JAPAN
Drinking reactor water
A lawmaker has drunk a glass of water taken from a radioactive puddle inside a reactor building at the stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in a bid to prove decontamination efforts are working. TV footage showed a visibly nervous Yasuhiro Sonoda gulping down water that he said had been decontaminated after being scooped up from inside the plant. “Just drinking [decontaminated water] doesn’t mean safety has been confirmed, I know that,” Sonoda said. “Presenting data to the public is the best way.” Sonoda, parliamentary secretary for the Cabinet office, said on Monday that he drank the water after journalists repeatedly asked him to “prove” the area around the plant was safe. The water came from puddles that had collected in the plant following clean-up efforts, a source not normally intended for human consumption.
PHILIPPINES
Bishop warns of fake priests
People making their traditional All Saints’ Day visits to cemeteries should watch out for fake priests offering to bless the dead for money, a senior bishop warned yesterday. Security guards at cemeteries and people approached by these priests were advised to check their church-issued ID cards to make sure they were for real, Bishop Deogracias Iniguez said. “There are these persons who offer themselves as priests and this is a day for them because there are so many people in the cemeteries who would like the tombs of their relatives to be blessed,” he said. Reports have indicated the fake priests approach people at cemeteries — especially the larger ones — and offer prayers in exchange for cash, said Iniquez, head of the public affairs office of the country’s Catholic bishops. More than 80 percent of the country’s 94.9 million people are Catholics, who traditionally observe All Saint’s Day on Nov. 1 with visits to the cemetery to pray for the dead.
BANGLADESH
Alleged swindler caught
Police said yesterday they had arrested a man for allegedly swindling a Japanese couple out of US$855,000 by claiming that a mosque was actually a cultural center for which he needed funds to complete. Darad Ahmed, 38, took the money between 2005 and last year, telling the couple it would be used for a Japan-Bangladesh cultural center in the remote northeastern district of Baralekha, police inspector Rajab Ali said. “He passed off his local mosque as the cultural center. He regularly sent pictures of the mosque to the couple,” Ali said. “The prime minister’s office has ordered us to investigate the case seriously. We’ve found that the cultural center the couple thought was being built does not exist,” he said. Ahmed was reported to have told the couple that the building would improve ties between the two nations. Police have charged him with cheating and misappropriation of funds.
CHINA
Detonation kills four people
A vehicle carrying explosive material detonated in the southwest yesterday, killing four people, injuring about 100 others and causing several nearby buildings to collapse, local authorities said. The explosion took place at about midday on a road in Fuquan City in Guizhou Province, the government said on its Web site. Police, firefighters and ambulances were dispatched to the scene. The cause of the blast is under investigation. A spokeswoman for the Fuquan City government declined to comment. Other details were not immediately available.
RUSSIA
Police chase naked drunk
A drunk and naked driver wreaked havoc in central Moscow, damaging 12 cars before he was caught, city police said. Officers said they started pursuing the man on Sunday after he ignored a road sign banning a turn and refused orders to stop. In the ensuing chase, the motorist nearly hit a school bus, rammed through a police vehicle and smashed several other cars before being caught. When police got him he was completely naked. Footage broadcast by local TV stations showed him lying on the pavement and shouting “don’t cover me!” to officers who tried to cover him with clothes. The man said he came from Moldova and was in distress over an unhappy relationship.
UNITED KINGDOM
Internet stalker jailed
A man who stalked his girlfriend using social networking sites and posted sexual images of her on the Internet was on Monday jailed for four months. Judge Anthony Callaway said Shane Webber, 23, was guilty of a “gross violation” of Ruth Jeffery’s privacy after he hacked into her e-mail account and sent naked images of her to family and friends while the two were going out. Webber, from Nottingham in central England, admitted one count of harassment at an earlier hearing at a magistrates’ court in Southampton, the town where Jeffery, 22, lives. “I am extremely pleased with the outcome,” Jeffery said after the decision. “The maximum sentence in a magistrates’ court will never make up for the hurt he had put me through, but I am pleased I can now put it behind me.”
UNITED KINGDOM
Love triangle cat found
A kitten that disappeared after becoming caught up in a political love triangle a year ago has been found alive, well and fully grown. Christine Hemming, estranged wife of Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming, was sentenced to community service last week for taking tabby kitten Beauty from the house of her husband’s mistress, Emily Cox, in the city of Birmingham last year. Hemming admitted going to Cox’s house to deliver mail to her husband, but said what happened next was “a blur,” and Beauty remained missing. John Hemming said on Monday that a local woman called his office to say she had been looking after Beauty, assuming the cat was a stray. He said Beauty is now grown up and has had a litter of kittens.
UNITED KINGDOM
Townshend slams iTunes
Pete Townshend, the legendary frontman behind the rock group The Who, attacked Apple’s online iTunes service for bleeding artists “like a digital vampire” in a lecture late on Monday. Townshend, speaking in Manchester in northwest England, called on the online giant to do more to help the artists from whom it was making so much money. “Is there really any good reason why, just because iTunes exists in the wild west Internet land of Facebook and Twitter, it can’t provide some aspect of these services to the artists whose work it bleeds like a digital vampire ... for its enormous commission?” he asked. Record labels and music publishers had in the past provided a range of services to artists, offering editorial guidance and nurturing them creatively, he said. Apple should hire 20 talent scouts “from the dying record business” to help new acts and provide financial and marketing support to the best of them, he said. Townshend made his remarks in the inaugural John Peel lecture, an event organized in memory of the legendary BBC disc jockey.
CANADA
Man leads police on chase
Police arrested a man on Monday driving a stolen tractor-trailer who was pursued for several hours by at least 15 police cars on highways in southern Ontario before the truck pulled over to the side of the road. A news helicopter followed the action, which was being broadcast live in Canada. Ontario Provincial Police Sergeant Dave Woodford said the man eventually pulled the truck over voluntarily on the Queen Elizabeth Highway and police arrested him. He said he did not believe the driver ran out of gas. Woodford said the truck was reported stolen at about 4am and that an officer first spotted the truck at 8am. Police trailed the man for about five hours. The truck had been refueled before it was stolen. A news helicopter had to refuel and missed it when the man was pulled over and arrested. An Ontario Ministry Transportation highway camera also cut out just as the man pulled over.
UNITED STATES
Obama zombie sparks row
A Halloween-themed graphic featuring a zombie President Barack Obama with a bullet hole in his forehead provoked widespread outrage and the attention of the Secret Service on Monday after a local Republican committee in Virginia used it to scare up interest in Halloween parade political activities. The montage, a banner on a mass e-mail to Republicans in a Virginia county, mingles seasonal images including a jack-o’-lantern, a disfigured US Representative Nancy Pelosi and a throng of flesh-hungry zombie Obama supporters. The posterized image of a rotting, undead Obama with a bleeding, large-caliber hole centimeters above his right eye prompted Democrats to cry foul and Virginia’s Republican governor to denounce it as “shameful and offensive.” Loudoun County Republican chairman Mark Sell said in an e-mail response that the graphic was “a light-hearted attempt to inject satire humor into the Halloween holiday.”
UNITED STATES
Fetus robber to plead insane
The lawyer for a Milwaukee woman accused of killing a pregnant woman and trying to steal her full-term fetus says his client will enter an insanity plea this week. Thirty-three-year-old Annette Morales-Rodriguez is accused of killing a 23-year-old woman and slicing out the fetus in hopes of passing off the child as her own. The baby also died. She is scheduled to enter a plea at an arraignment today. Her attorney, Robert D’Arruda, said on Monday he will enter a plea on her behalf of not guilty and not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. Once that happens, the court is expected to appoint a mental-health expert to evaluate Morales-Rodriguez. She is charged with two intentional-homicide counts. If convicted she faces two life sentences.
UNITED STATES
Faith healers sentenced
A judge has sentenced two members of an Oregon church that embraces faith healing to more than six years in prison, telling them they could easily have kept their newborn son alive. The Oregonian reports the sentences handed down on Monday are the harshest sanctions yet for members of the Followers of Christ church. The Oregon City congregation shuns traditional medicine in favor of faith-healing rituals such as prayer and rubbing oil on the sick. Dale and Shannon Hickman were convicted of manslaughter in the death of their son, David. The boy was born two months prematurely, weighed less than 1.81kg and lived less than nine hours. They are the fourth couple in the congregation to stand trial.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion