AUSTRALIA
‘Extreme fire’ warning given
Victoria State authorities yesterday warned about extreme fire weather, perhaps some of the worst since a 2009 inferno that killed 173 people. “These next four days promise to be amongst the most significant that we have faced in Victoria since Black Saturday,” acting state Premier Peter Ryan said. Tens of thousands of firefighters are on standby, and 1,290 brigades are in a “state of high preparedness,” he added, with the peak danger day expected on Friday. Forecasters say Victoria and South Australia state are likely to see “severe to extreme heat wave conditions” this week.
PHILIPPINES
Flooding kills 22
Twenty-two people have been killed and nearly 200,000 evacuated as floods and landslides hit the eastern section of Mindanao Island that is still recovering from Typhoon Bopha in December 2012, officials said yesterday. Torrential rain struck the area in the past weekend weekend. “Major rivers overflowed, causing people to drown in areas still recovering” from the typhoon, civil defense operations officer Franz Irag said. “Many of the victims had not managed to rebuild and were staying in temporary shelters when they were hit by fresh flooding.”
PHILIPPINES
Marcos jewelry ‘ill-gotten’
A jewelry collection owned by former first lady Imelda Marcos was “ill-gotten,” the anti-graft Sandiganbayan court ruled on Monday, potentially paving the way for an auction of millions of US dollars worth of seized treasures. The court decided that the Malacanang Collection, the smallest of three confiscated from the Marcos estate and worth about US$150,000, was rightfully owned by the government. The other two collections are already in government hands, but the ruling is significant because previous attempts to auction off the entire haul have been derailed by legal issues relating to the Malacanang pieces. An assessment made by Christie’s in 1991 put the value of three collections at up to US$8.5 million, though it is likely to be substantially higher now.
NEW ZEALAND
Dotcom organizing party
Indicted Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom says he is launching a political party to contest the general election this year. In an interview yesterday with The Associated Press, Dotcom said he is founding and funding the party, but will not be a candidate. Born Kim Schmitz in Germany, the 39-year-old is a resident, but not a citizen and cannot be a candidate by law. Dotcom says he will launch the party on Monday, the second anniversary of police storming his mansion and arresting him. Authorities also shut down Megaupload, the popular file-sharing site he founded.
UNITED KINGDOM
Endangered plant stolen
A minuscule, nearly extinct water lily has been stolen from London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, officials said on Monday. The Metropolitan Police said the flower theft took place sometime on Thursday last week when a Nymphaea thermarum was pulled from a shallow pond in a glasshouse at the garden in Kew. Botanic Gardens horticulture director Richard Barley said the incident was a “blow to morale.” The lily — so rare that it does not have a common name — was discovered growing in southwest Rwanda by a German botanist in the 1980s. When the mud around the Rwandan spring where it was found dried up in 2008, the plant disappeared from the wild.
RUSSIA
Journalist denied visa
A US journalist and author critical of President Vladimir Putin says he has been barred from the country. David Satter, a former Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times, who had been working in Moscow since September, said on Twitter that he had been refused permission to return after a trip to Ukraine last month. Asked on Twitter about his treatment, Satter wrote: “Yes expelled. I was living in Moscow.” The Foreign Ministry did not immediately comment on the report.
RUSSIA
Kalashnikov writes of pain
A Russian newspaper, Izvestia, on Monday published the letter, in which Mikhail Kalashnikov, the designer of the AK-47 assault rifle, asked the head of the Russian Orthodox Church if he was to blame for the deaths of those killed by his weapon. Kalashnikov, who died last month at 94, told Patriarch Kirill that he kept asking himself if he was responsible. “The pain in my soul is unbearable. I keep asking myself the same unsolvable question: If my assault rifle took people’s lives, it means that I ... am responsible for people’s deaths,’’ he said in the letter. Kalashnikov’s daughter, Elena, was quoted by Izvestia as saying that a local priest could have helped her father write the two-page letter, which was typed and carried his signature. The letter contrasted sharply with past statements by Kalashnikov, who said that he created the weapon to protect his country and could not be blamed for other people’s actions.
UNITED STATES
‘Octomom’ charged
Nadya Suleman, the California single mother of 14 children, including octuplets, who has been popularly dubbed “Octomom,” has been charged with welfare fraud, prosecutors said on Monday. The 38-year-old mother, who became a media sensation five years ago after giving birth to octuplets conceived through in vitro fertilization, is accused of failing to report nearly US$30,000 in earnings from personal appearances and residuals from videos, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office said. Suleman, whose legal name is Natalie Denise Suleman, was charged on Jan. 6 with a single count of aid by misrepresentation and two counts of perjury. Suleman faces up to five years and eight months in prison if convicted.
UNITED STATES
Marcos’ secretary sentenced
A judge sentenced a former personal secretary to Imelda Marcos on Monday to two to six years in prison for conspiring to sell Impressionist masterpieces belonging to the Manila government that vanished when former Phillipine president Ferdinand Marcos was ousted. Justice Renee White of the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan said Vilma Bautista, 75, could remain free on US$175,000 bail while her lawyers appeal, the New York Times reported. Bautista’s lawyer, Fran Hoffinger, said the court should impose no jail sentence because of her frail health.
BRAZIL
Police investigate shootings
At least 12 young men were gunned down in separate incidents within hours of one another on the outskirts of a university town, and investigators said on Monday they were looking into whether police officers carried out the killings as revenge for the shooting death of a colleague in the same area. “We’re not ruling out executions, revenge nor a fight between criminals,’’ police investigator Licurgo Nunes Costa told the newspaper Estado de S. Paulo.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of