CHINA
Siri leads users to brothels
Concerns that the Mandarin version of the Apple iPhone’s new voice-activated assistant “Siri” directs users to brothels has been raised by netizens and lawyers, state media said on Monday. Users were given several options for finding prostitutes upon request, but could not verify if the listings were accurate, the state-run China Daily said. Prostitution is banned in the country, which retains a largely conservative attitude to sex. Nearly 9 million users of microblogging site Sina Weibo commented on the function. One suspected Apple of providing the service intentionally, while another noted how efficient it was at finding brothels, rather than restaurants that serve typical dishes. “When I ask Siri about beef noodle soup or hotpot, she has no idea,” the netizen said. Another message said Siri’s detailed knowledge of brothels puts law enforcement to shame. “A mobile phone can know all this while the police do not?”
VIETNAM
Elephants stomp policeman
A herd of elephants has trampled to death a police officer in a central jungle. The victim and two other men went into the jungle on Saturday to look for apricot trees. Huynh Trung Luan, the director of the elephant conservation center in Daklak Province, said more than 20 wild elephants attacked the men as they returned home that night. Luan said two of the men escaped unhurt. The 42-year-old policeman was found dead on Sunday morning. Luan said the herd became more aggressive after two of its members were killed by villagers in August.
IRAN
National symphony disbands
The national symphony orchestra has been disbanded for lack of funds, musicians said on Monday, another sign of the effects of Western economic sanctions. Orchestra members told the semiofficial ILNA news agency that they have not been paid for three months. The orchestra was reactivated just last year, after a two-year break. The step is likely tied to heightening economic woes in Iran because of government mismanagement and Western sanctions over Iran’s nuclear development program. Iran’s orchestra is one of the oldest in the Middle East, founded in the 1930s. It has hosted performances by world famous musicians like Yehudi Menuhin and Isaac Stern in the past.
JAPAN
WWII dud stalls airport
A huge, unexploded World War II bomb has been found buried near the runway of one of the coutnry’s busiest regional airports, forcing all flights to be canceled yesterday, officials said. A worker rebuilding drainage systems near Sendai Airport uncovered the 225kg bomb on Monday evening. Local reports said the bomb was 110cm long and 35cm in diameter. If the bomb explodes, fragments could be scattered more than 1km, NHK news said, adding that officials were mulling an evacuation.
CAMBODIA
Obama to make SE Asia trip
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs says US President Barack Obama is expected to visit Southeast Asia in the middle of next month. Ministry spokesman Koy Kuong yesterday said that Obama will travel to the capital, Phnom Penh, for an ASEAN summit. The meeting of heads of state is due to take place from Nov. 18 to Nov. 20, bringing together leaders of the 10-nation bloc. US officials have declined to confirm Obama’s travel plans. Koy Kuong had no further details, but another senior official said Obama is also expected to hold talks with Prime Minister Hun Sen.
CYPRUS
Anti-tank death plot foiled
Three men including a “paranoid” convicted felon allegedly plotted to assassinate the attorney general using an anti-tank weapon, a police investigator told a court on Monday. The court granted a police request to keep the three suspects in police custody for eight days until investigators build their case against them. The suspected ringleader is 61-year-old Andreas Ounoufriou, who was sentenced to 18 years in prison for the 1996 attempted murder of a judge. The trio faces charges of conspiracy to commit murder and possession of military-grade explosives, a missile launcher and other weapons. Police investigator Ioannis Georgadjis told a Nicosia District Court that Ounoufriou allegedly masterminded the foiled killing of Attorney General Petros Clerides from behind bars a few months before he was due to be released from a four-year sentence for an earlier prison escape.
NETHERLANDS
Jobs’ yacht completed
Steve Jobs’ super-yacht Venus has emerged from a shipbuilder’s yard just over a year after the Apple founder’s death. The approximately 70m long yacht was built by Royal De Vries shipbuilders in Aalsmeer, just south of Amsterdam. According to a posting on Sunday on the tech blog onemorething.nl, the ship will be presented to Jobs’ family, including his widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, and their three children, Reed, Erin and Eve. It will then be packed up and shipped by cargo to the US. Those who worked on the ship each received an iPod nano from the family, the blog said. The bridge features a control panel made up of an array of seven iMac computers. Another Mac can be seen through a porthole above the anchor. Sources told the blog that the ship took six years to design and build. Apple’s top designer, Jonathan Ive, was involved with the design.
GERMANY
Car crash saves life
A road crash may have actually saved the life of a taxi driver, authorities said on Monday. The 50-year-old choked on a sweet and lost control of his cab during a coughing fit while on a job in Wuppertal on Sunday, police said. First he hit a small truck parked at the roadside before losing consciousness with his vehicle headed towards oncoming traffic, hitting another parked car head-on, they said. The impact presumably dislodged the sweet from his throat and the taxi driver regained consciousness.
TURKEY
Secularists defy ban
Police fired tear gas and used water cannons to disperse thousands of pro-secular protesters who defied a ban by the moderate Islamist government to march on Monday in Ankara to mark Republic Day. Carrying national flags, demonstrators shouted slogans including “Fully independent Turkey” and “We are soldiers of Mustafa Kemal [Ataturk],” referring to the republic’s founding father. The rally began outside the first parliament building in the historic Ulus District. Some in the group were shouting anti-government slogans such as “Turkey is secular and will remain secular,” and “We are here despite the AKP [Justice and Development Party]” government. The Ankara governor’s office had banned the Republic Day rally, saying that security services had received intelligence that groups might be planning “provocative” action.
The Burmese junta has said that detained former leader Aung San Suu Kyi is “in good health,” a day after her son said he has received little information about the 80-year-old’s condition and fears she could die without him knowing. In an interview in Tokyo earlier this week, Kim Aris said he had not heard from his mother in years and believes she is being held incommunicado in the capital, Naypyidaw. Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was detained after a 2021 military coup that ousted her elected civilian government and sparked a civil war. She is serving a
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
‘NO AMNESTY’: Tens of thousands of people joined the rally against a bill that would slash the former president’s prison term; President Lula has said he would veto the bill Tens of thousands of Brazilians on Sunday demonstrated against a bill that advanced in Congress this week that would reduce the time former president Jair Bolsonaro spends behind bars following his sentence of more than 27 years for attempting a coup. Protests took place in the capital, Brasilia, and in other major cities across the nation, including Sao Paulo, Florianopolis, Salvador and Recife. On Copacabana’s boardwalk in Rio de Janeiro, crowds composed of left-wing voters chanted “No amnesty” and “Out with Hugo Motta,” a reference to the speaker of the lower house, which approved the bill on Wednesday last week. It is
FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
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