■ China
Gas death toll up to 243
The death toll from a gas drilling accident that spewed toxic fumes over villages in southwestern China has risen to 243 after 10 injured people died in hospitals, the government said yesterday. An additional 396 people were still being treated following the Dec. 23 disaster northeast of the city of Chongqing, the official Xinhua News Agency said. It said 27 were in critical condition. The government on Friday blamed negligence among gas-drilling workers for the accident in which a well blew out and spewed a toxic mix of natural gas and hydrogen sulfide over the mountainous area.
■ Malaysia
Muslims target tight jeans
Authorities in a conservative Malaysian state want Muslim women to completely cover their hair while at work and non-Muslim women to refrain from wearing tight jeans or short skirts, in a crackdown on what they deem as "obscenity." Preachers from the fundamentalist Islamic party that rules Terengganu state will soon accompany officials to businesses and offices to enforce a statewide dress code introduced last year, local government officials said yesterday. Non-Muslim women in tight jeans, short skirts or blouses with ``plunging necklines that show their busts'' would be admonished, said Sulaiman Abdullah, the head of the municipal council of Kuala Terengganu, the state capital. "We don't encourage obscenity here," Sulaiman said. Employers face fines or having their premises closed if workers are found repeatedly flouting the dress code.
■ Australia
Girl takes long road home
An 18-month-old girl who wandered away from her family ended up covering 5km searching for them, police in Australia said yesterday. The toddler vanished into bushland on a farm near Albany in Western Australia. Police spokesman Mark Fairclough said searchers could barely believe she had covered such a distance. "It just goes to show you that that's all it takes," Fairclough told Australia's ABC Radio. "You turn your back on mobile children for a couple of moments and they can take off."
■ Hong Kong
Women groped on subway
Two out of three Hong Kong women say they have been groped or touched by men while travelling on buses and underground trains, a news report said yesterday. Forty-two per cent of victims were targeted on the city's crowded Mass Transit Railway (MTR) underground system, while 38 percent were assaulted on buses, according to the Hong Kong Standard. The survey by a group called Gutsy Women found that nearly one in three would pretend nothing had happened, while half would just stare angrily at their attackers. Women who did complain about the assaults said that they found staff indifferent, researchers said.
■ Hong Kong
Crocodile person of the year
An escaped crocodile that has been on the loose on the Hong Kong-China border for more than two months was yesterday named Hong Kong's Person of the Year. The evasive 1.5m reptile, first spotted in early November and believed to be an escaped pet, beat a host of politicians and celebrities to win the poll, run by government radio station RTHK. The crocodile, not sighted since mid-December, won nearly 32 percent of votes in the online vote, far ahead of second-placed Hong Kong collective hospital workers with 19 percent. Hong Kong's chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa (董建華), got less than five per cent of votes.
■ Spain
Fireballs light up sky
Hundreds of witnesses reported seeing fireballs cross the skies of northern Spain on Sunday in what authorities said may have been a disintegrating meteorite, Spanish radio said. The bright flashes were spotted at around 6:00pm in a swathe across the northern half of Spain, from the eastern city of Valencia to the northwestern pilgrimage site of Santiago de Compostela. In some cases, objects were reported to have fallen to earth. "I left the house at around 12 minutes to six. I heard a big explosion, like an earth tremor, and a white cloud of smoke formed around a nearby mountain which took a long time to disappear," a local official from the northern region of Palencia told the radio.
■ United Kingdom
Sperm counts plummet
Male sperm counts have fallen by almost a third since 1989, with factors such as drinking and obesity possibly to blame, according to a British study released yesterday. A survey of 7,500 men who attended the Aberdeen Fertility Center in northern Scotland between 1989 and 2002 brought alarming findings, researchers said. Analysis of sperm samples showed that in men with what is considered a "normal" concentration of sperm -- defined as over 20 million sperm per milliliter of semen -- the average sperm count fell by 29 percent. This "must cause some concern and needs to be explained", said Dr Siladitya Bhattacharya, who led the research project. "There could be a number of lifestyle factors which could play a role in this," he said.
■ Egypt
Power failure cause of crash
French Transport Minister Gilles de Robien said on Sunday that the crash of an Egyptian charter plane at the weekend may have been caused by a sudden loss of power, but said it was too early draw conclusions. Asked on Europe 1 radio if the crash was definitely an accident, he replied: "There are no sure things about this, we only know that indications seem to point the same way. There was no explosion before the crash, no one has claimed responsibility for an attack, the arguments most commonly put forward point simply to a loss of power." De Robien later told LCI television that "We cannot draw conclusions at the moment," adding that "we must wait for the black boxes."
■ United Kingdom
Study finds charms work
A pioneering study into the effectiveness of lucky charms has found that they do work -- but only in the minds of the people who carry them. British scientists found that while carrying a charm had no impact on events based on chance, such as winning the lottery, those who believed in them felt more confident and optimistic. In the study, 100 people around Britain were asked to take a supposedly lucky Victorian-era penny coin with them for a month, and to keep a diary as to how their fortunes changed in areas such as finance and health. While the University of Hertfordshire psychologists found no measurable difference in how fate had actually favoured these people, 30 percent felt their luck had taken a turn for the better. And although sceptical of any magical effects, these people felt more confident, secure and optimistic about the future, the survey found. Perhaps the most compelling statistic came at the end of the survey when participants were told they could give up the lucky coin -- 70 percent said they would keep carrying it.
■ Zambia
British writer to be deported
Zambia intends to deport a British writer for allegedly "insulting" President Levy Mwanawasa in his popular weekly column in a private newspaper, an official said yesterday. Home affairs permanent secretary Peter Mumba said he had recommended the interior minister to issue a deportation order for Zambia-based Roy Clarke, who writes a column in the Post newspaper. The article, modelled along the lines of George Orwell's Animal Farm, referred to the person in charge of the farm as "Mawelewele," or fool in the local Nyanja dialect. The article, published last Thursday, also referred to ministers as "long-legged giraffes, red-lipped, long-figured baboons."
■ New Zealand
All air travellers in danger
About 1 percent of long-distance air travellers are likely to suffer symptoms caused by "economy-class syndrome," research done in New Zealand suggests, and first-class passengers are just as affected. Scientists said the findings indicated that blood clots in the legs or lungs were a potential danger for many passengers, not just those with previous health problems or those in constricted seats. "The term `economy-class syndrome' should be avoided," said the scientists in a article in Britain's Lancet. They recommended "air-traveller's thrombosis" as a better term.
■ Sri Lanka
Clarke applauds landing
Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke applauded the landing of NASA's Spirit rover on Mars over the weekend, and said yesterday that he believed that there was life on the Red Planet. "It is a jolly good show," Clarke said from his home in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo. "If we can find some form of life there, it will change everything," he said, adding "I believe there existed vegetation and this means some forms of life [on Mars]."
■ United States
Scientists freeze light
Scientists have stopped and frozen light in an experiment which could help the development of futuristic super-powerful computers. The light pulse was brought to a standstill and held for a mere few hundredths of a millisecond. The new research is the first to trap light while keeping its electromagnetic energy intact. It opens up the possibility of harnessing packets, or "quanta," of light to store and process data. This could be an important step towards the far-off goal of building quantum computers. Such machines, which are still only a dream, would manipulate the strange properties of sub-atomic particles to carry out mind-boggling calculations.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done