■ China
Students steal `state secrets'
China plans to charge students with stealing state secrets over a scheme to sell answers to the national university entrance exam, official media said yesterday. The ring allegedly obtained questions from students who left the exam hall during the test. The answers were then looked up and sent by mobile phone text message to students in the test hall. Reports said about 20 students were detained last week at the Zhenping No. 1 High School in the central province of Henan after the highly competitive exams. Five were still being held in a local jail and another suspect, a second-year university student in the northwestern province of Gansu, had also been detained.
■ Japan
Mishap briefly shuts airport
The Narita international airport had to close one of its two runways for nearly an hour yesterday after an incoming plane ended up facing an outgoing aircraft on the taxiway, airport officials said. The two planes -- a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines passenger aircraft arriving from Amsterdam and a South Korean Asiana Airlines plane preparing to depart for Incheon -- were taxiing toward each other, the officials said. They did not collide. The runway at Japan's main international air hub just north of Tokyo was closed for about an hour while workers removed the planes, they said.
■ Singapore
Shrine visits irk future leader
Singapore's leader-to-be slammed Japan's prime minister yesterday over his regular visits to a Tokyo shrine that honors that country's war dead, saying they are an "unnecessary aggravation" angering Asian neighbors. "It riles everyone up -- it doesn't necessarily rile me up -- but he's made his calculations," Lee Hsien Loong was quoted as saying in The Straits Times yesterday. Lee, the elder son of Singapore's founding father Lee Kuan Yew, is set to assume the prime ministership himself later this year when Goh Chok Tong steps down.
■ China
Red tides threaten seafood
Two giant toxic red tides engulfed parts of the sea off northeastern China over the weekend, and officials were monitoring seafood for contamination, the China Daily reported yesterday. Marine experts said so far shellfish and other seafood were safe to eat, the newspaper quoted the State Oceanic Administration as saying. "All seafood from the red tide-polluted areas will be strictly examined before entering the market," said Wang Shicheng, a Shandong fisheries official. Red tides are caused by plankton reproducing because of nutrients provided in part by sewage and industrial waste.
■ China
Police told to get in shape
Police in the northeastern city of Harbin have been ordered to lose weight or lose their jobs, state media reported yesterday. Police there are considered too fat and a new regulation has been passed by the city's Public Security Bureau stating that those with waistlines more than 90cm (36 inches) would be laid off. The Shenzhen Special Zone Daily said the regulation was aimed at encouraging police to do more physical exercise so they can better perform their duties. Policemen under the age of 30 are required to keep their weight under 70kg and their waistlines within 83cm. Those under 40 are cut more slack, being allowed to weigh up to 75kg and have waistlines up to 90cm. No details were given for those over 40.
■ United Kingdom
Court bans Islamic dress
A 15-year-old Muslim girl on Tuesday lost a court battle for the right to wear strict Islamic dress to school. Shabina Begum has not attended Denbigh High School in Luton since September 2002, when she was sent home for wearing a jilbab, which covers all of the body except the face and hands. The school, a 1,000-pupil state school where almost 80 percent of pupils are Muslim, has a flexible uniform policy giving girls the option of wearing slacks, skirts or shalwar kameez trousers and tunic. Simon Birks, representing the school, said Denbigh did not let pupils wear jilbab in part because pupils wearing it risk "tripping and slipping."
■ United States
Iraq contracts wasteful
Multibillion-dollar Pentagon contracts to support military operations in Iraq were plagued by "inadequate planning" and oversight, the chief US budget investigator told Congress on Tuesday, citing management deficiencies that fostered waste and cost overruns. David Walker, comptroller-general and head of the General Accounting Office, offered a sweeping portrait of reckless spending by contractors the Pentagon hired. Officials focused mainly on the largest corporate recipient of
Iraq-related contracts, Halliburton, whose KBR subsidiary has so far received US$4.5 billion.
"We saw very little concern for cost considerations," Walker said of KBR's programs in Iraq and Kuwait.
■ United States
CIA gaffes kept from public
The CIA has ruled that large portions of a report by
the Senate Intelligence Committee that was highly critical of the agency included material too sensitive to be released to the public, officials said on Tuesday. Between 30 and 40 percent of the material in a 400-page report was deleted by the CIA in a version approved for public release, the officials said. The Republican and Democratic leaders of the committee had been pressing the agency and the White House for broad declassification of the report, which focuses on miscalculations
and mistakes in prewar intelligence about Iraq
and its weapons program. Committee members were considering an appeal against the decision.
■ United States
Bees swarm after accident
A tractor-trailer overturned on a Montana highway on Monday, spilling its load of hundreds of bee hives and unleashing some 9 million angry honey bees. The
bees buzzed furiously as
driver Lane Miller, 41, his
arm scraped to the bone, struggled to flee his rig after it overturned in Bear Trap Canyon west of Bozeman.
"I had to kick the windshield out of the front of the cab and the bees were on me from that moment," Miller said. "I've never felt so
much fear in my life." Miller underwent surgery on his arm and suffered bruises and about 20 stings. The state road was closed for 14 hours as crews and beekeepers cleaned up the 512 hives. Firefighters directing traffic also suffered stings.
■ West Bank
Palestinians fight barrier
Hundreds of Palestinian villagers pelted Israeli bulldozers with stones yesterday as work began
on incorporating the major Jewish settlement of Ariel within the West Bank separation barrier, officials said. Some 16,000 people live in Ariel, one of the largest of the Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.
■ Botswana
Polio returns
The discovery of Botswana's first polio case in 13 years is a wake-up call to other African countries believed to be free of the crippling disease, UN officials warned amid a massive door-to-door immunization campaign. Botswana is the ninth previously polio-free country on the continent to become re-infected following an outbreak in West and Central Africa. A young boy from the northern town of Maun was reported infected on Feb. 8 with a strain of the disease traced to Nigeria, some 2,500km north of this impoverished southern African nation. Nigeria's northern state of Kano has been the global epicenter of polio since last October, when authorities there kept children from being inoculated because of persistent rumors the vaccines are unsafe.
■ South Africa
Bright condoms distributed
The South African government, criticized for its slow response to the AIDS pandemic, launched a brand of brightly wrapped condoms this week in a bid to enhance their appeal in the battle against HIV/AIDS. The condoms will be distributed for free in a country where one in nine people is infected with the HIV virus. "We are encouraging those who cannot abstain or remain faithful to one partner to use a condom consistently and correctly," Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang said. Last year the government's health department distributed more than 300 million condoms, but the minister said the dull gray packaging "was seen to be far less attractive ... than those of the commercial brands."
■ United States
Jackson settled for millions
Pop star Michael Jackson, who faces a trial on child molestation charges, paid more than US$23 million to a boy and his family in the mid-1990s to settle similar accusations, CourtTv reported on Tuesday. CourtTv said it had obtained a copy of the legal agreement. A spokeswoman for Jackson said she was trying to find out if the documents shown on camera by CourtTv were "the actual agreement" in that case. She added that the release of the information seemed aimed at influencing potential jurors against the entertainer.
■ Spain
All aboard the nude cruise
It has been billed as the first naked tour of the Mediterranean, a week-long cruise for 450 people with the wearing of clothes mostly optional and sometimes banned completely. The first big-ship nudist cruise of the Mediterranean, on the 17,000-tonne Flamenco, was hailed as the biggest naked event in these waters since Aphrodite appeared in her birthday suit floating on a scallop shell. The cruise left Barcelona on Monday with a passenger list made up mostly of Spaniards, but with Britons the second-largest group. "It is just like a normal cruise, but for people who like being nude," a spokeswoman for the organizers said yesterday.
■ United Kingdom
Student auctions his virginity
A British student has put his virginity up for sale on the Internet for ?6,000 (US$11,000), a British newspaper reported yesterday. David Vardy, a 19-year-old media studies undergraduate at Bournemouth University, had 7,000 hits on eBay before the Internet auction site removed the advert, The Daily Express said. "I am always coming up with these crazy ideas," the student told the tabloid.
Tens of thousands of Filipino Catholics yesterday twirled white cloths and chanted “Viva, viva,” as a centuries-old statue of Jesus Christ was paraded through the streets of Manila in the nation’s biggest annual religious event. The day-long procession began before dawn, with barefoot volunteers pulling the heavy carriage through narrow streets where the devout waited in hopes of touching the icon, believed to hold miraculous powers. Thousands of police were deployed to manage crowds that officials believe could number in the millions by the time the statue reaches its home in central Manila’s Quiapo church around midnight. More than 800 people had sought
DENIAL: Pyongyang said a South Korean drone filmed unspecified areas in a North Korean border town, but Seoul said it did not operate drones on the dates it cited North Korea’s military accused South Korea of flying drones across the border between the nations this week, yesterday warning that the South would face consequences for its “unpardonable hysteria.” Seoul quickly denied the accusation, but the development is likely to further dim prospects for its efforts to restore ties with Pyongyang. North Korean forces used special electronic warfare assets on Sunday to bring down a South Korean drone flying over North Korea’s border town. The drone was equipped with two cameras that filmed unspecified areas, the General Staff of the North Korean People’s Army said in a statement. South Korea infiltrated another drone
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
Cambodia’s government on Wednesday said that it had arrested and extradited to China a tycoon who has been accused of running a huge online scam operation. The Cambodian Ministry of the Interior said that Prince Holding Group chairman Chen Zhi (陳志) and two other Chinese citizens were arrested and extradited on Tuesday at the request of Chinese authorities. Chen formerly had dual nationality, but his Cambodian citizenship was revoked last month, the ministry said. US prosecutors in October last year brought conspiracy charges against Chen, alleging that he had been the mastermind behind a multinational cyberfraud network, used his other businesses to launder
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