■ Kazakhstan
Media control law passed
The upper house passed new media legislation yesterday despite criticism from the US and others that the changes represented a setback to press freedom. President Nursultan Nazarbayev has to sign the amendments for the new law to come into effect. If approved, the amendments would put reporters under tighter state control and make registration harder for news outlets. News organizations need official registration in order to operate.
■ Singapore
Briton jailed for murders
British businessman Michael McCrea was sentenced to 24 years in prison yesterday for killing his Singaporean chauffer and the driver's Chinese girlfriend. McCrea, 48, was sentenced to the maximum 10 years each for two counts of culpable homicide not amounting to murder. He received an additional four years for causing evidence to disappear in relation to a murder, his lawyer Kelvin Lim said. McCrea admitted on Monday to strangling his driver Koh Nai Guan, 46, and using a plastic bag to suffocate Lan Ya Ming, 29. The court was told that McCrea had a fight with Koh who had used the word "slut" to describe McCrea's Singaporean girlfriend, while Ming was killed because she was a witness.
■ Thailand
British fugitive nabbed
Christopher Alan Caunter, 34, who is wanted in the UK on murder and drug charges, was arrested by Thai police late on Wednesday in the beach resort of Cha Am. Caunter is accused of killing his fiance, Deborah Jane Townsend, 35, by pushing her out of her car in Suffolk, then backing over her, a police spokesman said.
■ China
Fines for flying phone users
China's aviation regulator plans to quadruple fines for airline passengers who use mobile phones during flights due to concerns that the calls are threatening flight safety, state media said yesterday. Fines for in-flight cellphone use will be raised to 2,000 yuan (US$250) from the current 500 yuan, the official China Daily newspaper said, citing draft regulations from the General Administration of Civil Aviation.
■ China
Vice governor detained
China has detained a vice governor of Anhui Province for taking bribes, close on the heels of the sacking of a vice mayor of Beijing on similar grounds, a Hong Kong-based watchdog said yesterday. He Minxu (何閩旭), 50, was taken into custody by the Communist Party's internal corruption monitor, the discipline inspection commission, on Monday for allegedly accepting 300,000 yuan (US$37,510) in bribes from a businessman, the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said in a statement. An officer at the provincial government declined to confirm or discuss the issue.
■ Philippines
Poor officers pawn guns
Six police officers may lose their jobs for pawning their guns in the southern Philippines, where underfunded and poorly paid security forces are fighting Muslim and communist insurgencies. German Doria, police chief of the central region of Mindanao island, said on Wednesday the incidents of government-issued guns being pawned came to light when the National Bureau of Investigation raided shops selling stolen goods in Tupi town. "What these police officers had done was tantamount to grave misconduct and they should be dismissed from the service," Doria told reporters, adding that he had ordered an inventory of guns issued to all officers in South Cotabato province.
■ South Korea
President's, PM's IDs stolen
The president and prime minister appear to have become victims of online identity theft after their names were used by others to access hundreds of game and pornographic Web sites, an opposition MP said on Wednesday. The 13-digit personal identification numbers of President Roh Moo-hyun and Prime Minister Han Myeong-sook are readily accessible on Internet search engines and have been used by numerous South Koreans, United Liberal Democrat Ryu Keun-chan said in a posting on his Internet site. Roh's ID number was used to access 416 sites requiring personal identification, including 280 pornographic sites, Ryu said.
■ Singapore
Cat torturer faces jail
A serial cat abuser was sent to Singapore's Institute of Mental Health after torturing a kitten so badly it had to be euthanized, news reports said yesterday. David Hooi Yin Weng, 42, was charged with repeatedly hitting a four-month-old kitten, found limp and bleeding with broken teeth outside his flat. The man had previously been jailed in March for three months after torturing a female kitten. District Judge May Mesenas on Wednesday granted the prosecution's application to remand him at the institute for a psychiatric assessment, the Straits Times said. If convicted, Hooi could be fined up to S$10,000 (US$6,329) and jailed for up to 12 months for animal abuse.
■ Canada
Couple hid rocket launcher
An amnesty program designed to reduce the number of illegal and unwanted guns in British Columbia has also turned up an unexpected weapon -- a rocket launcher. An elderly Vancouver-area woman turned in the weapon that she and her husband had kept hidden in their attic after discovering it while renovating their house in 1973, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said on Wednesday. The couple had been too afraid to tell anyone about the weapon earlier, police said. The month-long program allows people to give police unregistered or prohibited guns without threat of prosecution.
■ Germany
Hail storms kill one
One person was killed and over 100 were injured by rain and hail storms which swept through south-western Germany, police said yesterday. The storms, which hit Baden-Wuerttemberg state's Black Forest and part of Bavaria late on Wednesday caused millions of dollars in damage to houses with roofs blown off and windows smashed. Torrential rain and hail stones the size of tennis balls caused numerous injuries and a 66-year-old man drowned after being swept away in raging floodwaters.
