NEW ZEALAND
Anti-royalist’s plan foiled
Police said they caught a man before he had a chance to throw a bucket of horse manure over Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, during a royal visit to the country. Castislav “Sam” Bacanov, 76, pleaded not guilty in an Auckland court yesterday to planning a crime in a public place. He has agreed under his bail conditions to keep at least 500m from the royal couple. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall are on a six-day tour of the country, the last leg of their Pacific tour marking Queen Elizabeth II’s 60th Jubilee. Police spokeswoman Noreen Hegarty said officers arrested Bacanov, a known anti-royalist, on Monday near a downtown Auckland venue where Charles and Camilla were due to appear. She said the royal couple had not yet arrived at the outdoor venue and were never in any danger. Bacanov is due to appear in court again on Nov. 27.
INDONESIA
PETA hunts elephant killers
The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) yesterday offered a US$1,000 reward for information on the killing of three critically endangered Sumatran elephants near palm oil plantations. The carcasses of three female elephants, including a year-old calf, were found rotting at the weekend in the jungle on Sumatra Island outside the Tesso Nilo National Park. Park chief Kupin Simbolon said on Monday the elephants had likely been poisoned in revenge after plantation workers’ huts were destroyed in a recent stampede. The animal rights group offered the reward for information “leading to the arrest and conviction” of the killers. “These cowardly killers need to be caught and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” PETA Asia vice president Jason Baker said in a statement. “If poisoned, these elephants endured a slow and agonizing death.”
MALAYSIA
‘Holy’ window moved
A church is taking possession of a hospital window that has attracted hundreds of people who believe it bears an image of the Virgin Mary. Prayerful crowds of Roman Catholics have gathered outside the Sime Darby Medical Center in a suburb near Kuala Lumpur since last weekend after an image believed to resemble the Virgin Mary was spotted on the hospital’s seventh-floor window. Reverend Simon Labrooy of the suburb’s Church of St Thomas More said he met with hospital officials and agreed that the crowd could affect medical emergency services. He said in a statement late on Monday that the hospital glass panel would be moved to a church and tested by theologians and religious authorities.
ZIMBABWE
Officials ‘stealing’ diamonds
Diamonds worth at least US$2 billion have been stolen by President Robert Mugabe’s ruling elite, international dealers and criminals, in “perhaps the biggest single plunder of diamonds the world has seen since Cecil Rhodes,” a watchdog has claimed. Revenue that could have revived the country’s ailing economy has been channelled into a “parallel government” of police and military officers and government officials loyal to Mugabe, according to Partnership Africa Canada (PAC). The Marange fields in the east were discovered in 2006 and are one of the world’s biggest diamond deposits, but funds from diamond sales have not reached the state treasury, with evidence showing millions have gone to Mugabe’s inner circle, a PAC report published on Monday said.
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
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
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