■ Malaysia
Mahathir vows `hands off'
Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad vowed that he won't become a "back seat driver" who interferes in the running of the government after he retires at the end of this month, a newspaper said yesterday. Mahathir said he'd spend his retirement writing his memoirs and delivering public lectures, The Star newspaper reported. ``I am not going to direct the government,'' Mahathir, 77 said in an interview. ``The government can go on and do what is directed by the [new] leader.'' Mahathir has led Malaysia since 1981. He said he was confident the power hand-over to his deputy, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, would go smoothly.
■ South Korea
Number of defectors rising
South Korea has taken in 3,834 North Korean defec-tors since the 1950 to 1953 Korean War, 77 percent of them in the past five years, the Unification Ministry said yesterday. The number of defectors rose from 148 in 1999 to 583 in 2001 and 1,140 last year, the ministry said in a report quoted by Yonhap news agency, adding this year's arrivals would exceed 1,200. Chronic food and energy shortages have driven a growing number of northerners to enter China illegally in a bid to seek refuge in South Korea. Aid groups estimate that up to 300,000 northerners have escaped into northeastern China. Beijing refuses to grant refugee status to the North Koreans and usually sends them back home by force.
■ China
People flee flooding
Flooding along the Yellow River and one of its tribu-taries has forced 238,000 people to flee their homes in northern China, while another 11,000 people in east China must be relocated, officials said yesterday. Some 300,000 people in Weinan city in Shaanxi Province have been reloca-ted as continuous heavy rain since Sept. 27 has caused flooding along the Wei River, a tributary to the Yellow River, said a local official. The official said no deaths or injuries have been reported so far. In Shandong Province, dike breaks along the Yellow River, have forced 11,000 people to be relocated in Dongming county. So far only 5,900 have been moved, an official said.
■ China
Traffic accidents soaring
Sichuan Province suffered 385 traffic accidents in just one day of the week-long National Day holiday, leaving 16 people dead and 83 injured, state media reported yesterday. The accidents occurred Saturday, the Huaxi Dushi Newspaper said. The holiday is one of three annual "golden week" breaks allotted by the government to encourage consumer spending and boost the economy. This golden week is seeing record-breaking travel figures after many travel plans were postponed due to the cancellation of the pre-vious golden week in May as a result of the SARS epidemic.
■ Afghanistan
Armitage on one-day visit
US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage will use a one-day visit to Afghanistan to reinforce US support for the nation, officials said. Armitage began his one-day trip in Kandahar yesterday with talks with provincial Governor Yusuf Pashtun. He will also meet President Hamid Karzai and other officials in Kabul. The U.S. embassy said Armitage aimed to reinforce support for full implementation of the Bonn Agreement which mapped out the country's political future.
■ United Kingdom
Al-Qaeda might target queen
Intelligence services have warned that Britain's Queen Elizabeth II could be the target of an al-Qaeda terrorist attack during a visit to Nigeria later this year, the Sunday Telegraph reported. A warning to the British government indicated that terrorists hoped to strike during a Commonwealth Heads of Government conference in December, the London-based paper said. It added that Chris Mullin, the Foreign Office minister responsible for Africa, had told colleagues he was prepared to offer Nigeria the use of British forces to bolster security. Ministers insisted that there was no suggestion that the queen would not go to the conference, which she is due to attend as head of the the 54-nation Commonwealth, according to the Telegraph.
■ United States
Police hunt tiger in Harlem
To the sounds of enormous jungle roars, a police sniper rappelled down the side of a Harlem apartment building on Saturday and fired tranquilizer darts through an open fifth-floor window to subdue a 160kg Bengal tiger. Officials planned to send the tiger to a conservancy in Ohio. What the tiger, along with a 1.2m to 1.5m long reptile called a caiman, was doing inside a cluttered apartment remained a mystery on Saturday. The New York Police Department became involved when the apartment's resident, Antoine Yates, called to say he had been bitten by a pit bull and a neighbor complained of large amounts of urine and a strong smell coming through the ceiling. Yates has since disappeared.
■ United States
Magician's condition critical
Famed Las Vegas magician Roy Horn of the "Siegfried and Roy" duo remained in critical but stable condition on Saturday after being mauled by a white tiger during a performance on his 59th birthday, representatives said. The seven-year-old male tiger, named Montecore, did not respond to Horn's cues and then grabbed the performer's forearm about halfway into the Friday night performance. When Horn tried to fend the tiger off with his live microphone -- hitting the animal in the face and saying "no, no" -- the tiger lunged and bit him on the neck and dragged him offstage, causing massive bleeding.
■ United Kingdom
Techno-addiction on the rise
Too much text messaging? You may need professional help. More and more people were succumbing to so-called "technology addictions," spending hours tapping on mobile phones or surfing the Internet, one of Britain's best known psychiatric clinics said. "There has been a huge rise in behavioral addictions," said a spokeswoman for the Priory Clinic, which treats 6,000 patients a year for a range of addictions including gambling, eating disorders and drugs. The head of the clinic's addictions unit told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper some patients were spending up to seven hours a day text messaging.
■ Oman
Women don't gain ground
Women failed to make gains on Oman's advisory council, barely managing to hold on to two seats in the first elections open to all citizens of the conservative Gulf sultanate, according to results yesterday. Lujaina Mohsen Darwish and Rahila al-Riyami will continue to represent different districts of Muscat on the 83-member Majlis ash-Shura elected on Saturday. But none of the 13 other women candidates who vied for seats with 491 men made a breakthrough in or outside the capital, according to the initial results.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis
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