■ Singapore
No health aid for foreigners
The government will cut medical subsidies for foreign workers next year in order to subsidize its own aging population, the Straits Times reported yesterday. Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan was quoted as saying the move would save the government about S$36 million (US$22.3 million) a year, which would then be used to help pay medical expenses for elderly Singaporeans. Starting next October, foreign workers will have to pay the full cost of all medical treatment they receive at public hospitals, increasing their payout by nearly four times for a hospital stay, the Times reported.
■ Australia
Firefighters get a respite
Cooler weather brought temporary relief yesterday to around 3,500 firefighters battling a massive blaze in southern Australia, but officials warned the fire could still burn for months. The fire has so far engulfed more than 250,000 hectares of alpine forest and farmland in Victoria State, which is enduring its worst drought on record. Cooler winds swept across the state early yesterday, providing much needed relief to exhausted firefighters and army personnel battling to protect homes and villages.
■ South Korea
Unification officer replaced
The new unification minister, a staunch supporter of the country's engagement policy toward North Korea, was to take office yesterday as inter-Korean relations remain chilled after the communist nation's nuclear test. Lee Jae-joung, a Roman Catholic priest-turned politician, will replace Lee Jong-seok, who formally stepped down as the nation's point man on North Korea to take responsibility for the North's Oct. 9 nuclear test.
■ China
Sex-change angers parents
A couple whose only son underwent a sex change operation have sued a hospital in Fujian Province for compensation and to have the surgery reversed because their "family line" was broken, the Yancheng Evening News reported on Saturday. The newspaper said the parents and relatives of Xie Xiaoxin became violent and occupied a ward at the hospital for 11 days in September in an attempt to get US$3.6 million in compensation and their son's gender changed again. The newspaper said Xie's parents had lost contact with their son and then saw him as a woman on a TV show broadcast in Fuzhou in September. "They then went to the plastic and cosmetic surgery hospital in Fuzhou to seek compensation because their family line had been broken," the paper said.
■ Malaysia
Thief stranded atop billboard
A thief attempting to steal spotlights above a billboard in Kuala Lumpur was stranded atop it for seven hours when his accomplice fled after spotting a police patrol car, the New Straits Times reported yesterday. The 50-year-old ex-convict and another robber scaled the 7m billboard early on Sunday to steal the lights illuminating the ad, but residents who spotted them called the police, it said. The would-be thief man remained perched on the billboard for hours, unmoved by police orders to climb down and threatening to jump if officers tried to climb up to get him. He was eventually brought down using a forklift, the report said.
■ China
Date set for six-party talks
Six-party talks aimed at dismantling North Korea's nuclear programs will resume on Dec. 18, the Foreign Ministry said yesterday. "The second stage of the fifth round of the six-party talks will start from Dec. 18 in Beijing after consultations among the parties," ministry spokesman Qin Gang (秦剛) said in one-line statement on the ministry's Web site after six weeks of diplomatic haggling over a date. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said yesterday that the talks needed to make at least some progress toward the goal of North Korea abandoning its nuclear weapons and its nuclear plans.
■ Sri Lanka
Clashes death toll rises
Clashes between Tamil Tiger rebels and government soldiers in the eastern Batticaloa District have left 64 combatants dead, the military said yesterday. An officer at the government's Media Center for National Security said 24 soldiers were killed and 69 wounded in Sunday's artillery and mortar battle with the insurgents. Forty rebels were also killed in the clash, the officer said speaking on condition of anonymity due to policy. However, rebel spokesman Rasiah Ilanthirayan said that at least seven rebel fighters died in the clashes.
■ Philippines
Judges want guns: poll
The majority of judges in the country say they need to carry guns amid a rash of killings, a survey released by the Social Weather Stations research group in Manila said yesterday. The poll of 1,512 judges found that 64 percent of respondents said they needed a firearm and a permit to carry it. It also found 61 percent believed they needed to undergo self-defense training in such matters as shooting. However, only 16 percent said they had guns and permits and only 10 percent had undergone self-defense training. The survey was carried out between last October and February.
■ United Kingdom
Third female corpse found
Police investigating the deaths of two prostitutes in eastern England said on Sunday they had found the body of a third woman. The corpse was found at Nacton in Suffolk county, several kilometers from where two women's bodies were discovered earlier this month. Police said the body was that of a prostitute in her 20s, but did not name her. Police have already linked the deaths of Gemma Adams, 25, and Tania Nicol, 19. Their bodies were found about 3km apart in a waterway near the city of Ipswich.
■ United Kingdom
Blair in nude painting
Cherie Blair, the wife of Prime Minister Tony Blair, posed nude for a painting in her mid-20s, the Times newspaper reported yesterday. She posed for Euan Uglow as he painted Striding Nude, Blue Dress which depicts a woman wearing a sleeveless dress open at the front. Uglow later painted a second version of the painting with a different model. "He wasn't pleased with the painting because it wasn't finished," said Will Darby, a close friend of Uglow. "We exhibited it in 1983 alongside the finished one but after that he just didn't want to show it."
