■ Japan
Domestic violence growing
A record number of domestic violence cases was reported last year, with married women in their 30s the prime victims, police said yesterday. The National Police Agency received 18,236 cases of domestic violence last year, up 8 percent from the previous year and the highest since statistics were first kept in 2002. The gain was partially due to increasing public awareness amid a toughening of laws, which prompted more victims to report abuse to authorities, a police spokesman said. The number of protection orders issued by courts for victims rose 3.2 percent to a record 2,247 last year, the agency said. Of the total cases, 908 involved injury and 62 were murders or attempted murders.
■ China
Smoking ban a no-go
Stability could be threatened if the government tried to curb smoking, a senior official said on Wednesday at a discussion of National People's Congress. "Smoking harms people's health, but restraining smoking threatens social stability," said Zhang Baozhen, deputy chief of the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration. "Smokers rioted when the former Soviet Union collapsed because they could not get any cigarettes ... The principle applies in China as well," Zhang said, responding to proposals from some members of China's parliamentary advisory body to curtail the smoking industry. The tobacco industry contributed 80 billion yuan (US$10.33 billion) per day in tax to the country last year, Zhang said. China, the world's largest producer and consumer of cigarettes, with nearly 2 trillion sticks consumed a year, bans its drivers from smoking, but the law is routinely ignored.
■ Philippines
Snipers after the president
Communist insurgents have trained a special group of snipers to assassinate President Gloria Arroyo and other officials, the country's national security adviser said yesterday. Norberto Gonzales told foreign correspondents that he, along with Arroyo and four to five other people were on a hit list, were being targeted before May congressional elections. "They want me dead before the elections. They are training a group of assassins -- snipers," Gonzales said. He said the plot was hatched by the founder of the Communist Party of the Philippines, Jose Maria Sison, from his self-imposed exile in the Netherlands in an effort to "jumpstart" a waning rebellion.
■ China
Artificial panda leg appeal
An animal research center has appealed to the world for help to fashion an artificial leg for a panda that lost a limb -- along with its sex life -- in a fight, local media reported yesterday. In December, a resident of Dajiangou village in Shaanxi Province stumbled upon a group of pandas fighting, the Beijing News said. One seriously injured panda, a two or three-year-old female that rescuers named "Niu Niu," was taken to an animal rescue center and saved, but lost two-thirds of its front left leg. "Niu Niu's spirits have lifted, the wound has healed and her appetite has basically recovered. But without her left paw, her loss of balance has directly affected her love life," the paper said. "The rescue center's staff suddenly had a bold idea. If they could give Niu Niu an artificial limb, not only would that solve her walking and foraging for food, it would also enable her to mate." Staff were appealing to the world's experts for suggestions and hoped to receive a plan for a "meticulously scientific" fake limb as soon as possible.
■ United Kingdom
Camp icon Inman dies
Actor John Inman, best known for his role as camp shop assistant Mr Humphries in the long-running BBC comedy Are You Being Served? died aged 71 yesterday. Inman, who later became a pantomime regular, was one of the sitcom's most memorable cast members and his catchphrase "I'm free" became part of popular culture. In 1976, he was voted "Funniest Man On Television" by readers of TV Times magazine and was also named BBC TV's "Personality Of The Year." He died at St Mary's Hospital in London after being ill for some time, his manager Phil Dale said. "John, through his character Mr Humphries of Are You Being Served? was known and loved throughout the world," he said.
■ Dr Congo
Arrest in uranium scandal
The head of the country's atomic energy commission has been arrested on suspicion of illegally selling uranium, officials said on Wednesday. Fortunat Lumu, the director of the country's single nuclear center, and one of his aides were arrested on Tuesday "because they were accused of having illicitly sold a quantity of uranium," Attorney General Tshimanga Mukendi said. Mukendi refused to give information on the amount of uranium or the alleged buyer, saying these details would be part of an investigation. In August, the government emphatically denied a British newspaper report that a uranium shipment left its territory in 2005 bound for Iran.
