AFGHANISTAN
‘Sesame Street’ hits TV
US children’s TV favorite Sesame Street came to Afghanistan this week with the launch of a new series featuring familiar characters like Elmo and Big Bird. Baghch-e-Simsim made its debut on a local TV channel on Thursday and aims to improve education for children in the country. It is not the first time that the Sesame Street format has been exported. A version of the show came to neighboring Pakistan earlier this year, funded by the US government’s international aid agency USAID, while co-productions have also screened in Bangladesh, Egypt, Mexico and Russia. Deputy Education Minister Mohammad Siddiq Patman said he believed the program would “depict traditions, culture and other aspects of Afghan rural and urban life” and would be “profoundly useful” for children.
UNITED KINGDOM
Album ‘difficult’ for dad
Amy Winehouse’s posthumous new album Lioness: Hidden Treasures hits stores tomorrow, but the one fan who will find it hardest to listen is her father. Mitch Winehouse, who has set up a charity in his daughter’s name after she died in July aged 27, heard the collection of 12 songs recorded from as early as 2002, a year before the release of her debut album, Frank. He said the experience had been “difficult,” with the memories of the late chart topper still raw. “We were finding it difficult to listen to Amy’s music, but we had to listen to it because if it wasn’t up to scratch we wouldn’t have allowed it to go out,” Mitch said in a recent interview. Early reviews of the album, released on Universal Music’s Island Records label, have been mixed. Lioness: Hidden Treasures features 12 songs and demos chosen by producers Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi, who both worked with Winehouse when she was alive.
PHILIPPINES
Dogs saved from fighting
Police have arrested six South Koreans suspected of running a massive, high-tech dogfighting operation where matches in the Philippines were shown online to overseas betters, police said yesterday. About 240 pitbulls were confiscated in the raid late on Friday from a secluded compound where the dogs were kept and the matches held, the local police intelligence chief said. “They had an arena enclosed with mirrors. They had videocams, computers and they would show live fights of the pitbulls and it could be seen on their Web site in Korea,” Chief Inspector Romeo Valero said. He said the Koreans did not know how to speak English and it was not yet known how long they had been in the country. One Korean said they did not know dogfighting was illegal in the Philippines.
CHINA
Letters delivered from space
China’s post office is hoping to boost business by allowing customers to send letters postmarked from space. E-mails would be sent to a computer aboard Tiangong-1, a spacecraft currently orbiting the Earth and rerouted to a special China Space Post Office branch on the ground in Beijing, the country’s space program said on its Web site. The e-mails would then be printed, placed in space-themed envelopes, stamped with a new galactic postmark and sent on in the mail. The gimmick, which features China’s first astronaut, Yang Liwei (楊利偉), as head of a so-called “space post office,” is the latest initiative devised by the postal service to drum up business as more and more Chinese go online.
UNITED STATES
Gears foil car thieves
Two carjackers gave up trying to steal a 2007 Nissan when they discovered that the car was a stick shift. The St Petersburg Times reported that a man and his girlfriend were leaving his workplace early on Friday morning when two men pulled a handgun. The assailants said if the couple didn’t get out of the car, they would shoot. The men then jumped into the car and started it, but did not get far. Police said the carjackers couldn’t drive a stick shift vehicle so they gave up and ran away.
UNITED STATES
Jazz legend Vega dies
A longtime US musician who played with some of the country’s finest jazz talents through a 70-year career has died at age 90. Hospital spokeswoman Kory Dodd said Al Vega died on Friday at Massachusetts General Hospital. No cause of death was given. Boston radio personality Ron Della Chiesa said that Vega, born Aram Vagramian, was the house pianist at the Hi-Hat jazz club in the late 1930s and the 1940s and 1950s, and played with jazz greats including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Count Basie and Duke Ellington. He later led his own trio. Della Chiesa called Vega a legendary musician and teacher. He said Vega was also a World War II veteran.
UNITED STATES
Cops posed as protesters
Media reports said Los Angeles police used nearly a dozen undercover detectives to infiltrate the Occupy LA encampment in the weeks before Wednesday’s raid to gather information on protesters’ intentions. A police source who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case is ongoing told the Los Angeles Times that none of the officers slept at the camp, but they tried to blend in to learn about plans to resist or use weapons against police. Nearly 300 people were arrested during the pre-dawn raid at City Hall Park. Police are downplaying the significance of the undercover work since Occupy meetings were public and easily tracked.
UNITED STATES
YouTube ‘terrorist’ in court
A man has pleaded guilty to supporting a Pakistani terrorist group by making a propaganda video and distributing it on the Internet. Jubair Ahmad, 24, of Woodbridge, Virginia, who has been jailed since his September arrest, entered the plea on Friday. Prosecutors allege Jubair produced and uploaded a propaganda video to YouTube last year on behalf of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant Pakistani group that the US has designated as a terrorist group since 2001. Court documents show that Ahmad, who came to the US from Pakistan as a 19-year-old, was the subject of a two-year FBI investigation. An affidavit states he received training from Lashkar-e-Taiba while living in Pakistan. Ahmad was charged with providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization.
UNITED NATIONS
Russia condemns ‘threats’
Russia believes new UN sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program are no longer possible, Moscow’s UN envoy said on Friday, condemning “threats” being made against Tehran and Syria by the West. “We believe that the sanctions track in the Security Council has been exhausted,” Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin told a press conference. “We continue to believe very strongly that negotiations should continue with Iran.” The EU and US have ordered new sanctions against Iran after an International Atomic Energy Agency report said there were signs of military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear drive.
‘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