■ CHINA
Finland trip a bust
Beijing has punished a group of law enforcement officials who faked a letter of invitation from Finland's justice department because they wanted to get a free tour of Europe, state media reported on Tuesday. The group of 10, from Anhui Province's prosecutor's department, were deported upon arriving at Helsinki airport when Finnish officials sniffed out the ruse, the semi-official China News Service said. The "inspection tour" was at least in part legitimate, though. "The responsible people in the inspection group changed the route to be taken without authorization and added a few more destination countries," the report said, without elaborating.
■ NEW ZEALAND
Funeral cortege in accident
A policewoman ordered a hearse to pull over as it led a funeral cortege, causing several mourners' vehicles to crash into each other "like dominoes," local media reported yesterday. Police have launched an internal inquiry after the policewoman ordered the hearse to stop as it led up to 100 cars to Te Anau cemetery on South Island last week. Three vehicles were damaged, two of them extensively, in nose-to-tail crashes. "I thought it was absolutely disgusting," an anonymous son of the deceased told the Southland Times newspaper. "Here we are taking dad to the cemetery and we are all pulled over and there are accidents behind us. It was just like dominoes," he said.
■ MALAYSIA
YouTube video probed
Authorities are investigating a YouTube video of a student rapping to the national anthem using allegedly seditious lyrics, the Straits Times reported yesterday, citing officials. Nearly 500,000 people have watched the six-minute video by Namewee, a 24-year-old studying abroad at Taiwan's Ming Chuan University. The paper said that the song contained lyrics that "touched on racially sensitive issues by sarcastically singing the morning call to prayer for Muslims." In a partial translation of the lyrics circulating on the Internet the song also portrays the country's police as extortionists.
■ PHILIPPINES
Tropical storm kills one
A tropical storm triggered a landslide that killed a boy in a mountain town in the north early yesterday, while rescuers saved five children from the wreckage of a house that collapsed in the torrential rains, officials said. The landslide buried a house in the resort city of Baguio, killing a nine-year-old boy who was sleeping inside. East of Manila firefighters pulled five children from the rubble of their house after a concrete wall collapsed during the downpour, police Chief Superintendent Nicasio Radovan said. The downpour, induced by Tropical Storm Pabuk and a new storm brewing off the coast, flooded many streets in the capital.
■ CHINA
Luxury offices investigated
Beijing has sent investigators to 30 provinces to probe illegally built government offices after a spate of scandals over luxurious buildings appearing in poverty-struck areas, state media said yesterday. It is the latest crackdown on graft by the government. It is also the latest warning about ostentatious public buildings being put up with official funds. In the latest case, the government of Zhanjiang in Guangdong Province spent US$1.45 million on a poverty relief office in which only 20 people worked, the reports said.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Rowling lawsuit dropped
A British court rejected J.K. Rowling's lawsuit on Tuesday over the publication of a photograph of the author and her son taken on an Edinburgh street in November 2004. The author of the Harry Potter series sued Express Newspapers and the agency which supplied the photograph, Big Pictures (UK). Rowling and her husband, Neil Murray, complained their right to privacy had been violated. The picture showed Rowling and her husband with their son, David, in a baby carriage. It appeared with a Sunday Express story on her approach to family life. The author sought damages and a ban on further publication.
■ IRELAND
Police come under attack
Police came under a sustained petrol bomb attack in the north on Tuesday following the discovery and removal of a sizeable stash of apparently home-made explosives. Officers were targeted by crowds of youths hurling petrol bombs, stones and fireworks in Craigavon, south-west of Belfast. Police officers, acting after reports of suspicious activity, said about 180kg of what was understood to be home-made explosives was recovered and removed for further examination. Dissident republicans were thought to be behind the suspected explosives. While the main Irish Republican Army has dismantled its arsenal, dissident republican groups remain active.
■ RUSSIA
Croc falls out of apartment
Residents in the nuclear research town of Sarov got a jaw-dropping surprise on Tuesday when a crocodile fell from the 12th-story apartment of its owner, the emergency situations ministry said. The 1m caiman crocodile landed on a pavement after leaning too far out of the window of the apartment where it had lived for the last 15 years, the RIA Novosti news agency quoted an official with the local branch of the ministry as saying. Frightened passers-by called the emergency services and rescuers managed to lasso the stunned animal and take it to a shelter for stray pets. It was soon returned to its owner, unharmed apart from damage to one of its teeth, the official said.
