■ Japan
Repentant thief nabbed
A letter of apology sent to a robbery victim spelled arrest for a man after police investigating the case identified him from the handwriting. NHK television said the man had pushed his way into the house of a 78-year-old woman in the town of Misato, western Japan, and stole ¥15,000 (US$125) after threatening her with a knife. He later wrote the victim a letter saying he was sorry and returning the cash. The handwriting "and other things" led police to the man, a 51-year-old construction worker who lives near the victim, NHK said.
■ Australia
Driver suffers reversal
Police charged a driver with "reversing further than necessary" after he traveled backwards for more than 40km along one of the country's busiest highways. Police said the man was stopped on the Hume Highway -- which runs between Sydney and Melbourne -- at Benalla, about 200km northeast of Melbourne. Police said the man told them reverse was the only gear in the car that worked and that he was traveling home to the small regional town of Numurkah, a further 90km away. He was also charged with unlicensed driving and driving an unregistered car and will appear in court later this year.
■ Pakistan
Child killed during festival
One child was killed and about 70 people injured during an annual spring kite-flying festival, police said yesterday, despite a crackdown against kite-fliers that netted more than 1,400 people over three days. Authorities banned kite-flying during the Basant festival in Lahore and other eastern Punjab provincial cities after seven people were fatally slashed by kite strings reinforced with wire or glass fiber in the days leading up to the event, which culminated on Sunday. There was only a sprinkling of kites over Lahore on Sunday due to the ban, which the mayor said helped prevent the multiple deaths normally associated with the festival.
■ China
Corruption raised at NPC
Corrupt politicians in rural areas are paying tens of thousands of dollars to win local elections, lured by the vast profits they can make afterwards wielding their clout, state media said yesterday. The claim was one of a series of allegations about corruption in the countryside that was raised at the National People's Congress (NPC), the Xinhua news agency said. "It's apparent that what the candidates are actually seeking is the power to control the village's land and mineral resources, which they can trade for cash and other personal benefits," said Liu Xiguang, an NPC delegate. Another NPC deputy, Zhu Huiqiu, called for an amendment to the Criminal Law that would make "sabotaging village elections" a crime.
■ China
Beijing steps up repatriation
Authorities expect a series of high-profile corrupt officials and businessmen who fled abroad to be repatriated, as Beijing steps up efforts to get them back from the countries where they have found refuge, the China Daily reported, citing a former assistant minister of public security. Among the targets is China's most wanted fugitive, Lai Changxing (賴昌星), allegedly the ringmaster of a US$6 billion smuggling ring in Fujian Province and who has been fighting extradition from Canada for several years. Others include two men now in the US who allegedly embezzled almost US$500 million from a Bank of China branch.
■ Algeria
Islamic leader freed
A jailed founder of the Islamic Armed Group was freed on Sunday, witnesses said, in one of the most significant releases yet under a government amnesty aimed at ending more than a decade of civil war. Abdelhak Layada -- also known as Abu Adlane -- was the leader of the group, known by its French initials GIA. He was arrested in 1993 in Morocco and had been sentenced to death. The GIA was responsible for massacres of civilians during a period of strife that began in 1992 when the army cancelled elections that radical Islamists were set to win. The violence cost about 150,000 lives and US$20 billion in economic losses.
■ Germany
Jews protest artwork
Jews blasted a conceptual artist on Sunday for converting a former synagogue into a "gas chamber" in a project he said targeted the "trivialization of the memory of the Holocaust." Spanish artist Santiago Sierra hooked up the exhaust pipes of six cars to tubes that pumped the poisonous gas into a former synagogue in the town of Pulheim near Cologne in a work he called 245 Cubic Meters. Visitors lined up to enter the building for a few minutes accompanied by a firefighter and wearing a protective mask to shield them from the deadly concentration of carbon monoxide inside. Sierra said in a written statement that the shocking project was aimed to stop complacency in the face of the Nazis' mass extermination of the Jews in death camp gas chambers.
■ Germany
Games cause disorder
Playing Internet-based roleplaying games to an excessive degree could lead to multiple personality disorder, according to the Medical University of Hanover. The university pointed to an example where a female patient had played online for several hours a day over three years using the personalities of a number of different characters. "During that time the invented characters gradually took control over the personality which had been neglected. The patient lost control of her own identity and social life," said Bert de Wildt of the university. During psychoanalysis, therapists discovered she had developed multiple personalities. De Wildt went on to explain that online roleplaying games were not the only cause of the disorder but therapists believed they can trigger the condition and could make it more persistent.
