AUSTRALIA
Croc travels free in hold
A baggage handler had a nasty surprise when he opened the cargo door of a Qantas passenger flight to find a crocodile roaming loose in the hold, the airline said yesterday. The reptile, reported to be a relatively small specimen, managed to escape its transport container during a flight from Brisbane to Melbourne last week, a Qantas spokesman said. “The animal was quickly and safely secured when the aircraft arrived in Melbourne,” the spokesman added. The crocodile was being transported as freight by cargo firm Australian Air Express. Qantas said it was investigating whether the animal had been in the right container and properly loaded.
CHINA
Homeowner killed in protest
Police in Liaoning Province shot and killed a homeowner who set himself on fire while trying to protect his property from a demolition crew, an official and state media said yesterday. Wang Shujie, 36, set himself ablaze after seeing his father shot and wounded, and started toward a policeman, who opened fire, according to the China Daily. The father had tried to wrestle the policeman’s gun from him after he fired warning shots into the air as the protest in Panjin began to get restive, the newspaper said. A local government official in Panjin confirmed Friday’s killing, but refused to go into details pending an inquiry. However, the People’s Daily said on its microblog a preliminary investigation concluded the policeman’s actions were justified. Government-backed land grabs have become China’s most volatile social problem as officials and developers seek to cash in on the nation’s property boom, sometimes forcing people out of their homes without proper compensation.
JAPAN
Envoy sent to Beijing
Tokyo sent its top foreign affairs bureaucrat to China yesterday for a two-day visit, in a move aimed at cooling the diplomatic temperature in a territorial dispute, officials said. Vice Foreign Minister Chikao Kawai, the most senior unelected man in the ministry, was to meet his Chinese counterpart “to discuss a wide range of bilateral issues based on the current situation,” a ministry official said. The announcement came a day after China said it was postponing long-planned events marking the 40th anniversary of ties and as the Japanese coastguard said three Chinese government ships were in waters around the disputed Senkaku Islands, known in Taiwan and China as the Diaoyutais (釣魚台)
VIETNAM
Three bloggers jailed
A court in Ho Chih Min city yesterday jailed three bloggers for “anti-state propaganda” after a trial of just a few hours. High-profile blogger Nguyen Van Hai, alias Dieu Cay, was sentenced to 12 years in prison and policewoman-turned-dissident Ta Phong Tan was given 10 years. “Their crimes were especially serious with clear intention against the state,” Court President Nguyen Phi Long said, adding that “they must be seriously punished.” Phan Thanh Hai, the only one of the trio to plead guilty, was handed a four-year term. All of the defendants will also have to serve between three and five years under house arrest after they complete their prison sentences. “They abused the popularity of the Internet to post articles which undermined and blackened [Vietnam’s] leaders, criticizing the [Communist] party [and] destroying people’s trust in the state,” Long said.
TURKEY
Sex doll mistaken for body
Rescue workers retrieved an inflatable sex doll from the Black Sea after police were notified by panicked residents who mistook it for a woman’s body floating offshore, Milliyet newspaper reported on Sunday. Police cordoned off a wide stretch of beach in northern Samsun province and sent a team of divers into the water to rescue what appeared to be a drowning woman, it said. The team quickly discovered it was in fact a blow-up doll, which they deflated before throwing it in the garbage, the daily said. It was not clear where the blow-up doll had come from.
AUSTRALIA
Irish woman goes missing
Australian homicide detectives on Monday took over an investigation into the disappearance of a young Irish woman in Melbourne after her handbag was found in a nearby street. Jill Meagher, who works for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), was last seen at about 1:30am on Saturday when she left friends at a bar to walk the short distance home. She never made it. “We take on these cases of a suspicious nature where a person goes missing when there’s a possibility that they may have been met with foul play,” Detective Inspector John Potter said.
UNITED STATES
Boys flee detention center
Six teenage boys escaped from a juvenile detention center in Washington state after knocking out a female staff member, but all were captured a few hours later early on Sunday in nearby woods, authorities said. The King County Sheriff’s department said it received word of the escape at about 11:30pm on Saturday from Echo Glen Children’s Center in Snoqualmie, about 40km east of Seattle. The six males were serving time for offenses including assault, possession of firearms and burglary, West said. Law officers on the ground with search dogs and in the air combed the area on the outskirts of Snoqualmie before a helicopter crew spotted the escapees in woods near the center using thermal-imaging equipment, according to West.
SAUDI ARABIA
Dozens protest detention
Dozens of Saudis protested at a prison in Qassim near the capital, Riyadh, on Sunday against the detention of their relatives in the Gulf kingdom, where demonstrations are banned, protesters and a rights activist said. Police restricted the protesters to a cordoned off area for six hours, they said. Demonstrations are rare in Saudi Arabia which escaped last year’s Arab Spring unrest but has faced criticism for its human rights record. Activists say thousands of people are held without charge in the kingdom and human rights groups have accused the government of using its campaign against Islamist militants to imprison political dissidents.
BELARUS
Parliament seats assigned
Authorities in Belarus say that all but one of the 110 seats in parliament have been assigned after elections that critics of the vote say were tainted by improbably high turnout figures. Central Elections Commission chairman Lidiya Yermoshina said yesterday that only official turnout tallies would be considered, and downplayed assessments by independent observers. Yermoshina reported a preliminary turnout figure of 74.3 percent. Parliamentary elections were held on Sunday without the main opposition parties, which boycotted the vote to protest the detention of political prisoners and opportunities for election fraud.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
Japan is to downgrade its description of ties with China from “one of its most important” in an annual diplomatic report, according to a draft reviewed by Reuters, as relations with Beijing worsen. This year’s Diplomatic Bluebook, which Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s government is expected to approve next month, would instead describe China as an important neighbor and the relationship as “strategic” and “mutually beneficial.” The draft cites a series of confrontations with Beijing over the past year, including export controls on rare earths, radar lock-ons targeting Japanese military aircraft and increased pressure around Taiwan. The shift in tone underscores a deterioration
A retired US colonel behind a privately financed rocket launch site in the Dominican Republic sees the project as a response to China’s dominance of the space race in Latin America. Florida-based Launch on Demand is slated to begin building a US$600 million facility in a remote region near the border with Haiti late this year. The project is designed to meet surging demand for the heavy-lift rockets needed to put clusters of satellites into orbit. It is also an answer to China’s growing presence in the region, said CEO Burton Catledge, a former commander of the US Air Force’s 45th Operations
Germany is considering Australia’s Ghost Bat robot fighter as it looks to select a combat drone to modernize its air force, German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius said yesterday. Germany has said it wants to field hundreds of uncrewed fighter jets by 2029, and would make a decision soon as it considers a range of German, European and US projects developing so-called “collaborative combat aircraft.” Australia has said it will integrate the Ghost Bat, jointly developed by Boeing Australia and the Royal Australian Air Force, into its military after a successful weapons test last year. After inspecting the Ghost Bat in Queensland yesterday,
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