Thu, Sep 15, 2005 page7

• World News Quick Take

  • AGENCIES
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  ■ China
  Courts beef up security

  China has told its widely criticized courts to install metal detectors and beef up security following a series of attacks on judges, a newspaper said yesterday. Courts should separate judges' benches from the public, install monitoring equipment and have police escort judges to and from the building, China's Supreme Court and top prosecuting body ordered, the Beijing News said. A female judge was killed in her office in eastern Jiangsu province earlier this year, a judge in Beijing was run over and then beaten up by the driver, and in June a mob of more than 20 people stormed a court on the outskirts of the capital and assaulted a judge, the newspaper said.

  ■ Philippines

  Gang leader nabbed

  Philippine troops have arrested a leader of a notorious kidnap-for-ransom syndicate that abducted an Italian priest and five Chinese engineers in the south in 2001, an official said yesterday. Norham Amil, alias Commander Ramsie, was arrested late on Tuesday at an army checkpoint in the town of Leon Postigo in Zamboanga del Norte Province, 780km south of Manila, army chief Lieutenant General Hermogenes Esperon said.

  ■ Hong Kong

  Tsang's rating rises

  The popularity of Chief Executive Donald Tsang (曾蔭權) has reached a new high with three out of four people saying they would give him their vote if the city had free elections. The approval rating of the 60-year-old career civil servant, who succeeded Tung Chee-hwa (董建華) in June, reached 74.8 percent in the first two weeks of this month, according to a survey published yesterday.

  ■ Indonesia
  Car bomber sentenced

  An Indonesian court yesterday sentenced a second Islamic militant to death for involvement in last year's suicide car bomb attack outside the Australian embassy in Jakarta. The South Jakarta court found Ahmad Hasan guilty of helping build the bomb and plot the attack with Malaysian fugitive Azahari bin Husin, a senior militant linked to al-Qaeda and the alleged mastermind of the bombing that killed 10 Indonesians. The same court on Tuesday sentenced Rois, also known as Iwan Dharmawan and the leading defendant in custody over the bombing, to death.

  ■ Japan

  Koizumi's ratings soar

  Public support for Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has jumped after his weekend election victory, but many voters are worried that his party's big majority will make the popular Japanese leader arrogant. Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) took 296 of the 480 seats in parliament's lower house in Sunday's election. The LDP's coalition partner also took 31 seats, giving the ruling bloc more than the two-thirds of seats needed to dominate the chamber with majorities in all committees and override objections from the upper house if need be. Koizumi had gambled his premiership by calling the election when rebels within his party joined the opposition to vote down his postal privatization bills in the upper house last month.

  ■ Hong Kong

  Police search for officer

  More than 300 police officers were scouring one of Hong Kong's rural country parks yesterday for a missing police officer, three days after he made a desperate call for help. Constable Ting Li-wah, 45, was off duty and hiking alone in a remote area of Sai Kung Country Park when he dialed the emergency services apparently suffering from heatstroke or exhaustion. His last words in an incoherent, seven-minute call on Sunday were "help, help, help" before the line went dead, police say, sparking fears he may have lost consciousness.

  ■ China

  Eleven killed in truck blast

  A truck loaded with 18 tonnes of ammonium nitrate exploded in southwest China, flattening 17 village houses, killing at least 11 people and injuring dozens, state media reported yesterday. For hundreds of meters around the site of the blast, trees were stripped bare of leaves, electricity pylons were bent over and everything was covered in yellow dust, the Beijing News said. The truck blew up on a road running through the village of Shengangzhai in Yunnan Province just before midnight on Monday, the newspaper said. Five women and three children were among the dead and 43 people were injured, eight seriously, it said. The explosion dug a crater 18.5m wide and 5.6m deep. Police are investigating.

  ■ New Zealand

  Hate-mailer gets jail

  A 53-year-old New Zealand Catholic from Upper Hutt, near Wellington, who sent hate mail to local Muslims containing slices of pork was jailed for six months yesterday for criminal harassment. The man, whose name was suppressed by the Wellington District Court pending an appeal, sent up to 30 offensive letters, cartoons and pieces of meat to Moslems whose names he picked out of telephone directories because he was angry at the Sept. 11 attacks on the US and terrorist bombings in Bali. Most victims were Somalis and a spokesman said the Wellington Somali community had forgiven him and did not want him to go to jail, Radio New Zealand reported.

  ■ El Salvador
  Killings set record

  Murders occurred at the rate of one an hour recently, setting a new record for the violent-prone Central American country, news reports said on Tuesday. The report said that during one day recently 19 people were killed within 19 hours, setting a new record. The average murder rate usually hovers at around one every two hours, or 12 every 24 hours. Most of the deaths are said to occur in connection with the violent "Maras" groups -- criminal gangs that have become a huge security problem that the slayings have even started happening among Salvadorian immigrants in the US. Attempts to quash the wave of violence have proved futile, the report said.