■ United Kingdom
Connery has tumor removed
Sean Connery has undergone surgery for a kidney tumor and is now recovering at home, his spokesman said on Sunday. The 75-year-old Scottish actor underwent surgery a few weeks ago and is recuperating at home, spokesman James Barron said. "He's very fit -- he's 100 percent plus," Barron said of the former James Bond actor. Connery told the Sunday Times that he "was opened in five places." His brother, Neil, told the newspaper that "as far as I'm led to believe, the tumor was benign. He [Sean] seems to be quite upbeat about it."
■ Spain
Police nab illegal migrants
Police caught more than 200 Africans trying to reach the Canary Islands after long, dangerous trips in overcrowded boats that set out from Mauritania, officials said on Sunday. At least four boats carrying 208 people reached the islands in the space of 24 hours starting on Saturday, Civil Guard officials said.
■ United States
Spies revealed online
The names of CIA personnel, including covert operatives, internal telephone numbers and locations of two dozen CIA installations, can be found through Internet searches, the Chicago Tribune reported on Sunday. Through online services that provide public, legally obtained information for a fee, a reporter netted a directory of 2,600 CIA employees and 50 internal phone numbers, according to a Tribune investigation. The paper also discovered the identities of CIA operatives at US embassies in Europe. At the request of the CIA, the newspaper did not release the names of the operatives. It did quote an unnamed source saying CIA Director Porter Goss was "horrified" at the discovery. "Cover is a complex issue that is more complex in the Internet age," chief CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Dyck told the Tribune.
■ Mexico
Kidnapped victims freed
Police on Sunday freed five kidnapped businessmen from a 2m by 2m metal cage where they had been held for ransom for months by the Arellano Felix gang, prosecutors said. Police found the men in Tijuana, where they did business. The men were freed after a firefight, during which one of the kidnappers threatened to kill the hostages if police did not leave, the prosecutors said. The captors demanded sums as large as US$5 million, state prosecutors said. The family of one man, who owns a candy shop, paid part of his ransom while he remained kidnapped for two months. Five kidnappers were captured, according to the prosecutors, who said they were all attached to the Arellano Felix gang.
■ Chile
Bachelet honors her father
President Michelle Bachelet, on her first full day in office on Sunday, paid a moving graveside tribute to her father, who died in prison 32 years ago after being tortured under dictator Augusto Pinochet. Accompanied by her mother Angela Jeria, Bachelet visited a mausoleum where her late father Alberto Bachelet is buried. "Thank you all for having lived," she said as she laid flowers for her father and other family members buried there. Her father was an adviser to Socialist president Salvador Allende, toppled in a 1973 coup that brought Pinochet to power. He died of a heart attack at the age of 50 after six months in captivity during which he was tortured.
■ United States
Fans buy film stars
About 400 movie fans made bids on Saturday in the "Everything Must Go" auction at the Movieland Wax Museum in Buena Park, California for wax figures of Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando and many other famous movie stars. The museum was closed last year after 43 years and about 500 items were up for auction. Chris Doohan, 46, went to the auction hoping to buy the figure of his dad, James Doohan, who played Scotty in Star Trek and died last year. The bidding, however, reached US$4,200, which was a little too high for Doohan.
■ United States
Workers fall from coaster
Seven carnival workers fell from a roller coaster on Sunday while testing the ride for the upcoming Miami-Dade County Fair, authorities said. "One of the carts seemed to have jumped off the tracks or was derailed," Miami-Dade Fire-Rescue Lieutenant Roman Bas said. "As a result, it looked like the cart kind of tipped over and the individuals fell out." Four of the injured others were hospitalized It wasn't clear how far they fell.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RUSSIAN INPUT: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov called Washington’s actions in Asia ‘destructive,’ accusing it of being the reason for the ‘militarization’ of Japan The US is concerned about China’s “increasingly dangerous and unlawful” activities in the disputed South China Sea, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ASEAN leaders yesterday during an annual summit, and pledged that Washington would continue to uphold freedom of navigation in the region. The 10-member ASEAN meeting with Blinken followed a series of confrontations at sea between China and ASEAN members Philippines and Vietnam. “We are very concerned about China’s increasingly dangerous and unlawful activities in the South China Sea which have injured people, harm vessels from ASEAN nations and contradict commitments to peaceful resolutions of disputes,” said Blinken, who
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