■ China
Cattle prods used in raid
Police raided a bible school run by an underground Protestant church, detaining 36 people amid a nationwide crackdown on Christians worshipping outside state-controlled churches, an overseas support group said. About 50 officers armed with electric cattle prods and backed by more than 10 police vehicles surrounded the school in Anhui Province on Wednesday, the China Aid Association said. Students, teachers and church leaders, were taken away in police vans, the group said. The school's owner, Chu Huaiting, was later arrested at his home, it said.
■ China
6,000 chicks die on farm
Six thousand chicks have died on a farm from a suspected parasite-related illness, but officials have not ruled out bird flu as a cause, a government Web site and a news report said yesterday. The birds died over several weeks in the Guangzhou, the Guangzhou Food Safety News Network Web site said. The report said the chicks are suspected of falling ill due to cold and rainy weather. Hong Kong's Wen Wei Po daily, quoting local residents, put the toll at nearly 9,000. It quoted agricultural officials as saying the parasite Coccidia is suspected, but it also quoted an animal disease prevention official as saying bird flu could not be immediately ruled out.
■ China
Labor activist released
Beijing has released labor activist Xiao Yunliang (肖雲良) 24 days before his four-year jail term for subversion was due to end, a Hong Kong human-rights report said. Xiao led workers in a three-day siege of a city hall in their demand for back pay, the China Labor Bulletin said. He was released last Thursday.
■ Japan
Drinking saves lives
Teetotalers and heavy drinkers face a greater risk of suicide than moderate drinkers, according to a study released yesterday. Heavy drinkers and men who never have a drop both commit suicide at 2.3 times the rate of those who enjoy only a few drinks a month, said the study released by the health ministry. Heavy drinkers were classified as men who knocked back the equivalent of six glasses of wine or three double-shots of whisky a day more than once a week. However, the researchers cautioned that drinking more moderately would not necessarily decrease the risk of suicide as other factors such as stress were also important.
■ Indonesia
Elephants probably poisoned
Six wild Sumatran elephants found dead with blackened mouths on the jungle floor of Mahato, Riau Province, were believed to have been poisoned, a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) official said on yesterday. "We have a strong belief that they were all poisoned," Desmarita Murni, WWF communications officer for species programs said, adding that the WWF planned to perform an autopsy later yesterday to find out exact details on how and who might poisoned the wild beasts. Continuous conflicts between the wild beasts and villagers encroaching into the jungle have often been cited as the cause of the elephants' occasional rampages that damage houses and kill villagers in Riau Province.
■ Hong Kong
`Wizard' cons women
A man tricked two women into having sex with him by telling them he was a wizard and it would bring them luck, a court report said yesterday. The man, a 47-year-old Indonesian-Chinese, is alleged to have told the two women they were possessed by demons and bad luck and that they needed to perform a ritual to change their fortune after reading their palms. The ritual involved going back to a guest house and having unprotected sex with the man on five occasions over a period of 12 months from February 2003, said the report in the South China Morning Post.
■ Japan
Students become apathetic
High school students in Japan are less interested in academic achievement and family ties than peers in the US, China and South Korea, but more enthusiastic about comics and other entertainment, a poll said. The four-nation survey, published on Wednesday by the government-backed Japan Youth Research Institute, also showed that the Japanese felt most fondly about the US but least friendly toward China. Only one-third of Japanese students cared to improve grades, sharply below the three-quarters in the other three nations.
■ East Timor
Deserters to be punished
Hundreds of soldiers who deserted their barracks alleging poor treatment will no longer receive pay and have been stripped of their right to bear arms and wear uniforms, a top officer said yesterday. "Military personnel who leave their barracks to protest in Dili will from now on not receive their pay," deputy chief of the armed forces, Lere Annan Timor said. Timor declined to say how many soldiers had joined the protest but an officer among those protesting said earlier this week that 404 soldiers left their barracks on Feb. 8. The fledgling army has about 1,500 regular soldiers and 1,500 reservists. Many of them were former resistance fighters unused to the discipline of a regular military force, local media quoted him as saying.
■ Germany
Dinner and a movie
A real-life cannibal who ate a willing victim is being immortalized on the big screen, like the fictional Hannibal Lecter, despite his legal bid to block the movie version of his gruesome crime. Rohtenburg (Butterfly -- A Grimm Love Story) is set to open in Germany next Thursday and will hope to profit from the shock and fascination the case of Armin Meiwes evoked in a transfixed public. The movie tells the tale of fictional US criminal psychology student Katie (Keri Russell) who is drawn in by the bizarre case of a Meiwes-like character called Oliver Hartwin. The cannibal plot of the movie, seen in a preview on Tuesday, is almost identical to real-life events.
■ Gaza /West Bank
Signs of al-Qaeda noted
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said in remarks published yesterday there were signs of an al-Qaeda presence in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. "This is intelligence information. We have not yet reached the point of arrests," Abbas said. "The last security report I received was three days ago," he told the London-based al-Hayat newspaper. Israeli officials said they were worried that foreign militants and al-Qaeda agents entered Gaza from Egypt during a brief period of chaos on the border following the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza last year. The Palestinian Authority said that was untrue.
■ Cyprus
Poor spelling foils forger
A court jailed Pakistani national Fazal Ur Rehman for eight months for forgery after police spotted spelling mistakes on stamps on an Afghan passport he was carrying -- otherwise it was a near-perfect copy, the Cyprus Mail said on Wednesday. "Ministry" was spelled "Menistry" and the first "n" was missing from government, the newspaper said. "The passport looked perfect and professionally made ... almost deemed original by forensics," a police officer told a magistrate in the Cypriot capital Nicosia.
