CHINA
Smog ratings face reform
Authorities in Beijing have pledged to improve the way they measure air quality amid accusations they massively underestimate pollution in the capital, state media said yesterday. Thick smog that blanketed the city on Monday and Tuesday highlighted a huge discrepancy between official data ranking the pollution at the time as “slight” and US embassy measurements ranking it as “hazardous.” With growing numbers of Beijing residents trusting the US figures over their own government’s, the Global Times newspaper said city authorities were considering overhauling their own measuring system. “The Beijing bureau applies the current national standard, which is undergoing an amendment,” the paper quoted Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau’s Du Shaozhong (杜少中) as saying. The discrepancy is because China currently only measures large particles that pollute the air, while the US system also includes the smaller particles, the paper said.
CHINA
Military eases up on rules
The military is accepting recruits who are heavier and have more visible tattoos, conceding to rising prosperity and individuality among young people. In keeping with a drive for better educated recruits, the military would also pay an additional 6,000 yuan (US$944) annually to university students who take time off to serve and their university places will be reserved for them. The changes announced by the Ministry of National Defense yesterday took effect during the military’s winter recruitment drive. The People’s Liberation Army is the world’s largest with 2.3 million in uniform. The ministry said would-be recruits would no longer be failed for having face or neck tattoos as long as the body art does not exceed 2cm. The changes also allow for body weight up to 25 percent greater or 15 percent lower than the military’s standard, in contrast to the former limits of 20 percent greater and 10 percent lower.
SOUTH KOREA
Brides, with houses, sought
Mindful of soaring house prices, a matchmaking firm has launched a program to bring together female property owners with men unable to provide a marriage home. The idea goes against the country’s tradition in which the man provides the home and the woman supplies honsu — the household contents. However, the Sunoo company says 480 men and 150 women, all aged in their thirties, have signed up for its program since it was launched three weeks ago. Sunoo arranges dates between men with decent jobs but no property and women who already own a home. Marriage traditions have been changing slowly, especially among young people, Sunoo spokeswoman Park Young-sun said. “Usually, men would be wealthier than women ... but due to changes in circumstances such as economic difficulties there can be a reversal of roles,” she said.
JAPAN
Broke dad murders family
A heavily indebted man who allegedly bludgeoned his wife and son to death with a pickax handle was arrested yesterday, police said. Isao Shinomoto told police he wanted to kill his family, saying he could not cope with his debts, local broadcasters said. Shinomoto, 53, attacked his 49-year-old wife, 20-year-old daughter and son, 18, early yesterday as they slept, police said. The bloodied bodies of his wife and son were discovered by police who were called to the house in western Tokyo. Officers rescued the injured daughter and arrested Shinomoto, police said.
UNITED KINGDOM
Blair guru wins damages
A style guru, whose friendship with former prime minister Tony Blair’s wife caused him embarrassment during his time in office, won libel damages on Tuesday over newspaper claims she would reveal sex secrets about the Blairs in a book. Carole Caplin, Cherie Blair’s former lifestyle adviser, was awarded substantial damages from the Daily Mail. An article, headed “Carole’s £1m question: Will she tell all about the Blairs’ sex secrets?” was published in September last year, the Press Association reported. “It was claimed that Ms Caplin had insisted that Mrs Blair tell her every last detail of their sex life and that publication of these revelations would blow the lid on the Blairs’ marriage and finish them,” her lawyer David Price said. Price told London’s High Court Caplin had never had any intention of disclosing any confidential information about the couple, nor was she in financial difficulty as the article suggested.
UNITED KINGDOM
Morbid prize up for grabs
It will be the world’s most literary mortuary. Ten leading crime writers are competing for the honor of having a morgue named after them. Scotland’s University of Dundee said on Monday it would name its new morgue and research facility after whichever writer gets the most votes in an online poll and fundraising effort. Kathy Reichs, Lee Child, Tess Gerritsen, Harlan Coben, Mark Billingham and Val McDermid are among the authors taking part in the “Million for a Morgue” campaign. The university hopes to raise £1 million (US$1.6 million) for the new facilities at its Center for Anatomy and Human Identification. The university’s forensic scientists help train emergency workers in identifying disaster victims and have developed groundbreaking techniques that have identified pedophiles from images of their hands. The university said the morgue would be the first in Britain to use the Thiel embalming method, which advocates say better preserves cadavers so they can be studied by forensic scientists.
