■ 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.
DIPLOMATIC THAW: The Canadian prime minister’s China visit and improved Beijing-Ottawa ties raised lawyer Zhang Dongshuo’s hopes for a positive outcome in the retrial China has overturned the death sentence of Canadian Robert Schellenberg, a Canadian official said on Friday, in a possible sign of a diplomatic thaw as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney seeks to boost trade ties with Beijing. Schellenberg’s lawyer, Zhang Dongshuo (張東碩), yesterday confirmed China’s Supreme People’s Court struck down the sentence. Schellenberg was detained on drug charges in 2014 before China-Canada ties nosedived following the 2018 arrest in Vancouver of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟). That arrest infuriated Beijing, which detained two Canadians — Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig — on espionage charges that Ottawa condemned as retaliatory. In January
Two medieval fortresses face each other across the Narva River separating Estonia from Russia on Europe’s eastern edge. Once a symbol of cooperation, the “Friendship Bridge” connecting the two snow-covered banks has been reinforced with rows of razor wire and “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank obstacles on the Estonian side. “The name is kind of ironic,” regional border chief Eerik Purgel said. Some fear the border town of more than 50,0000 people — a mixture of Estonians, Russians and people left stateless after the fall of the Soviet Union — could be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next target. On the Estonian side of the bridge,
Jeremiah Kithinji had never touched a computer before he finished high school. A decade later, he is teaching robotics, and even took a team of rural Kenyans to the World Robotics Olympiad in Singapore. In a classroom in Laikipia County — a sparsely populated grasslands region of northern Kenya known for its rhinos and cheetahs — pupils are busy snapping together wheels, motors and sensors to assemble a robot. Guiding them is Kithinji, 27, who runs a string of robotics clubs in the area that have taken some of his pupils far beyond the rural landscapes outside. In November, he took a team
SHOW OF SUPPORT: The move showed that aggression toward Greenland is a question for Europe and Canada, and the consequences are global, not just Danish, experts said Canada and France, which adamantly oppose US President Donald Trump’s wish to control Greenland, were to open consulates in the Danish autonomous territory’s capital yesterday, in a strong show of support for the local government. Since returning to the White House last year, Trump has repeatedly insisted that Washington needs to control the strategic, mineral-rich Arctic island for security reasons. Trump last month backed off his threats to seize Greenland after saying he had struck a “framework” deal with NATO chief Mark Rutte to ensure greater US influence. A US-Denmark-Greenland working group has been established to discuss ways to meet Washington’s security concerns
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