HONG KONG
Penis cutter suspect on trial
A Chinese woman is on trial for killing her former boyfriend with a hammer after first cutting off his penis with scissors, the South China Morning Post reported yesterday. Yeung Ki, 41, has admitted killing 32-year-old piano teacher Zhou Hui on Dec. 26, 2012, but denies murder. Yeung, who had had an affair with the married Zhou for years, killed him after he beat her, slapped their daughter and then raped Yeung, the High Court has heard. She drugged him with soup laced with sleeping pills, cut off his penis and flushed it down the toilet, then when he was awakened by the pain, beat him to death with a hammer, the prosecution said on Monday.
NORTH KOREA
Almost perfect poll turnout
Pyongyang yesterday confirmed near-perfect turnout for its parliamentary election on Sunday in which single candidates stood uncontested in 687 constituencies nationwide. “According to the election returns available, 99.97 percent of all the voters registered ... took part in the election,” the KCNA news agency said. Of the votes cast, “100 percent” were for the candidates, KCNA said. However, turnout was slightly lower than the last election in 2009, when 99.98 percent of voters cast ballots.
SWITZERLAND
Tamils protest in Geneva
Thousands of Tamils demonstrated in Geneva on Monday to protest Sri Lanka’s rejection of calls for an international probe into alleged war crimes at the end of its civil war. About 4,000 people marched through Geneva and crowded into the square outside the UN’s European headquarters. The demonstrators blocked traffic and police were forced to use pepper spray to contain the situation when protestors began pressing against the security barriers.
JAPAN
Research recall urged
A coauthor of a study that promised a revolutionary way to create stem cells has called for the research to be retracted over claims its data was faulty. The findings, published by Haruko Obokata and US-based scientists in the January edition of British journal Nature, outlined a simple and low-tech approach in the quest to grow transplant tissue in the lab. However, allegations have been raised that researchers used erroneous image data for the article. Teruhiko Wakayama, a Yamanashi University professor who coawrote the article, said the research should be retracted.
NEW ZEALAND
Key vows flag referendum
Prime Minister John Key yesterday pledged to hold a referendum on changing the national flag if he wins a third term in office in September. Key had been tipped to hold the referendum alongside Sept. 20 elections, but said he did not want the campaign dominated by debate over the flag. He said he supported ditching the current flag in favor of a silver fern on a black background, the emblem used by the nation’s sport teams.
AUSTRALIA
Volcanoes help survival
The steam and heat from volcanoes allowed species of plants and animals to survive past ice ages, a study published yesterday said. “Volcanic steam can melt large ice caves under the glaciers, and it can be tens of degrees warmer in there than outside,” said Ceridwen Fraser, the joint team leader from the Australian National University. “Caves and warm steam fields would have been great places for species to hang out during ice ages.”
UNITED STATES
General’s trial ‘politicized’
A military judge in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on Monday found that politics had been unlawfully injected into the rare court-martial of Brigadier General Jeffrey Sinclair, but refused to dismiss the sexual assault charges against him. The judge said he would allow Sinclair to renew an offer to plead guilty to some lesser charges in exchange for the most serious allegations of coercive sex acts being dropped. Military leaders at Fort Bragg rejected a previous proposal by the general after giving improper consideration to a letter from the main accuser’s lawyer that invoked politics while urging them to deny the offer, Colonel James Pohl ruled.
UNITED STATES
Snowden has no regrets
National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, speaking via live video conference on Monday, told a packed audience at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival that he had no regrets and acted because he believed the constitution had been “violated on a massive scale.” Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), spoke to Snowden, who is in Russia, from the Austin event along with Snowden’s legal adviser, the ACLU’s Ben Wizner. Snowden dispensed advice on how citizens can keep their Web-surfing activities more private and urged the technology industry to create more software and services that help guard privacy.
SOUTH AFRICA
More testimony on autopsy
The pathologist who conducted an autopsy on the girlfriend shot by Oscar Pistorius was testifying yesterday for a second day at the athlete’s murder trial. Gert Saayman was speaking about the gunshot wounds suffered by Reeva Steenkamp when Pistorius opened fire through a toilet cubicle door at his home on Feb. 14 last year. On Monday, Pistorius vomited into a bucket at his feet and retched as he listened to Saayman’s testimony, which was so graphic that it was not broadcast or reported live on social media by journalists under an order from Judge Thokozile Masipa. Saayman methodically listed the extent of the three main gunshot wounds Steenkamp suffered when she was shot in the right side of the head, the right hip and the right arm through a toilet cubicle door.
TURKEY
Alleged coup plotters freed
A court on Monday released scores of defendants convicted last year over an alleged coup plot, media reported. The ruling came after former army chief Ilker Basbug — sentenced to life in jail in connection with the so-called “Ergenekon” conspiracy — was released from prison on Friday. The constitutional court had ruled earlier that Basbug’s legal rights were violated, saying that a lower court failed to publish its detailed verdict on the case and send it to the appeals court. That ruling paved the way for 19 more defendants to be released, including prominent journalist Tuncay Ozkan and retired army officers, the private NTV channel reported.
UNITED STATES
House cat menaces family
Portland police had to be called in to subdue a 10kg house cat that trapped its owners inside their bedroom after attacking their baby. Portland Police Bureau spokesman Sergeant Pete Simpson said officers responded to an emergency call on Sunday evening from a couple who had locked themselves in their bedroom with the baby and their dog after the cat attacked the child, although the baby was not injured. He said the cat remained with its owners.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.