UNITED KINGDOM
Queen’s knickers sold
A pair of ample bloomers once owned by Queen Victoria sold for £9,375 at an Edinburgh auction on Tuesday, more than three times the original estimate. An anonymous buyer bought the white silk undergarments during an auction of items from London’s Old Battersea House — the London home of the Forbes family, the American publishing dynasty. An oil painting of the long-serving monarch with servant John Brown also smashed pre-auction expectations. It went under the hammer for £145,250 at the sale, held in the Scottish capital’s Lyon & Turnbull auction house. Simon Edsor, art adviser to the Forbes family, called the sale “a great result,” which demonstrated the worldwide appeal of royal memorabilia.
UNITED KINGDOM
Livingstone may have lied
He was one of history’s most famous explorers and his first-person account of a 19th-century massacre in the heart of Africa helped galvanize Britain to shut down one of the continent’s biggest slave markets. However, two researchers now say they have uncovered evidence suggesting David Livingstone may not have told the whole truth. They say they have used spectral imaging technology to decode Livingstone’s long-illegible 1871 field diary and found hints his men may have been involved in the atrocity — contrary to his previous claims. Scans and transcripts of the unedited diaries were posted on Tuesday on the Web site of the University of California, Los Angeles.
UNITED STATES
Sandwich charges dropped
The Safeway supermarket chain is dropping charges against a Honolulu couple whose arrest for stealing sandwiches led to their two-year-old daughter being taken into state custody and sparked nationwide outrage. Safeway spokeswoman Susan Houghton said the company notified Honolulu police on Tuesday that it wouldn’t press charges against Marcin and Nicole Leszczynski. They were arrested last week when Nicole, who is 30 weeks pregnant, ate a sandwich while shopping and walked out without paying. Their daughter Zofia was taken away by the state and returned to her parents 18 hours later. Houghton said management followed procedure by contacting police, but Safeway regretted not foreseeing doing so would result in separating a child from her parents.
UNITED STATES
Booze ups breast cancer risk
Light to moderate alcohol drinkers have an increased risk of breast cancer compared with women who do not drink beer, wine or liquor, a US study published on Tuesday said. Women who drink three to six glasses of alcohol per week have a 15 percent higher risk of getting breast cancer than women who do not drink, the research led by Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School said. Women who drink on average two glasses daily of alcohol show a 51 percent higher risk of breast cancer, the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association said. Researchers followed 105,986 women who answered survey questions about their health and alcohol consumption from 1980 until 2008. The higher breast cancer risk was seen whether the women drank early in life or whether they were drinking after age 40, suggesting that even stopping may not have an effect on lowering risk.
UNITED STATES
Injured marines get suckers
Marines badly wounded in Afghanistan may get a “lollipop” with a powerful painkiller from now on instead of the traditional shot of morphine, a Marine Corps spokesman said on Tuesday. The new treatment offers an alternative to the morphine needle “you see in the World War II movies,” with medics jabbing a syringe into a soldier’s leg or arm, Captain Brian Block said. The fentanyl lollipop offers medics a faster way to ease the pain of a battlefield injury as the drug can be absorbed more rapidly through a lozenge in the mouth than from a needle injected into a muscle, Block said. “The absorption is actually faster through the blood vessels in the mouth. You don’t have to worry about shock, which will constrict the blood vessels in a major muscle in a leg or an arm,” Block said.
CUBA
Dissident detained, beaten
Guillermo Farinas, a leading dissident and winner of the European Parliament’s top human rights prize, was arrested on Tuesday and for the first time beaten in detention, his mother and activists said. Farinas, who won the Sakharov rights prize last year after going on a 135-day hunger strike to press for the release of political prisoners, had gone to a hospital in Santa Clara to visit another dissident on a hunger strike, his mother Alicia Hernandez said. “According to what I was told by someone who was with him, he was on his way in and [state agents] told him no, and there was some kind of melee and they arrested him,” Hernandez said. One of the agents “held him kept him in place, while another beat him. They have him in the police unit,” she added, noting: “They had never before physically abused him.”
‘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
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