NEW ZEALAND
Oil spill worst disaster
An oil spill from a container ship stranded off the North Island coast has become the country’s worst maritime pollution disaster, New Zealand Environment Minister Nick Smith said yesterday. The amount of oil spewing from the stricken vessel, Rena, which hit a reef on Wednesday, had increased five-fold after it sustained further damage in a storm overnight, Smith said at Tauranga, where once-pristine beaches have been fouled with oil. He described as tragic the latest developments, in which up to 350 tonnes of heavy fuel oil leaked into the Bay of Plenty early yesterday, but said there was little authorities could do to prevent it.
JAPAN
Tsunami pod unveiled
A round yellow pod, christened Noah for the maker of the ark, could mean the difference between life and death in the case of another killer earthquake and tsunami like the one that hit the country in March, said its inventor, Shoji Tanaka, president of equipment maker Cosmo Power. Spherical in shape, Noah is about 1.2m in diameter, with one hatch, one glass window and two holes for drainage and ventilation. It’s made of fiber reinforced plastic, which Tanaka said is lighter but also stronger than steel. Its bright yellow color is designed to attract the attention of rescuers. It’s also small enough to fit into an average Japanese home. The company said it already has orders for 700 of the four-seater pods. It sells for ¥288,000 (US$3,800) for a standard model and US$4,500 for one with cushions that help absorb shocks.
SINGAPORE
Police probe torture claims
Police yesterday pledged to investigate a local businessman’s claim that he was tortured while under arrest for allegedly trading in millions of US dollars’ worth of stolen Apple devices. Ong Su Ping, 32, said police officers “forced him to drink their urine, put a toilet brush into his mouth, covered his head with used underwear, pulled his hair and assaulted his private parts,” the Straits Times reported. Ong told a court hearing on Monday that the ordeal lasted four hours. Police said Ong’s case was being investigated by the Internal Affairs Office, a new department that conducts independent investigations into complaints and offences involving officers.
MALAYSIA
Get faith ‘counseling’: Sultan
The sultan of the state of Selangor has ordered faith “counseling” for 12 Muslims who attended a church event where they were allegedly proselytized in a case that strained religious ties in the country. The Muslims will undergo counseling “to restore their belief and faith,” Sharafuddin Idris Shah has said. There would be no action taken against Islamic religious police who raided the dinner at a Methodist church hall on Aug. 3, he said in a statement yesterday. The raid near the capital, Kuala Lumpur, sparked renewed fears of a growing Islamization in the Muslim-majority but multicultural country. It is illegal to convert Muslims to other religions in most parts of the country.
CHINA
Reforms for Syria: ministry
Syria should move faster to honor reform promises, Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin (劉為民) told a news briefing yesterday, nearly a week after Beijing rejected a Western-backed UN draft resolution condemning the bloody crackdown in Syria. Liu’s remarks echo earlier statements made by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev last week that Syria’s leaders should step down if they could not enact reforms.
RUSSIA
Oblast claims home to yeti
A region in Siberia on Monday confidently proclaimed its mountains are home to yetis after finding “indisputable proof” of the existence of the hairy beasts in an expedition. The Kemerovo Oblast administration said in a statement on its Web site that footprints and possibly even hair samples belonging to the yeti were found on the research trip to its remote mountains. “During the expedition to the Azasskaya cave, conference participants gathered indisputable proof that the Shoria mountains are inhabited by the ‘Snow Man,’” the regional administration said in a press release. The expedition was organized after Kemerovo’s governor invited researchers from the US, Canada and several other countries to share their research and stories of encounters with the creature at a conference. “They found his footprints, his supposed bed, and various markers with which the yeti marks his territory,” the statement said. The collected “artifacts” will be analyzed in a special laboratory, it said.
UNITED KINGDOM
McCartney turns up the noise
Once a rocker, always a rocker. Former Beatle Paul McCartney got in trouble with noise enforcement officers who visited his London home early on Monday after neighbors complained about the loud music coming from his late-night wedding party. Officials said McCartney agreed to turn down the music. He does not face any legal problems because of the raucous party, which followed his Sunday afternoon wedding to Nancy Shevell. McCartney’s neighbors in the affluent St John’s Wood neighborhood were complaining about recorded music, not McCartney’s own performance, which included an emotional new ballad he wrote for his 51-year-old bride.
