■ Japan
Panties trigger bomb alert
Two bags with a note warning they would blow up if opened triggered a bomb alert at a Japanese university -- before explosives experts found they contained women's underwear and a chocolate cake. Police evacuated Kyushu University's pharmacology department yesterday and called in the bomb squad after a staff member found a white paper bag with a note that said "To Yoko, if you open this it will explode" and a pink plastic bag marked "This one too." Two female students had meant the parcels as a birthday present for a friend, and thought the note would stop anyone from touching the bags.
■ China
Nine nabbed in cocaine bust
Chinese and US agents yesterday announced the arrests of nine people in the country's largest ever seizure of smuggled cocaine. Those held included two Colombian nationals arrested in Hong Kong, along with suspects from Hong Kong and China, officials of China's customs agency and the US Drug Enforcement Administration said at a news conference. Officers confiscated 142.7kg of cocaine smuggled from Colombia, an official said.
■ China
Beijing wants Uighurs back
Beijing yesterday demanded the return of five Chinese Muslims released from the Guantanamo Bay detention center, blasting a US decision to allow them to seek asylum in Albania. "The five people accepted by the Albanian side are by no means refugees but terrorist suspects," Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao (劉建超) said. The US freed the five Uighurs after concluding they posed no threat to the US but might face persecution if they returned to China.
■ India
Varansi bomb suspect killed
Indian soldiers in Kashmir yesterday shot dead a suspected Muslim militant, who police said was behind bomb blasts in the Hindu holy city of Varanasi in March that killed 15 people and wounded dozens. "On specific information, Zubair was killed in a fierce encounter in Handwara," said Nitish Kumar, a police official, adding the man was considered to have played a leading role in the Varanasi attacks. Kumar said Zubair, who has one name, came from the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and was attempting to flee to Pakistan.
■ Hong Kong
ISPs must identify pirates
Hong Kong's movie industry won a court order demanding that four local Internet service providers identify users who downloaded pirated copies of movies using the file-sharing software BitTorrent, a broadcaster reported yesterday. The four companies have three weeks to comply, Hong Kong TV station Cable TV reported. An earlier court document identified the plaintiffs as One Hundred Years of Film Co, Hero China International Ltd and Applause Pictures Ltd, co-founded by Hong Kong director Peter Chan (陳可辛).
■ Pakistan
Elders' order causes death
An 11-year-old boy was strangled by relatives who killed him rather than obey an order from tribal elders for them to marry one of their womenfolk to the child, police in Karachi said on Monday. The marriage had been ordered in compensation for the kidnapping of the boy's sister. Mohammed Asif was killed on Sunday, five months after his 15-year-old sister was abducted from their home. The children's father, Saeed Akbar, a rickshaw driver, appealed to a tribal council for justice after the kidnap.
■ Japan
Recluse dies of `shock'
Police arrested a director and members of a nonprofit organization on Monday for allegedly killing a 26-year-old hikikomori social recluse from Tokyo after forcibly taking him out of his apartment, a news report said. Shoko Sugiura, director of Ai Mental School in the city of Nagoya, and four staff members allegedly forced the the reclusive man out of his apartment in Tokyo in the middle of last month and took him to a school dormitory. The man was classified as a hikikomori, a term that has been coined to describe young shut-ins who refuse to go out of their rooms for work or school. In the name of treatment, the man was chained to a pillar, even during meals, in the school's dormitory for four days before he was taken to a nearby hospital. He died from traumatic shock, the daily paper quoted the police as saying. His parents had requested the school to take their son but were never aware of physical restraint or confinement.
■ New Zealand
Rolling Stone has surgery
Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards was recovering in a New Zealand hospital yesterday after surgery to relieve pressure on his brain following a fall in Fiji, his spokesman said. The 62-year-old underwent the operation in Auckland's Ascot Hospital after complaining of headaches on Sunday, the spokesman for the veteran British rocker said in London. Richards' spokesman told Britain's domestic Press Association news agency that the procedure, which involved drilling a hole in the guitarist's skull to drain blood from the brain, was a "complete success."
■ United Kingdom
Vicars offer home blessings
Homeowners wanting to liven up their sex lives, ward off bathroom germs or calm kitchen rows can now call on his ministers for help. A new service is being offered by vicars in the north of England who give blessings to people moving to a new home. They will say prayers for each room, calling on divine assistance to protect the home and the health of those in it. Reverend Chris Painter, a vicar in the diocese of Manchester, said the initiative was designed to tempt new people into the church. "For a large part of the church's history, people have come into the church building," he said. "Nowadays people tend not to come into church so we need to find new ways to meet people."
