■ CHINA
PLA warns recruiters
People's Liberation Army (PLA) recruiters have been warned not to accept bribes from substandard recruits who want to join, Xinhua news agency said yesterday. Xinhua said the PLA had warned recruiters of "severe" penalties if they are caught accepting bribes. They have also been ordered "to sign an eight-clause pledge to prevent corruption," Xinhua said. Recruits must be healthy, have no criminal record and be 18 to 22 years old. Joining the PLA is still seen as a sure-fire way to advance in Chinese society. The government has also been trying to modernize the 2.3 million-strong force by adopting high-tech battle systems and improving training.
■ AUSTRALIA
Neighbor shot over music
A man shot and wounded his neighbor for refusing to turn down loud music, police said yesterday. The 56-year-old man was set to appear in court yesterday to be charged with attempted murder, said Western Australia state police spokesman Roy Hamilton. Hamilton said the 25-year-old victim was in satisfactory condition with gunshot wounds to his buttocks and stomach. The victim had been entertaining friends on Saturday afternoon at his home near Perth when the neighbor approached wielding a board, Hamilton said. After an argument the man left, returned with a rifle and fired three shots at the house and two shots at the victim, Hamilton said. Hamilton said he did not know what kind of music or rifle was involved.
■ SOUTH KOREA
Belly dancer charged
Prosecutors said yesterday they have charged a well-known belly dancer with forging a degree to get a job teaching the skill at a university. Ahn Yoo-jin will face trial for allegedly forging a certificate from a university in Sydney. She used it to get a job as a part-time lecturer in belly dancing at Kwangju Women's University last year but has now been sacked from the post, Yonhap news agency reported. Ahn is the head of the Korea Belly Dance Association. She established the Belly Korea Academy in 1995 and hosted several televised belly dance lectures.
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■ UNITED KINGDOM
School performs Blair satire
Students at former prime minister Tony Blair's former school have been performing a satire of his political career in which a young Blair leads an invasion of a neighboring school, the Daily Telegraph reported yesterday. In "The Which Blair Project," written by a teacher at Fettes College private school in Edinburgh which Blair attended from 1966 to 1971, he also forges a pact with a youthful Gordon Brown to help him ascend to the position of head boy, before reneging on a deal to hand over the position to Brown. The play, which also features US President George W. Bush as a US student with learning difficulties, was meant to be "mischievous rather than malicious," its author David McDowell was quoted as saying.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Firefighters battle blaze
A fire at an east London warehouse on the 2012 Olympics site sent a towering column of black smoke over the city yesterday, but there were no reports of injuries, authorities said. The blaze broke out shortly after noon on the western boundary of the Olympic Park site in Stratford. Police said there was nothing to suggest a suspicious cause. About 75 firefighters were fighting the blaze, the London Fire Brigade said.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
BBC denies foxing viewers
The BBC defended on Sunday a nature program that showed a fox shaking off "rain water," which had been sprayed on with a hose, insisting it had not created a fake impression that the scene was filmed in the wild. The images of the fox were the latest challenge to the broadcaster, which has seen scandals over faked programming force the resignation of a top executive and an unprecedented fine in the last few months. "Of all the programs where fakery should be avoided, nature and wildlife are top of the list," said Jeremy Hunt, culture spokesman for the opposition Conservative Party.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Queen attends ceremony
Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Gordon Brown joined veterans in London on Sunday to remember those who died serving Britain in conflicts from the World War I to Iraq and Afghanistan. The annual Remembrance Sunday service took place at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, central London, on the anniversary of the end of the 1914 to 1918 conflict on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. The queen, Brown and Prince William laid wreaths at the ceremony.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
UDA formally ends violence
The largest Protestant paramilitary group in Northern Ireland, the Ulster Defense Association (UDA), declared a formal end to its decades of terror inflicted on the north's Catholic minority on Sunday. The outlawed UDA said it was disbanding all of its armed units and its weapons supplies would be placed beyond the reach of rank-and-file members. "The Ulster Defense Association believes that the war is over and we are now in a new democratic dispensation that will lead to permanent political stability," the UDA said.
■ LIBYA
Italy says sorry with a road
Italy is planning to build a motorway across Libya as part of compensation for colonial wrongs under a deal it is negotiating with Tripoli, Jana news agency reported on Sunday. Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema told Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi on Saturday that the road would link Ras Jdayr on the Tunisian border to Sallum on the Egyptian border.
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■ UNITED STATES
Troops granted citizenship
US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff spent Sunday at Camp Anaconda in Iraq, where he participated in a ceremony for 178 foreign-born service members to become US citizens. "I can't think of people who are more deserving of citizenship than those who are fighting to defend the country even before they are citizens," Chertoff said. "They understand that freedoms don't come free and they are willing to make sacrifices even before they reap the benefits of citizenship."
■ UNITED STATES
Pancho Villa auction slow
Three guns linked to Pancho Villa were auctioned for nearly US$29,000, apparently less than what organizers expected the firearms tied to the Mexican revolutionary to fetch. "That's the fun of auctions -- sometimes you get bargains," said Amy McMurrough, a spokeswoman for the auction, which was held on Saturday near San Antonio, Texas. The prize of the auction -- Villa's Remington single action revolver with his real name, "Doreteo Arango," engraved on the barrel -- sold for US$18,000. A rifle that Villa reportedly dropped in the Rio Grande during a skirmish with opposition forces sold for US$7,500, and a pistol owned by Villa's bodyguard was sold for US$3,450.
■ UNITED STATES
Outlaw human cloning: UN
The international community should outlaw reproductive human cloning or quickly adopt strict rules overseeing its use, a top UN official said on Sunday, one day before the release of a UN major study on the subject. "Failure to outlaw reproductive cloning means it is just a matter of time until cloned individuals share the planet," Brendan Tobin of the Irish Center for Human Rights in Galway, Ireland ,and one of the chief authors of the UN study said. The report scheduled for release yesterday warns that humans created from reproductive cloning face potential abuse, prejudice and discrimination.
■ UNITED STATES
Suspect in killing dead
A Pakistani businessman suspected of playing a role in the brutal 2002 killing of US journalist Daniel Pearl died earlier this year, shortly after being interrogated by US and Pakistani intelligence, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. The Journal said Karachi businessman Saud Memon became a key suspect in the case because he owned a nursery where Pearl had been held captive. Citing an unnamed US law enforcement official, it said Memon was interrogated by both US and Pakistani intelligence services. Memon's family and human rights groups said that in April, the businessman was left in front of his Karachi home badly injured and emaciated, the report said. About a month later, he died from what was described as complications from meningitis and tuberculosis, the Journal said.
■ UNITED STATES
Cacao drink started as beer
Natives of Central America were drinking beverages made from cacao before 1000BC, 500 years earlier than previously thought, a study released by Cornell University in New York yesterday said. These early cacao beverages were probably alcoholic brews, or beers, made from the fermented pulp of the cacao fruit, rather than the frothy chocolate-flavored drink made from the seed of the cacao tree that was an important feature of later Mesoamerican culture. But in brewing up this primitive beer, the Mesoamericans may have stumbled on the secret to making chocolate-flavored drinks, the paper said.
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
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
US president-elect Donald Trump is not typically known for his calm or reserve, but in a craftsman’s workshop in rural China he sits in divine contemplation. Cross-legged with his eyes half-closed in a pose evoking the Buddha, this porcelain version of the divisive US leader-in-waiting is the work of designer and sculptor Hong Jinshi (洪金世). The Zen-like figures — which Hong sells for between 999 and 20,000 yuan (US$136 to US$2,728) depending on their size — first went viral in 2021 on the e-commerce platform Taobao, attracting national headlines. Ahead of the real-estate magnate’s inauguration for a second term on Monday next week,
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