NETHERLANDS
Mladic hospitalized: lawyer
One of Ratko Mladic’s lawyers says the former Bosnian Serb military chief has been hospitalized with suspected pneumonia. A spokeswoman for the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, where the 69-year-old is detained while waiting to be tried on charges, including genocide, had no immediate comment. Mladic lawyer Milos Saljic said yesterday jail authorities had told him Mladic had been hospitalized “allegedly because of pneumonia.”
NORWAY
Chilly PRC ties ‘untenable’
Oslo’s frosty relationship with Beijing since last year’s award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波) is “unnatural and untenable” and has hurt local industry, Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere told a newspaper yesterday. The awarding of the prize by the Norwegian Nobel Committee to democracy campaigner Liu, serving an 11-year jail sentence for subversion, infuriated China, which called the decision a “political farce” and boycotted the award ceremony. There have been no top-level bilateral political meetings since the announcement of the award in October last year.
FRANCE
Strikes disrupt rail, schools
Strikes have disrupted some trains and schools as unions across the country plan protests against government austerity measures. President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative government says the cost-cutting measures are essential to reducing the country’s debts and allowing the country to remain a pillar of the troubled eurozone. The striking and protesting workers say the cuts hit some sectors and workers unfairly hard and that the rich should make more of a contribution.
UNITED STATES
Police arrest fetus abductor
Wisconsin police said yesterday they had arrested a woman for fetal abduction and the homicide of its mother. “Fetal abduction is rare, but sadly, this appears to be the case here,” a statement from Milwaukee police said, noting that papers were being prepared to go to the district attorney for review. A report on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Web site, citing a police report of the incident, named the suspect as Annette Morales Rodriguez, 33, who is accused of killing Marita Ramirez, 23, and her male fetus. It said Rodriguez on Thursday went looking for a pregnant woman near a social service agency, found Ramirez and offered her a ride, before obtaining some medicine and stopping at the suspect’s house to use the bathroom. When Ramirez came out of the bathroom, Rodriguez struck her repeatedly with a baseball bat, then strangled her unconscious before using a knife to cut the fetus from her womb, trying, she told detectives, to copy a Caesarean section she’d seen performed on the Discovery Channel, according to the newspaper. Rodriguez called 911 to say she had given birth, but the baby was not breathing. After an autopsy was performed on the dead fetus, police returned to Rodriguez’s house on Friday and found the young mother’s body in the basement, the report added.
UNITED STATES
Beauty queen snitched
It was a former Icelandic beauty queen who scooped the US$2 million reward for tipping off the FBI as to the whereabouts of feared Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger, the Boston Globe revealed. Bulger, who is charged with 19 murders in the 1970s and 1980s in Boston, was arrested in June in Santa Monica, California, where he had been living under an assumed name with long-term girlfriend Catherine Greig. The FBI has steadfastly refused to disclose the identity of the tipster, again declining to comment on Monday, but the Boston Globe said it was Anna Bjornsdottir, a 57-year-old graphic designer and yoga instructor. Bjornsdottir, who was crowned Miss Iceland in 1974, tipped off police after recognizing Bulger, 81, on the television news, reports said. She is said to have befriended Greig, 60, in Santa Monica after the two women took a shared interest in a local stray cat.
UNITED STATES
Marathon runner gives birth
Amber Miller could be forgiven for taking a long rest after completing the Chicago Marathon on Sunday, but rather than resting her aching limbs, the 27-year-old spent the evening giving birth to her second child. Miller was 39 weeks pregnant when she started the 42.195km race and went into labor shortly after finishing, a spokeswoman from Central DuPage Hospital said on Monday. The Chicago native had completed marathons during her previous pregnancy, but told reporters at the hospital she had not expected to finish this year’s race. She alternated between running for 3.2km and walking for 3.2km throughout the race, Miller told the Chicago Tribune.
UNITED STATES
Gunfight erupts in Newark
An outbreak of gunfire in Newark, New Jersey, left several people wounded on Monday, police said. Detectives said they were “in the early stages of an investigation into the circumstances that resulted in several people being shot.” “Officers encountered at least four people suffering from gunshot injuries,” a Newark Police Department statement said. The news site nj.com reported six people had been hit in the gunfire at the public housing complex.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing