■ 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.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
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