■ Denmark
Honor killers sentenced
A Danish court jailed a Pakistani man for life for his part in the so-called honor killing of his daughter after she married without her family's consent, Ritzau news agency reported on Wednesday. The father of Ghazala Khan and eight other men and women were convicted on Tuesday of involvement in an attack on the 18-year-old woman, who was shot twice in the chest by her elder brother in September last year. Her husband Emil Khan, whom she had wed secretly, was also seriously injured in the attack, thought to have been carried out in the belief that the marriage had tarnished her family's honor. The prosecution described the murder as an honor killing, the ninth in Denmark in the past decade, but the brother insisted it was accidental.
■ United States
Berkeley ballot to bunk Bush
Berkeley plans to give voters a say on a measure calling for the impeachment of US President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, the mayor of this famously liberal California city said on Wednesday. A number of local governments across the US have passed resolutions urging impeachment. But the Berkeley city council wants to be the first to put the issue directly to voters, Mayor Tom Bates said in an interview. "This is basically giving the people a chance to talk, to join the debate," Bates said. "The issues go way beyond impeaching the president. They go to safeguarding the Constitution."
■ Netherlands
Coalition faces challenge
A key member of the ruling coalition threatened to bring down the government unless it fires Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk after a row over the citizenship of a Somali-born Dutch politician. Verdonk threatened to strip Ayaan Hirsi Ali of her Dutch passport last month for lying about her name, age and refugee status on arrival in the Netherlands in 1992, but reversed her position and granted Hirsi Ali full citizenship on Wednesday. D66, the smallest member of the central right coalition said it would support an opposition motion of disapproval against Verdonk. It said that it might withdraw its support for good if the government did not act soon.
■ United Kingdom
Media warned over suicides
Britain's media watchdog warned journalists on Wednesday not to report suicides in too much detail to avoid helping readers take their own lives. "We received convincing evidence ... that media reporting of suicide often prompted copycat cases," said Les Hinton, chairman of a committee of the independent Press Complaints Commission that drew up an editors' code of practice for the media. The new professional guidelines, unveiled on Wednesday, urge journalists not to give "excessive" detail about the methods used to commit suicide, except when to do so is in the public interest.
■ United States
Alleged pirates charged
US federal prosecutors filed charges on Wednesday against 22 alleged members of a global piracy ring responsible for manufacturing and distributing millions of counterfeit movies. The suspects covered the entire pirating process, from the "cammers" who use camcorders to copy the films in movie theaters, to the printers who package the pirated DVDs and the wholesalers who distribute them. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) said the New York-based ring was responsible for half of all camcorded copies of films available on the US black market and 25 percent of those available world-wide.
■ United States
Pentagon adjusts viewpoint
The Pentagon no longer deems homosexuality a mental disorder, officials said on Wednesday, although the reversal has no impact on US policy prohibiting openly gay people from serving in the military. After a 1996 Pentagon document placing homosexuality among a list of "certain mental disorders" came to light this month, the American Psychiatric Association and a handful of lawmakers asked the Defense Department to change its view. The Pentagon said in a statement: "Homosexuality should not have been characterized as a mental disorder in an appendix of a procedural instruction. A clarification will be issued over the next few days."
■ United Kingdom
Smell recorder unveiled
It is a gadget straight out of a science fiction story: a machine that can record a smell and play it back to you. Engineers hope a successful smell-recording device could be useful for online shopping -- allowing customers to smell products before buying them -- or to add another dimension to television. Pambuk Somboon, of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, who is leading the development of the smell-recording gadget, told New Scientist magazine that while aroma generators have been produced in the past, they have failed commercially because the number of smells they can produce has always been limited. In his system, there are no pre-prepared smells, just 15 chemical-sensing electric noses that can pick up a wide range of smells.
■ Russia
Russians face `dry' summer
Wine lovers are facing a parched summer after a bureaucratic foul-up has left shelves empty in liquor stores nationwide. All imported wines and spirits with old excise labels must be removed from sale by tomorrow, but there has been a delay in the introduction of the new excise stamps. The glitch occurred when too few excise labels were provided too slowly to importers, and new barcode readers were not installed in time.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
Hundreds of thousands of Guyana citizens living at home and abroad would receive a payout of about US$478 each after the country announced it was distributing its “mind-boggling” oil wealth. The grant of 100,000 Guyanese dollars would be available to any citizen of the South American country aged 18 and older with a valid passport or identification card. Guyanese citizens who normally live abroad would be eligible, but must be in Guyana to collect the payment. The payout was originally planned as a 200,000 Guyanese dollar grant for each household in the country, but was reframed after concerns that some citizens, including
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered