■ Philippines
Three die in Quezon shooting
Three people were killed yesterday when a jilted man opened fire in Manila's suburban city of Quezon, a police report said. Armed with a pistol, the man allegedly burst into the beauty parlor owned by his estranged wife triggering a confrontation. The suspect allegedly shot his wife and her new lover before shooting himself. Police said all the three died on the spot.
■ Japan
UN funding proposal
Tokyo has proposed setting a minimum amount that permanent UN Security Council members must contribute toward the world body's budget, Kyodo News agency reported yesterday. The report, quoting the Foreign Ministry, said the minimum proposed would be from 3 percent to 5 percent of the UN budget. Officials could not immediately confirm the report. Japan, the second-largest contributor to the UN after the US, has recently stepped up complaints about its large payments in light of the lack of international support for its bid to join the Security Council as a permanent member.
■ Japan
Royal reforms shelved
The government yesterday missed a deadline to ask parliament to introduce female succession to the royal family, signalling that any historic changes will not come anytime soon. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi had backpedaled but not publicly dropped support for the reforms after the palace announced last month that a princess was pregnant, raising the possibility of a male heir. Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe confirmed the government had not submitted the imperial reforms by yesterday, the deadline set by the cabinet for agenda items in the parliament's current session, which runs through June.
■ Japan
Envoy ignores summons
China's ambassador ignored a summons to Japan's Foreign Ministry after Beijing's top diplomat described Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's repeated visits to a controversial war shrine as stupid, media reports said yesterday. Wang Yi (王毅) ignored Japanese Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Shotaro Yachi's repeated calls on Wednesday to report to the ministry, saying he was busy, Japan's business daily Nihon Keizai newspaper said, citing ministry sources. Japan wanted to lodge a protest after Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing (李肇星) commented on Koizumi's trips to the shrine, the paper said. On Tuesday, Li described Koizumi's visits to Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japanese war dead -- including convicted war criminals -- as inexplicably "stupid."
■ United Kindom
Sex scandal minister dies
John Profumo, the Conservative politician who resigned from the Cabinet in 1963 after lying to parliament about an affair with a call girl, died at a London hospital after suffering a stroke. He was 91. Chelsea and Westminster Hospital said early yesterday that Profumo died about midnight surrounded by his family. Profumo was a rising political star when he was named secretary of state for war in 1960, but his political career ended three years later over a sensational sex-and-spying scandal involving the call girl Christine Keeler. She said she had had sex with both Profumo and Russian intelligence officer Eugene Ivanov, the Soviet assistant naval attache in London.
■ Germany
Impostor unmasked
A 67-year-old man who drew his dead brother's pension for 26 years after taking on his identity was unmasked after police stopped him for driving without a seatbelt, authorities said on Thursday. "During checks it emerged that just after his death the man assumed the identity of his older brother, who has been resting in peace in a Regensburg cemetery since he passed away in 1979," police in the central city of Kassel said. Thanks to the physical similarity between the siblings, the impostor pulled off the switch by renewing his dead brother's passport. But he continued to use his real name on occasion. Police uncovered the ruse because of records showing the younger man was wanted for repeatedly failing to settle a minor bill.
■ Germany
Two mourners killed
A delivery van driver, believed to have suffered a fatal heart attack, ploughed into a funeral procession on Thursday, killing two mourners and seriously injuring 33 others, police said. The parcel courier drove into the group of about 150 mourners as they made their way from a church to a cemetery in the Bavarian German town of Jettingen-Scheppach west of Munich. Police said the cause of the accident was unclear, but suspected the 60-year-old driver had suffered a heart attack and crashed into the mourners in the town of 7,000 at a high speed. They said some mourners were able to leap out of the path of the speeding vehicle but others were not able to get out of the way in time. Many of the injured suffered severe head injuries.
■ Germany
Gays protest president
Gay rights advocates protested during a speech by Poland's conservative President Lech Kaczynski on Thursday, holding placards and accusing him of sharing responsibility for violence towards gays. The protesters entered the auditorium at Berlin's Humboldt University while preliminary speakers were addressing the audience. Kaczynski spoke without interruption after one of the activists was permitted to speak from the podium. "He shares responsibility for violence against gays and lesbians," said Holger Wicht, editor of Siegessaeule, a Berlin gay publication.
■ France
Students protest contract
Police fired teargas outside Paris's Sorbonne university and at least 1,000 students formed a human chain around the landmark Arc de Triomphe on Thursday in protests over a new youth jobs contract approved by the upper house of parliament. Late in the evening a large number of police officers remained deployed around the Sorbonne.
■ United States
Water on Saturn's moon?
The Cassini space probe may have found water on Saturn's Enceladus moon, NASA said on Thursday. "NASA's Cassini spacecraft may have found evidence of liquid water reservoirs that erupt" like geysers in the US' Yellowstone park, it said in a statement. "We realize that this is a radical conclusion -- that we may have evidence for liquid water within a body so small and so cold," said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "However, if we are right, we have significantly broadened the diversity of solar system environments, where we might possibly have conditions suitable for living organisms," she said.
■ Israel
Killer's sperm intercepted
Yigal Amir, the jailed assassin of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, was caught on Thursday attempting smuggle a plastic bag filled with his semen to his wife, Israeli media reported. Serving a life sentence without parole for the 1995 shooting of Rabin, Amir married Larisa Trimbobler by proxy in 2004, but the Israeli Prisons Authority had in the past denied them conjugal visits. After a lengthy legal battle, the Prison Authority declared in principle earlier in the week that Amir would be permitted to begin an artificial insemination process with Trimbobler. However, the Prisons Authority made clear to Amir that preparations for the artificial insemination procedure have not been completed and that he was not yet permitted to pursue his intentions.
■ United States
No bird flu in US: experts
The H5N1 avian flu virus has not yet made its way to North America, although many experts believe it will, US government researchers said on Thursday. Eight months worth of sampling migratory birds has turned up no evidence of the dangerous H5N1 strain, the team at the US Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center said. The team has been sampling migratory waterfowl, considered to be the most likely carriers of influenza viruses from east Asia across to western North America, notably Alaska and Canada. They found several viruses but not H5N1.
■ United States
Teen smokers on the decline
Fewer public high schoolers are lighting up, a trend officials credit to such factors as better health education, smoking bans in workplaces and higher cigarette sales taxes. The number of teen students in New York City who smoke has fallen to just over 1 in 10, a decline of more than 50 percent since 1997, when 23 percent of students lit up, city officials said on Thursday. "Our survey shows that teens are finally getting the message that smoking just isn't cool," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said. About 30,000, or 11 percent, of the city's 280,000 public high-school students smoked last year.
■ United States
Abused kids to get cash
Eighty-eight people who say they were molested by Roman Catholic priests will get US$5,000 to US$200,000 each, with the exact amounts to be determined by an arbitrator, under an agreement announced on Thursday by the Boston Archdiocese. The arbitration hearings are scheduled to begin next week. Before the plaintiffs agreed to arbitration, the archdiocese had offered to settle for an average of US$75,000 each. That figure is less than half the average amount paid to 554 plaintiffs in a 2003 settlement.
‘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
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS