and state guidelines for licensing, among other provisions.
UNITED STATES
Drug probe nets family
A Californian family of four was arrested in the probe of an opium shipment hidden in a package of shovels from Laos. Del Norte County sheriff’s deputies searched the address on the package after the shipment was seized and nearly 1.4kg of opium was discovered by the Department of Homeland Security, the Daily Triplicate of Crescent City reported on Thursday. Investigators also found 58kg of processed marijuana, dozens of immature plants, 16 guns and more than US$32,000 in cash, sheriff’s sergeant Steve Morris said.
UNITED STATES
Controversial pastor jailed
The pastor whose burning of a Koran sparked deadly violence in Afghanistan was briefly jailed on Friday after a court banned his protest outside a mosque. A local judge jailed pastor Terry Jones of Gainesville, Florida, and his associate Wayne Sapp after a court found their planned protest outside the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, Michigan, could lead to violence. Judge Mark Somers set bond at the symbolic amount of US$1 each for the two pastors, which they initially refused to pay. Following their refusal, both were escorted to a local jail. However, local media reported both men changed their minds after spending about an hour behind bars and posted the US$1 bond.
UNITED STATES
Tornadoes sweep St Louis
Several tornadoes swept the St Louis, Missouri, area late on Friday, blowing out glass at the airport and injuring several people, local media reported. MSNBC television said an unknown number of people were injured at the Lambert-St Louis International Airport. The extent of the injuries was not immediately known and were believed to be from flying glass, the report said.
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