■ Hong Kong
Activists push press freedom
Hong Kong activists marched on a Chinese government office in the city demanding the release of a detained journalist accused of spying for Taiwan. Chanting "Long live press freedom," a dozen protesters including radical Lawmaker Leung Kwok-hung (梁國雄) called for the release of Ching Cheong (程翔), a Hong Kong-based reporter working as the Straits Times' chief China correspondent. "Ching Cheong has been detained for eight months now without trial and he has been denied the right to see his wife, family and his lawyer. This cannot be tolerated," Leung said. "We demand the central government respect human rights and immediately release Ching Cheong." Ching, 55, has been detained since April but he was not formally arrested until Aug. 5.
■ Japan
Whaling fleet inactive again
A Japanese whaling fleet suspended its work for the second day in stormy conditions yesterday as environmental group Greenpeace defended its tactics in disrupting the controversial hunt. The whalers and two Greenpeace ships have been playing cat and mouse in the icy Southern Ocean for almost a week. The environmental group said it had received a statement from Japanese whaling authorities accusing it of breaching maritime safety laws.
■ Australia
Streaker interrupts church
Churchgoers attending a Christmas Mass in central Australia took swift action when a teenager ran naked through their church, newspaper reports said yesterday. About 150 people were attending the midnight service in the Northern Territory town of Alice Springs when an 18-year-old man ran naked down the aisle before jumping and dancing provocatively on the altar. "He must have planned it," Father Brian Healy told the Northern Territory News. "As he ran into the church he was yelling something and then he ran around a bit and jumped on the altar." Police praised the efforts of churchgoers who detained the streaker until police arrived. The man was charged with indecent exposure and disturbing a religious worship.
■ Sri Lanka
Three killed ahead of funeral
Fresh violence claimed three more lives in Sri Lanka yesterday as Tamil Tiger rebels prepared for the funeral of a key Tamil legislator gunned down during Christmas mass, police said. A police constable was killed when suspected rebels launched a pre-dawn rocket-propelled grenade attack on the Puttur police station in the eastern district of Batticaloa, where the lawmaker was murdered on Sunday, police said. Two civilians were also killed by unidentified attackers in the neighboring Trincomalee district yesterday, police said.
■ Japan
Top diplomat inspects bases
Japan's foreign minister yesterday inspected US military bases near Tokyo and met local officials from the bases' host cities, urging them to support the US base realignment plans, officials said. Foreign Minister Taro Aso asked Katsuji Hoshino, mayor of Zama City, one of several cities to be affected by the shifting around of the 50,000 US troops stationed in Japan, to understand the importance of Japan's security alliance with the US, city officials said. Aso told Hoshino that Japan's reliance on US bases is needed for the nation's peace and security and asked for the city's understanding and support for Camp Zama's realignment, city spokesman said on condition of anonymity.
■ Israel
Orthodox erotic movie made
Films and even television soap operas dealing with the ultra-Orthodox Jewish world are not new, but an Israeli filmmaker has taken things a step further by making the first "ultra-Orthodox" erotic movie, the Israeli Ma'ariv daily reported on Sunday. Sex between the Sacred and the Mundane, an 80-minute movie, available next month on a pay-per-view channel run by Israel's satellite broadcaster, features prayers as well as sex scenes (although no sexual organs are shown) between a religious man and woman who exhibit all the characteristics of ultra-Orthodox Jews.
■ Russia
Student stabbed to death
An African student was stabbed to death and another was seriously wounded in separate attacks on the same street in St. Petersburg, prosecutors and a student activist said. The students were attacked by a group of youths as they walked from a subway station to their university dormitory on Saturday night. In the first incident, the attackers slashed a student -- who was either from Zambia or Kenya -- but he managed to escape, said Aliu Dumkara, head of African Unity, a group that advocates for African students in the northern Russian city. A Cameroonian student attacked about two hours after the first attack was stabbed and died on the spot.
■ United States
Bush lawyer backs Smith
Playboy playmate Anna Nicole Smith has an unusual bedfellow in the Supreme Court fight over her late husband's fortune: the Bush administration. The administration's top Supreme Court lawyer filed arguments on Smith's behalf and wants to take part when the case is argued before the justices. The court will decide early next year whether to let the US solicitor general share time with Smith's attorney during the one hour argument on Feb. 28. Smith, a television reality star and native Texan, plans to attend the court argument. She is trying to collect millions of dollars from the estate of J. Howard Marshall II, the oil tycoon she married in 1994 when he was 89 and she was a 26-year-old topless dancer. Marshall died in 1995.
■ Germany
Ex-lover immolates self
A man used a crowbar to break into the apartment of his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend on Christmas Eve, poured paint thinner over his head and then set himself on fire, police in Siegburg said on Sunday. The new boyfriend, 25, survived the fiery suicide attack by jumping out a window, breaking his arm in the fall from the second storey. The woman, 27, escaped the fire that engulfed the flat by reaching a balcony. The fire brigade later rescued her. The ex-boyfriend, a 27-year-old man from the nearby city of Bonn was killed in the fire.
■ France
100 vehicles burned
Paris police said on Sunday that about 100 vehicles were burned overnight, which marked an average weekend tally for urban violence and did not signify a flare-up of violence after riots last month. Some French regions have banned retail sales of gasoline during the holidays to prevent a recurrence of violence after three weeks of riots in which youths used homemade gasoline bombs and set fire to cars and buildings. Long before the unrest, teenagers in poorer neighborhoods of large French cities began the custom of celebrating New Year's Eve by torching hundreds of cars.