  ■ Colombia

  Kidnappers face jail

  A handicapped man and his son who hijacked a passenger plane are facing up to 42 years in jail for their deed. The two men surrendered on Monday after freeing all 25 hostages and crew members on board at a military airport in Bogota. Some hostages were held up to six hours under the threat of being harmed by exploding the five hand grenades they had. Porfirio Ramirez Albana, 42, was demanding compensation of more than US$6,000 for injuries he received from during a police drug raid in 1991. Ramirez and his 23-year-old son, Linsen, hijacked the plane on Monday after takeoff from Florencia in southern Colombia.

  ■ United States

  Gator hoaxer exposed

  Authorities on Tuesday dismissed a claim that a wrangler had nabbed a 2m-long alligator named "Reggie" from a city lake, where he had been dumped several months ago. Earlier on Tuesday, a man claiming to be wrangler Jay Young, who had been hired by the city, told several media outlets that he had caught the alligator overnight. That story was cast into doubt when the promised delivery of the alligator to the Los Angeles Zoo never happened. Reached by phone at his Colorado gator farm on Tuesday, Young said he has not been in Los Angeles recently and that he hadn't called the media earlier in the day. He said the caller apparently was someone impersonating him.

  ■ Serbia

  Fugitive agrees to UN trial

  A Bosnian Serb indicted for crimes against humanity during the 1992-1995 Bosnia war has surrendered and will face trial at the UN war crimes tribunal, officials said on Tuesday. Serbia and Montenegro's Human Rights Minister Rasim Ljajic told Belgrade's Beta news agency that Sredoje Lukic had surrendered to Bosnian Serb authorities as a result of close cooperation between Bosnian Serb and Serbian authorities. Lukic, a former policeman, had been in hiding since the late 1990s.

  ■ Egypt

  US says bin Laden ill

  Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is in poor health and is seeking medical attention, the London-based Arabic newspaper al-Hayat reported yesterday in a report seen in Cairo. The newspaper quoted Colonel Don McGraw, director of operations at the Combined Forces Command in Kabul, as telling a group of British reporters that, "Osama bin Laden is trying to obtain medical attention." The report said that McGraw refused to say what bin Laden is suffering from or whether it is the same kidney disease which Pakistani officials said in the past he was suffering from.

  ■ United States
  Hoops star helps in arrest

  NBA star Shaquille O'Neal provided an assist to police over the weekend, trailing a man who allegedly assaulted a gay couple before alerting an arresting officer. The 2.16m Miami Heat center, who is in the process of becoming a Miami Beach reserve officer, was driving on South Beach around 3am on Sunday. He saw a passenger in a car yell anti-gay slurs at the couple, who were walking, said Bobby Hernandez, a spokesman for the Miami Beach Police Department. The man then got out of the car and threw a bottle, hitting one of the pedestrians, who was not seriously hurt. The man got back in the car, which sped off. O'Neal followed, flagging down an officer who made an arrest, Hernandez said.

  ■ United States

  9/11 design questioned

  A congressman is asking the US government to reconsider the crescent-shaped design of the memorial to those aboard a plane hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001, because some may think it honors the terrorists. Representative Tom Tancredo, a Republican, says the design, called "Crescent of Embrace," could invite "controversy and criticism." In a letter sent Tuesday to National Park Service Director Fran Mainella, Tancredo said many have questioned the shape "because of the crescent's prominent use as a symbol in Islam -- and the fact that the hijackers were radical Islamists."

  ■ South Africa

  `Dr Death' denies charges

  The ex-head of South Africa's germ warfare program denied knowledge yesterday of apartheid-era plots to murder black opponents and promised to beat new charges to be brought against him by the state. "The judge has already said I am innocent, and I am," Wouter Basson, dubbed "Dr Death" in the popular press, told reporters during a live radio interview. Basson was acquitted in 2002 of multiple murders, drug-trafficking, fraud and theft after one of the longest trials in South African history, and the ruling was upheld in the Supreme Court of Appeal in 2003 despite claims the white High Court judge was biased.

  ■ United States

  Evacuees flee Ophelia

  Thousands of people fled their homes in North Carolina's barrier islands on Tuesday as tropical Storm Ophelia strengthened into a hurricane again and wobbled toward the southeast US coast Ophelia's center was 175km south of Wilmington, North Carolina. The storm was creeping north-northwest and was expected to turn north and hit the North Carolina coast yesterday night and today, the forecasters said. Evacuees streamed off the barrier islands, heading inland before the buffeting winds forced authorities to close some of the high-rise bridges to the mainland.

  ■ Italy

  Bombing suspect to go to UK

  A suspected bomber in the July 21 London attacks will be extradited to Britain within 10 days after an Italian court rejected his appeal on Tuesday, a lawyer for Britain said. Ethiopian-born Hamdi Issac was arrested in Rome days after fleeing there in late July after the attacks on trains and a bus that killed no one but brought chaos to London. Two weeks earlier, suicide bombers killed more than 50 people in London in attacks on similar targets. On Tuesday Italy's high court rejected his appeal against an earlier lower court decision to extradite him. "It has been much faster than they thought ... He must now be extradited within 10 days," said Paolo Iorio, London's lawyer in the case.
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