■ United States
Kidman still loves Cruise
Nicole Kidman says her divorce from Tom Cruise was a "major shock" -- and she still loves him. "That was a major shock," the 38-year-old actress says in an interview in next month's issue of Ladies' Home Journal, on newsstands yesterday. "He was huge; still is. To me, he was just Tom, but to everybody else, he is huge. But he was lovely to me. And I loved him. I still love him," she tells the magazine. Cruise filed for divorce in February 2001. The divorce was finalized later that year.
■ Germany
Cannibal gets life
A man who admitted killing and eating an acquaintance he met on the Internet was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison yesterday, following his retrial in a case that engrossed and appalled Germany. Armin Meiwes, a 44-year-old computer technician, was also convicted of disturbing the peace of the dead. His lawyers had argued that the Frankfurt state court should instead convict him of the lesser offense of "killing on demand," on the grounds that he was only following his victim's wishes. The retrial of Meiwes opened in January. It was held after a federal appeals court overturned his initial manslaughter conviction to allow prosecutors to seek a tougher sentence.
■ Germany
Holocaust list updated
The Federal Archives published on Monday a new register of names of all known German Jews killed in the Holocaust, issuing a second edition of a register that was first published 20 years ago listing only victims from former West Germany. The four-volume book, containing 150,000 names in alphabetical order along with vital data and dates of detention, now includes Jews who had lived in eastern Germany and parts of modern-day Poland, which were in German hands before World War II. The Nazis invaded much of Europe, killing an estimated 6 million European Jews. The new memorial register corrects the inevitable errors in the first, 1986 edition that was deposited in the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.
■ Gaza Strip
Nine wounded in clashes
Nine Palestinians were wounded early yesterday in renewed clashes between militants from the Hamas and Fatah movements in downtown Gaza City, witnesses and paramedics say. The clashes erupted after Hamas gunmen arrived at the home of a top Fatah official and opened fire at Fatah activists inside, witnesses said. The Fatah gunmen returned fire and nine were injured in the exchange, including five schoolchildren, hospital officials said. At least one of the wounded was a Hamas gunmen, officials said.
■ United States
Spy case charges toughened
US prosecutors said on Monday that they plan to seek harsher charges against an engineer and two kin accused of plotting to steal sensitive US Navy warship technology and trying to smuggle it to China. The plans to beef up charges against Chinese-born engineer Mak Chi, 65, who worked for a US defense contractor, his wife, Rebecca Chiu Lai-wah, 62; and Mak's brother, former TV director Mak Tai-wing, 56, came at a pre-trial hearing in Los Angeles.
■ Canada
Killer mom to be deported
Authorities were to start deportation proceedings on Monday against a Japanese woman who let her two infant children die in an apartment while she went away for 10 days to see a boyfriend, officials said. Rie Fujii, deemed to be suffering from mental problems, is set to be released from jail in Alberta on Monday after serving more than five years of an eight-year sentence for manslaughter. After breaking up with the father of her 15-month-old son and three-month-old daughter, Fujii left the two alone in her Calgary apartment in June 2001 to visit her new boyfriend in another town. Both children died of starvation and dehydration.
■ South Africa
`I'm back,' Zuma claims
Former deputy president Jacob Zuma yesterday re-launched his bid for the presidency a day after he was acquitted for rape, apologizing to the nation for not using a condom and declaring: "I'm back." He told SABC radio that "I should have been more cautious and more responsible," referring to the case in which he admitted to having consensual but unprotected sex with a 31-year-old HIV-positive woman. "I erred on this issue and on this, I apologize," Zuma said. "The case is over. And therefore, I'm back." The "not guilty" verdict for the rape has put Zuma back into the political fray, but analysts said it remained an open question as to whether he would succeed in reclaiming his position as the frontrunner to succeed President Thabo Mbeki.
■ United Kingdom
Exposure to BSE possible
Patients in the UK undergoing routine dental treatments for root canal problems may have been exposed to infection by the human form of BSE because instruments have been used on patients unwittingly carrying the incurable disease, scientific advisers said on Monday. About 3 million such treatments are conducted every year in England and Wales alone. The scientists have told health ministers to consider banning the reuse of the equipment needed because of "hypothetical but plausible scenarios" which suggest that person-to person cases of variant CJD might follow the shrinking number of animal-to-human cases. The first wave of cases caused by infected food has so far struck only 190 people, mostly Britons since 1996.
■ United States
Fundraising drive halted
A nonprofit foundation has stopped trying to raise money to build the World Trade Center memorial until it can be sure how much it will cost and what it will look like, officials have said. The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation suspended fundraising several weeks ago after discussing the soaring price of the memorial, now budgeted at close to US$1 billion, and its orders to cut the costs in half. "It's only fair to donors to be able to expressly say how their money will be used and how much the project will cost,"foundation board member Tom Johnson said on Monday.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
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