■ China
Police raid brothels
Police in Beijing arrested 151 suspected prostitutes, customers and pimps in one of the biggest-ever crackdowns on organized Internet prostitution, state press said yesterday. Over 300 policemen fanned out last week, raiding 18 brothels, mostly located in luxurious villa compounds and an Internet bar where organizers had posted the sex services online, the Beijing Morning Post said. Police captured five ringleaders, 63 organisers, 38 prostitutes and 45 customers, the report said. The paper said the crackdown was the country's biggest on an Internet prostitution ring in the past five years, but did not detail any other previous crackdowns. Organizers had posted information on the sex workers in Internet chatrooms and blogs, offering the option of downloading pictures of the girls in various stages of undress, it said.
■ China
Cabs get spittoons
Cabs in Shanghai will be fitted out with spittoons to stop drivers hawking phlegm out their windows, a state newspaper said yesterday. Municipal health authorities plan to install the new "spitting sacks" inside 45,000 taxis in the hopes of curbing the widespread habit, the China Daily reported. The decision came after officials carried out a test trial at 10 frequent taxi stops, which found that spit-bag equipped taxis helped reduce the rate of public expectorating. The bags will be distributed free of charge and hung on the metal barrier that separates the driver from the passenger. Shanghai has long sought to dissuade its citizens from spitting on the street but the problem is still common throughout the city.
■ South Korea
Eight activists acquitted
A court yesterday acquitted eight activists of treason, almost 32 years after they were hanged for allegedly organizing a pro-North Korean revolutionary ring. The Seoul Central District Court said the eight were not guilty of forming an underground body bent on overthrowing authoritarian ruler Park Chung-hee and setting up a communist regime. "It cannot be seen that the statements by the accused were made in a free atmosphere ... their statements were also contradictory to those of others," the court said. Aside from false confessions extracted through torture, there was no material evidence to back up the treason charges, a state human rights body said. The eight were among 23 students and activists arrested for breaching the draconian Emergency Measure Law and anti-communist National Security Law, as Park faced mounting pro-democracy protests.
■ Vietnam
Drug dealers get death
Five people, including two women, have been sentenced to death for trafficking up to 55kg of heroin, a court official said yesterday. Two other members of the drug ring were jailed for life while 16 received terms from two to 20 years at the five-day trial in Ho Chi Minh City ending on Monday. The gang sold heroin in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City over a period of nine years from 1996 until their arrest in 2005, said Phan Ba, head of the municipal People's Court bureau. "This was one of the biggest drug trafficking cases in Ho Chi Minh City tried over the past few years," Ba said. Vietnam gives the death penalty to anyone caught with more than 600g of heroin or more than 20kg of opium.
■ Australia
Lenin found in Antarctica
A team of British and Canadian adventurers has described the "surreal" experience of arriving at the most remote point in Antarctica -- only to find a bust of Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. The team was the first to reach the Pole of Inaccessibility, the point on the Antarctic continent that is farthest from all surrounding seas, on foot. But an expedition from the former Soviet Union, using huge mechanized snow vehicles, reached the pole in 1958 and set up a small camp there. "It is made of some plastic composite -- he is totally frost free as if he was put there yesterday," the adventurers' Web site said.
■ Netherlands
Booze hounds get own brew
Terrie Berenden, a pet shop owner in the southern town of Zelhem, created a beer for her Weimaraners made from beef extract and malt. "Once a year we go to Austria to hunt, and at the end of the day we sit on the verandah and drink a beer. So we thought, my dog also has earned one," she said. Berenden consigned a local brewery to make the nonalcoholic beer, branded as Kwispelbier. It was introduced to the market last week and advertised as "a beer for your best friend." Kwispel is Dutch for wagging a tail. The beer is fit for human consumption, Berenden said.
■ Netherlands
Suicide consultant acquitted
A Dutch court on Monday acquitted a man charged for actively helping an Amsterdam woman commit suicide in June 2004, Dutch news agency ANP reported. The court ruled that there was sufficient doubt that Ton Vink, 53, who calls himself a "suicide consultant," did not supervise the woman's suicide despite being in contact with her over a period of 10 months before her death. The prosecution had charged that Vink had gone too far in consulting the woman by telling her how much medicine she needed to kill herself. Vink is connected with the Dutch suicide consultancy De Einder -- Dutch for horizon.
■ United Kingdom
MPs select Nelson as hero
Nobel Peace Prize-winner Nelson Mandela was named as the most popular political hero in a survey of British MPs published in the Independent yesterday. Mandela was nominated by 27 MPs in a survey of more than 150 members of the lower House of Commons, followed by former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher with 12 nominations and British war-time leader Winston Churchill with 11. Current British Prime Minister Tony Blair was fourth with seven, and former health secretary Aneurin Bevan, credited as one of the architects of Britain's National Health Service, rounded out the top five.
■ Russia
More Russians stressed out
Stressed out by everyday menaces such as terrorist threats or financial risks, up to 40 percent of Russians suffer mental problems, the Serbsky Psychiatry Center said late on Monday. "Compared to the 1990s, the number of mental problems has gone up three times and now concerns between 30 and 40 percent of Russians," the center's deputy director Zurab Kekelidze told reporters. Russians suffer most of all from claustro-phobia or agoraphobia, both linked to fears of hostage takings or terrorist acts, the official said, adding that the two were followed closely by manic depression, which is frequent in times of social transformation.
■ United States
Cocaine found at US border
US border agents found more than 540km of cocaine valued at US$40 million hidden in the floor of a truck full of broccoli, US Customs and Border Protection said on Monday. Customs officers using an X-ray scan on a tractor trailer coming from Mexico on Sunday noticed odd shapes in the floor of the trailer. A drug-sniffing dog alerted officers to the scent of drugs. The officers found a secret compartment carrying 500 brick-like packages of cocaine. The driver, a 37-year-old from Rio Bravo, Mexico, was not charged, but the tractor and trailer were seized. An investigation by US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement was ongoing.
■ United states
Site to list missing children
The social-networking Web site MySpace.com will now distribute online alerts to members notifying them of missing children in their communities. MySpace, a News Corp unit, is teaming with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children to distribute so-called "Amber alerts," which are triggered by law-enforcement officials. The online alerts will be sent to all users in the ZIP codes where it was issued, in a small text box at the top of a user's portfolio. The user can click on the box for more information, including a photo of the missing child and a description of the suspect. The alerts were named for Amber Hagerman, a nine-year-old girl killed in Texas in 1996.
■ United states
Thieves found by GPS
Thieves who stole global positioning systems (GPS) from a warehouse in New York state were apprehended after authorities activated the tracking devices to locate them, police said on Monday. Fourteen GPS were stolen last week from a warehouse in Babylon, New York. Police and municipal staff said they remotely activated the devices and were led to the home of one of the culprits who was found fiddling with one of them. The thieves believed they had snagged cell phones and planned to sell them, he said. Three people face charges.
■ United States
Bush at lowest ratings
US President George W. Bush delivers his annual State of the Union address at a time when he faces his lowest job approval ratings ever while US forces in Iraq grapple with some of the worst violence since the March 2003 invasion. According to a recent poll, Americans trust the Democrats more than Bush to deal with Iraq by nearly a two to one margin. The survey also found that the US public opposes his decision to send 21,500 more US troops to Iraq.
■ Canada
Second sextuplet dies
A second of the six babies born earlier this month in a Vancouver hospital in Canada's first delivery of sextuplets has died, a local radio station reported on Monday. Officials at the hospital declined to comment, citing the family's request for privacy since the four boys and two girls were delivered. The family's name has never been made public. Doctors say babies born in Canada after only 25 weeks have, on average, an 80 percent survival rate and are normally required to stay in intensive care for about 100 days. But medical officials have also said that care for the babies in this case could be more complicated because the parents are members of the Jehovah's Witnesses denomination, which objects to the use of blood transfusions.
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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