■ Firework leaves five dead
Five children from the same family died when a blaze started by a firework set off for Christmas ripped through their cardboard and plastic shack in Guatemala on Sunday, firefighters said. A spokesman for Guatemala's fire department, said the fire, in a poor area in the north of the capital, was started by a stray firework that fell on the roof of the children's home in the early hours of Sunday morning. The five children, aged between 2 and 13-years-old, had been left alone in the house while their mother searched for three more siblings who had stayed out late in the neighborhood for Christmas celebrations.
■ Mexico
Volcano breathes fire
Mexico's giant Popocatepetl volcano threw up an ash column almost 3km high and spat glowing rocks down its snow-clad slopes on Sunday, but nearby towns were not affected, officials said. Popocatepetl, whose name means "smoking mountain," spewed out the huge plume of ash and rocks in a three-minute exhalation. Sunday's activity was the latest in a recent series of disturbances which started on Dec. 1, when the 5,452m volcano showered ash on the nearby town of Amecameca.
■ Brazil
Indigenous leader killed
A leader of a native Brazilian tribe was killed days after being evicted from a piece of land in Mato Grosso du Sul state, reports said on Sunday. Dorvalino Rocha was beside a road where he had taken his community after being evicted when three men emerged from a car and one shot him in the chest. Rochas, 39, had led some 500 fellow tribesmen to the roadside site after being ordered by a court to vacate another piece of land 10 days earlier, according to news reports. The land had been set aside for indigenous peoples by Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, but a judge ordered Rocha's group evicted until it could be demarcated and former owners could be compensated.
■ Haiti
UN employee shot dead
A Jordanian peacekeeper was killed in Haiti when armed men in a notorious slum opened fire on the vehicle he was patrolling in, the UN said on Sunday. Yusef Mubarak died on Saturday afternoon of multiple gunshot wounds to the head in Cite-Soleil, a violent neighborhood of the capital, Port-au-Prince. The shooting came as Haitians and more than 7,000 UN peacekeepers gear up for general elections tentatively set for Jan. 8. Another 1,600 UN police are also in the Caribbean nation. Impoverished Cite-Soleil is a stronghold of supporters of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who fled Haiti in Feb. 2004 in the face an armed uprising.
■ United States
Shooting spree kills five
Five people were found dead in apparent murder-suicide shootings at homes in two Washington suburbs, police said. Officers found the bodies of three men and one woman in a house in Great Falls when they responded to reports of gunfire on Sunday morning, local police said. Police said they believe one of those found dead at the first house was responsible for all the shootings. They treated the first shooting scene as a barricade situation until they determined that the gunman was dead after a 20-year-old man came out of the house. An investigation at the first crime scene led officers to another house in the Tyson's Corner area, where they found the body of a woman. Police said the same person appeared to have been responsible for all the deaths, but gave no further details.
RARE EVENT: While some cultures have a negative view of eclipses, others see them as a chance to show how people can work together, a scientist said Stargazers across a swathe of the world marveled at a dramatic red “Blood Moon” during a rare total lunar eclipse in the early hours of yesterday morning. The celestial spectacle was visible in the Americas and Pacific and Atlantic oceans, as well as in the westernmost parts of Europe and Africa. The phenomenon happens when the sun, Earth and moon line up, causing our planet to cast a giant shadow across its satellite. But as the Earth’s shadow crept across the moon, it did not entirely blot out its white glow — instead the moon glowed a reddish color. This is because the
DEBT BREAK: Friedrich Merz has vowed to do ‘whatever it takes’ to free up more money for defense and infrastructure at a time of growing geopolitical uncertainty Germany’s likely next leader Friedrich Merz was set yesterday to defend his unprecedented plans to massively ramp up defense and infrastructure spending in the Bundestag as lawmakers begin debating the proposals. Merz unveiled the plans last week, vowing his center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU)/Christian Social Union (CSU) bloc and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) — in talks to form a coalition after last month’s elections — would quickly push them through before the end of the current legislature. Fraying Europe-US ties under US President Donald Trump have fueled calls for Germany, long dependent on the US security umbrella, to quickly
Romania’s electoral commission on Saturday excluded a second far-right hopeful, Diana Sosoaca, from May’s presidential election, amid rising tension in the run-up to the May rerun of the poll. Earlier this month, Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau barred Calin Georgescu, an independent who was polling at about 40 percent ahead of the rerun election. Georgescu, a fierce EU and NATO critic, shot to prominence in November last year when he unexpectedly topped a first round of presidential voting. However, Romania’s constitutional court annulled the election after claims of Russian interference and a “massive” social media promotion in his favor. On Saturday, an electoral commission statement
Chinese authorities increased pressure on CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd over its plan to sell its Panama ports stake by sharing a second newspaper commentary attacking the deal. The Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office on Saturday reposted a commentary originally published in Ta Kung Pao, saying the planned sale of the ports by the Hong Kong company had triggered deep concerns among Chinese people and questioned whether the deal was harming China and aiding evil. “Why were so many important ports transferred to ill-intentioned US forces so easily? What kind of political calculations are hidden in the so-called commercial behavior on the
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