■ GERMANY
Haribo discontinues bear
In a sure sign that his days as a global star are coming to an end, sweetmaker Haribo said on Tuesday it would halt production of jelly versions of Berlin Zoo's Knut the polar bear. Haribo launched its special line after the little bundle of white fur caused a global sensation when he survived rejection by his mother eight months ago and attracted thousands of visitors to the zoo. Knut was even snapped by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz for a Vanity Fair front cover, but he now tips the scales at a hefty 60kg -- and has rather lost his cuteness.
■ NIGERIA
Russian hostages released
Six Russian hostages were freed in the oil producing Niger Delta on Tuesday after two months in captivity, a state government spokesman said. The six, including one woman, were abducted on June 3 from the Aluminium Smelter Company of Nigeria, which is controlled by Russia's United Company RUSAL. "The six Russian hostages were released to the Rivers state government this evening. They are doing well," state government spokesman Emma Okah said. The release leaves at least six foreigners still in the hands of armed groups in the vast wetlands region, home to Africa's largest oil industry.
■ FRANCE
Stolen Picassos recovered
Police arrested three people on Tuesday in possession of three works by Pablo Picasso stolen from the Paris flat of the artist's granddaughter as she lay sleeping back in February. Police surveillance teams arrested the three suspects on Tuesday morning in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. They have been detained awaiting charges as inquiries continue. The two paintings and a drawing by the Spanish master, worth more than US$66 million, were taken from the flat of Diana Widmaier-Picasso overnight on Feb. 26. "The works are apparently in good condition," said Widmaier-Picasso's lawyer Olivier Baratelli after their recovery.
■ UNITED STATES
Disclosure bill passes
An Army school in Georgia that trains Latin American military -- and counts Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega among its alumni -- would be required to disclose the names of its graduates under legislation passed by the House. The Pentagon has concealed the records since 2005. A human-rights group says the secrecy was prompted by revelations in the 1990s that some graduates had later become involved in human-rights abuses and criminal activity in their countries. Pentagon spokesman Jeffrey Gordon responded that releasing the graduates' names could expose them to danger in countries with high levels of political violence. The bill has not yet passed the Senate.
■ BRAZIL
Dutch scientist freed
A judge on Tuesday ordered a prominent Dutch scientist freed from prison while he appeals his conviction for environmental crimes and embezzlement, a court official said. Marc Van Roosmalen was convicted on June 15 of trying to illegally auction off the names of monkey species, keeping monkeys at his house without authorization and selling a scaffolding donated to the National Institute for Amazon Research where he worked. He was sentenced to 15 years and nine months in a prison in the Amazon city of Manaus, where he lived. Roosmalen has claimed in media reports that he was framed by powerful logging and ranching interests that operate in the Amazon.
■ CNANDA
Thief steals car with baby
A car thief in Montreal alerted police of his misdeed after discovering a baby sleeping in the back seat of the vehicle, then fled, authorities said on Tuesday. The mother had left her 14-month-old daughter asleep in the sports utility vehicle (SUV) with its engine running while she stopped to visit her sister on Monday afternoon in the Montreal neighborhood of Outremont, Constable Miguel Alston said. Moments later, a man jumped into the driver's seat and drove off, only to abandon the vehicle a few blocks away and call police from a pay phone, Alston said. Police located the SUV with the little girl still asleep in her seat, he said.
■ UNITED STATES
Seismic shocks foil rescue
Seismic activity "totally shut down" efforts to reach six miners trapped below ground, causing a cave-in that wiped out all the work done in the past day, a mine executive in Utah said on Tuesday. Crews are drilling two holes into the mountain in an effort to communicate with the miners -- provided they are still alive. Little was known about the six miners; only one has been identified. The Mexican Consulate in Salt Lake City said three of the men are Mexican citizens. Unstable conditions below ground thwarted rescuers' efforts to break through to the miners, who have been trapped 457m below the surface for nearly two days, the executive said.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
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
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
RSS