SOUTH KOREA
Man sets fire to ministry
Police say a 61-year-old man set a fire at Seoul’s main government complex before killing himself. Seoul police cited witnesses as saying the man used a lighter and papers to start the fire at an Education Ministry office on the complex’s 18th floor yesterday and then jumped to his death. The blaze was quickly put out, and it caused only minor damage. Police say the motive for the arson was not immediately known. In 2008, a 69-year-old man set a fire that destroyed a 14th-century gate in Seoul in a fit of anger over a land dispute unrelated to the landmark. Yesterday’s fire occurred at one of the two main government complex buildings, which houses the Unification Ministry, the Public Administration and Security Ministry and other offices.
CHINA
Pandas once eaten: scientist
A scientist says that humans used to eat pandas. In a newspaper interview, Wei Guangbiao says prehistoric man ate the bears in what is now part of the city of Chongqing. Wei, the head of the Institute of Three Gorges Paleoanthropology at a Chongqing museum, says many excavated panda fossils “showed that pandas were once slashed to death by man.” The Chongqing Morning Post quoted him as saying: “In primitive times, people wouldn’t kill animals that were useless to them” and therefore the pandas must have been used as food. However, he says pandas were much smaller then. Wei says wild pandas lived in Chongqing’s high mountains between 10,000 and 1 million years ago. Pandas do not eat much apart from bamboo.
INDIA
Family of 10 die in fire
Police say 10 members of a family were been burned to death after an electrical short circuit caused a fire that engulfed their home. Police spokesman Surendra Srivastava says the accident took place before dawn on Saturday in Agra in Uttar Pradesh State. The dead included three children. Two other people were injured in the accident. Srivastava says it took fire engines a long time to reach the building because it was located in a crowded area with narrow, winding lanes.
JAPAN
Voyeur avoids charges
A “peeping Tom” who used a pen-shaped camera to take an upskirt photograph of a cabin attendant during a domestic flight has avoided charges after prosecutors failed to decide which prefecture the plane was flying over at the time, reports said. The 34-year-old man extended his hand with the micro-camera while seated and took the picture of the flight attendant, the Asahi Shimbun said on its Web site yesterday. He was arrested by police and admitted what he had done, saying he was “aroused by uniforms,” the report added. The man was on a Japan Airlines flight from Takamatsu in the southwest of the country to Tokyo last month, according to an earlier report by Kyodo News. The police tentatively determined the photograph was taken over the western prefecture of Hyogo based on witness accounts and their analysis of flight data, it said. However, prosecutors judged they were unable to rule out the photograph may have taken when the plane was over neighboring prefectures, Kyodo added. “Peeping Tom” offenses typically fall under prefecture-level law to prevent public nuisances and their applications require prosecutors to state exact locations of the crime.
Far from the violence ravaging Haiti, a market on the border with the Dominican Republic has maintained a welcome degree of normal everyday life. At the Dajabon border gate, a wave of Haitians press forward, eager to shop at the twice-weekly market about 200km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They are drawn by the market’s offerings — food, clothing, toys and even used appliances — items not always readily available in Haiti. However, with gang violence bad and growing ever worse in Haiti, the Dominican government has reinforced the usual military presence at the border and placed soldiers on alert. While the market continues to
An image of a dancer balancing on the words “China Before Communism” looms over Parisian commuters catching the morning metro, signaling the annual return of Shen Yun, a controversial spectacle of traditional Chinese dance mixed with vehement criticism of Beijing and conservative rhetoric. The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicolored visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an Internet meme. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to “persistent persecution” in
ONLINE VITRIOL: While Mo Yan faces a lawsuit, bottled water company Nongfu Spring and Tsinghua University are being attacked amid a rise in nationalist fervor At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common, but in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valor in cyberspace. Last month, a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan (莫言), accusing him of discrediting the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Wu, who posts online under the pseudonym “Truth-Telling Mao Xinghuo,” is seeking
‘SURPRISES’: The militants claim to have successfully tested a missile capable of reaching Mach 8 and vowed to strike ships heading toward the Cape of Good Hope Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia’s state media reported on Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unidentified official, but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the