■ UAE
First woman taxi driver
Ayda Sultan is a recently widowed 43-year-old who took advantage of a five-year-old law to become the first woman taxi driver in the country, newspapers reported on Sunday. In 2001 the municipal council in Ras al-Khaimah authorized women to drive taxis -- because many women refused to enter taxis driven by men. Even though what she was doing was not illegal, Sultan said she was still stopped many times by police unused to seeing a woman behind the wheel of a taxi. "But when I showed them my permit to drive a taxi, they were astonished and wished me well instead of booking me," she said.
■ Turkey
Three die in explosion
Three people died and 15 others were wounded when a central heating blast yesterday largely destroyed a five-story army residential building in Diyarbakir in the southeast of the country, hospital sources said. The governor's office in Diyarbakir said a central heating boiler was the cause of the blast. Faulty and old gas-powered central heating systems regularly cause deadly blasts in residential buildings across the country. There was no suggestion of foul play in yesterday's blast.
■ United Kingdom
Carbon card proposed
Every citizen would be issued with a carbon "credit card" -- to be swiped every time they bought petrol, paid an energy utility bill or booked an airline ticket -- under a nationwide carbon rationing scheme that could come into operation within five years, according to a feasibility study commissioned by the environment secretary, David Miliband, and published yesterday. Miliband said the idea of individual carbon allowances had "a simplicity and beauty that would reward carbon thrift." He acknowledged the proposal faced technical difficulties, but said ministers needed to seek ways of overcoming them. Under the scheme, everybody would be given an annual allowance of the carbon they could expend on a range of products. If they wanted to use more carbon, they would be able to buy it from somebody else. And they could sell any surplus.
■ United Kingdom
Bishop's night out
A bishop was entangled in a spiritual mystery on Monday after admitting he couldn't explain how he got a black eye after a drinks party -- while witnesses gave a colorful account of his night out. The Bishop of Southwark also sustained a bump on the head at some point after leaving a pre-Christmas party at the Irish embassy, which as media reports noted, is not known for restraint in providing liquid hospitality. One thing is sure: the bishop, less formally known as the Right Reverend Tom Butler, initially said he had been mugged after arriving home last Tuesday night with a bump to his head and without his briefcase, crucifix and mobile phone.
■ United Kingdom
Terror attack `highly likely'
An attempted terrorist attack in Britain in the run-up to Christmas is "highly likely," Home Secretary John Reid warned on Sunday. "The threat in this country is very high indeed. It is at the second highest level and people now know that publicly, because we publish it on the Web. And that means that it is highly likely that there'll be a terrorist attempt," Reid told a current affairs TV program. "We know that the number of conspiracies of a major type are in the tens -- 30 or [a]round about that," he said, although he did not give the details of any plots.
■ United States
Letters from prison
Eric Rudolph, who bombed a 1996 Atlanta Olympics site, claimed in a series of letters to a newspaper that the maximum-security federal prison where he is spending the rest of his life is designed to drive him insane. "It is a closed-off world designed to isolate inmates from social and environmental stimuli, with the ultimate purpose of causing mental illness and chronic physical conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and arthritis," he wrote in one letter to the Gazette of Colorado Springs. Rudolph wrote that he spends 23 hours a day in his 2.1m by 3.6m cell at Colorado's Supermax prison.
■ United States
Wolfowitz heckled on Iraq
Iraq war protesters interrupted a speech by World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz on Sunday, calling him a war criminal and saying he lied during the run-up to the war. Wolfowitz, a deputy to US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and a key advocate of the Iraq war, was in an Atlanta, Georgia, synagogue to speak about the relevance of Africa for Americans. At one point a man stood up at the front of the audience wearing an orange jumpsuit, seen by protesters as symbolic of clothes worn by prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "You lied about the Iraq war! You are a war criminal!" shouted another woman as she was escorted out.
■ Haiti
Preval fears cancer return
President Rene Preval, who was diagnosed with prostate cancer five years ago, says the disease may have come back and that he would soon leave the country for treatment and more tests. The possible illness adds to uncertainty facing Preval's coalition government, which took power in May and has struggled to stabilize the impoverished Caribbean nation. Speaking to reporters on Sunday after returning from a four-day trip to Cuba for medical exams, a fit-looking Preval said blood tests in Havana showed possible signs of cancer. Preval said the tests were inconclusive and that he would have to return to Cuba on Dec. 26 for more tests and unspecified treatment.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
HOLLYWOOD IN TURMOIL: Mandy Moore, Paris Hilton and Cary Elwes lost properties to the flames, while awards events planned for this week have been delayed Fires burning in and around Los Angeles have claimed the homes of numerous celebrities, including Billy Crystal, Mandy Moore and Paris Hilton, and led to sweeping disruptions of entertainment events, while at least five people have died. Three awards ceremonies planned for this weekend have been postponed. Next week’s Oscar nominations have been delayed, while tens of thousands of city residents had been displaced and were awaiting word on whether their homes survived the flames — some of them the city’s most famous denizens. More than 1,900 structures had been destroyed and the number was expected to increase. More than 130,000 people
A group of Uyghur men who were detained in Thailand more than one decade ago said that the Thai government is preparing to deport them to China, alarming activists and family members who say the men are at risk of abuse and torture if they are sent back. Forty-three Uyghur men held in Bangkok made a public appeal to halt what they called an imminent threat of deportation. “We could be imprisoned and we might even lose our lives,” the letter said. “We urgently appeal to all international organizations and countries concerned with human rights to intervene immediately to save us from
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
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