■ United kingdom
Court releases ganja gran
A 68-year-old woman who cooks with cannabis to ease her depression, aches and pains walked free from court on Wednesday after being convicted of growing and possessing the drug. Patricia Tabram was ordered to carry out 250 hours' unpaid community service and pay US$1,930 in costs. The former chef and teacher told reporters after the case: "I am still going to medicate with cannabis." Police who arrested her had declined to seize her dope-laced curries, casseroles and ice cream because they did not want to deprive her of food.
■ United Kingdom
Lawyers want arrest inquiry
Lawyers are demanding an independent inquiry after police were filmed on a security camera repeatedly punching a woman while they arrested her, the Guardian newspaper reported yesterday. The video pictures obtained by the newspaper and broadcast widely on TV showed an officer punching Toni Comer, 20, five times while apprehending her last year for damaging a car in Sheffield. The officer involved, named as police constable Anthony Mulhall, said he was acting in self-defense. The footage shows Comer wrestling with the officer outside a nightclub.
■ Serbia
Infamous juice launched
A new line of fruit juice whose bottles bear the names and images of notorious leaders like late Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and Cuban President Fidel Castro has been launched, a local daily reported on Wednesday. Award-winning film director Emir Kusturica has opened a small fruit juice factory in his western village of Drvengrad, the Glas newspaper said. The report carried pictures of small green bottles with the pictures of former Yugoslav dictator Tito and others. It said Castro's flavor would be blackberry and Tito's blueberry.
■ United States
Missing Iranian talking
A former Iranian deputy defense minister who disappeared last month during a visit to Turkey has left his country and is cooperating with Western intelligence agencies, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing a senior US official. Ali Reza Asghari was providing information on Hezbollah in Lebanon and Tehran's links to the group, the unnamed official told the newspaper. Iran had said on Tuesday that Asghari may have been kidnapped by Israel or the US. But the US official said Asghari was cooperating voluntarily. The official would not say where Asghari was at the moment or who was questioning him, but made clear that the data he is "offering is fully available to US intelligence," the Post reported on its Web site. Asghari disappeared after checking into a hotel in Istanbul last month.
■ United States
BTK killer's house torn down
With little fanfare, Park City, a suburb of Wichita, Kansas, demolished the house once owned by BTK serial killer Dennis Rader early on Wednesday, as a police officer stood by to guard against people hoping to run off with pieces of the debris. Crews loaded the home's remains into four trucks to be hauled away. Rader, who called himself BTK for his preferred method of killing -- "bind, torture and kill" -- lived with his family in the house for 25 years before he was arrested and pleaded guilty to killing 10 people between 1974 and 1991. He is serving 10 consecutive life terms in prison. Park City Mayor Dee Stuart has said she did not want the demolition to become a spectacle. The city plans to use the land to create a new entryway to a park.
■ United States
Trucker wins huge lottery
A truck driver stepped forward to claim half of a US$390 million jackpot, the richest lottery prize in US history. "I'm still numb," said Ed Nabors, 52, of Rocky Face, Georgia, about 145km north of Atlanta, at a news conference on Wednesday. Nabors said he wants to buy a house for his daughter, who has wanted to move out of her mobile home for a long time, and plans to keep working -- "at least two more days." The holder of the other winning ticket in Tuesday night's Mega Millions drawing has yet to come forward. Nabors elected to take his winnings in a lump sum instead of annual installments, and will get US$116.5 million before taxes, or more than US$80 million after.
■ United States
Ex-UN envoy found guilty
A US court on Wednesday found former Russian UN diplomat Vladimir Kuznetso guilty of money laundering in a procurement scandal involving more than US$1 million in kickbacks. The New York jury found him guilty of laundering more than US$300,000 in criminal proceeds allegedly obtained by a co-conspirator, Alexander Yakovlev, a former UN procurement officer. Prior to his arrest in 2005, Kuznetsov served as chairman of the advisory committee on administrative and budgetary questions at the UN and was one of the highest-ranking Russian diplomats at the world body.
■ United States
Muslim sues over graduation
A Muslim youth sued the Newark public schools on Wednesday, claiming that he was unable to attend his high school graduation last June because it was held in a church. Bilal Shareef, 18, said it was against his beliefs to set foot in any building with symbols involving God. Shareef graduated from West Side High with a 4.0 grade-point average.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees
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