■ United Kingdom
Queen opens new Welsh HQ
Queen Elizabeth II opened a new headquarters for the Welsh Assembly in Cardiff on Wednesday, which is seen as one of the world's most environmentally friendly parliamentary buildings. The Senedd building draws its heat from the earth and toilets are flushed by rain water collected on the roof. It features a glass exterior, designed to represent transparent democracy, a curvy, wood-panelled roof interior, and a funnel topped by a mirrored cone to allow for natural light and ventilation.
■ United Kingdom
Record heist: More arrests
Police on Wednesday recovered a "substantial amount" of cash hidden on a farm southeast of London, according to neighbors, as six people were questioned over the UK's biggest robbery. Kent police refused to comment on reports that money had been recovered from the farm, but officers spent a fourth day at the address conducting searches. According to neighbors who live near the manor farm house owned by John Fowler, police said they had discovered the money buried under bracken and branches on the isolated property. Police sources confirmed that Fowler and his wife had been arrested over the Feb. 22 £53 million (US$93 million) robbery of the Tonbridge Securitas depot in Kent alongside three other men and a woman.
■ United States
Man indicted for taped death
A Toms River, New Jersey, man accused in the 1996 slaying of a teacher who surreptitiously tape-recorded her pleas for mercy has been indicted on felony murder and other charges. The five-count indictment against Michael LaSane, 26, was handed up on Tuesday, two years after an appeals court overturned his conviction because his mother had an affair with his lawyer. LaSane is charged in the death of Kathleen Stanfield Weinstein, who used a microcassette recorder to tape 46 minutes of conversation with LaSane before being smothered in a wooded area. The tape was found in her coat pocket.
■ Colombia
President on campaign trail
President Alvaro Uribe kicked off his re-election effort on Wednesday as leftist rebels stepped up an offensive aimed at disrupting the campaign. In response to the new wave of attacks, Uribe ordered the police and armed forces to increase patrols to prevent violence ahead of the May 28 presidential vote. Uribe's supporters in Congress passed a constitutional amendment last year lifting a long-standing ban on presidents seeking a second consecutive term.
■ United States
Pentagon wants shark spies
The Pentagon is funding research into neural implants with the ultimate hope of turning sharks into "stealth spies" capable of gliding undetected through the ocean, the New Scientist says. The research builds on experimental work to control animals by implanting tiny electrodes in their brain, which are then stimulated to induce a behavioral response. "The Pentagon hopes to exploit sharks' natural ability to glide quietly through the water, sense delicate electrical gradients and follow chemical trails," says the report, carried in tomorrow's New Scientist. "By remotely guiding the sharks' movements they hope to transform the animals into stealth spies, perhaps capable of following vessels without being spotted."
■ Latin America
Coca cultivation increasing
Coca cultivation was up in Bolivia and Peru last year and Venezuela is doing little to halt the smuggling of Colombian cocaine across its borders, the US government said in its annual narcotics report on Wednesday. Growth of coca leaf was up 38 percent in Peru and 8 percent in Bolivia last year compared with 2004, despite coca eradication and programs that encourage farmers to grow alternative crops, the US said. Critics of the US-funded war on drugs in the region pointed to the increased cultivation in the second- and third-largest coca-producing nations as evidence of its failure. The report did not provide an estimate for cocaine production in Colombia, the biggest producer.
■ United States
Performing cats a big hit
Russian clown Yuri Kuklachev has a troupe of cats who do handstands, crawl along high wires and balance on balls and he says the secret to training them is realizing that you can't force cats to do anything. "The Moscow Cats Theater" has done so well at a small theater in New York that it recently moved to a bigger venue near Times Square. Kuklachev has 120 cats in Moscow and has brought 26 of them to New York. "If the cat likes to sit you can't force her to do anything else," he said, adding that several of the cats in the New York show simply sit and watch the others. "Each cat likes to do her own trick," Kuklachev said.
‘GREAT OPPRTUNITY’: The Paraguayan president made the remarks following Donald Trump’s tapping of several figures with deep Latin America expertise for his Cabinet Paraguay President Santiago Pena called US president-elect Donald Trump’s incoming foreign policy team a “dream come true” as his nation stands to become more relevant in the next US administration. “It’s a great opportunity for us to advance very, very fast in the bilateral agenda on trade, security, rule of law and make Paraguay a much closer ally” to the US, Pena said in an interview in Washington ahead of Trump’s inauguration today. “One of the biggest challenges for Paraguay was that image of an island surrounded by land, a country that was isolated and not many people know about it,”
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
‘FIGHT TO THE END’: Attacking a court is ‘unprecedented’ in South Korea and those involved would likely face jail time, a South Korean political pundit said Supporters of impeached South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol yesterday stormed a Seoul court after a judge extended the impeached leader’s detention over his ill-fated attempt to impose martial law. Tens of thousands of people had gathered outside the Seoul Western District Court on Saturday in a show of support for Yoon, who became South Korea’s first sitting head of state to be arrested in a dawn raid last week. After the court extended his detention on Saturday, the president’s supporters smashed windows and doors as they rushed inside the building. Hundreds of police officers charged into the court, arresting dozens and denouncing an
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
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