■ SOUTH KOREA
Cabinet approves Lee probe
The Cabinet yesterday approved a special counsel to look into securities fraud allegations against president-elect Lee Myung-bak, the presidential Blue House said in a statement. Conservative Lee will become the country's first president-elect to face a criminal investigation and the probe is likely to undermine his leadership when he takes office in late February. Members of Lee's Grand National Party have asked outgoing South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun and his government to veto the special counsel bill for the sake of national unity. Any investigation is unlikely to be completed before Lee's inauguration on Feb. 25, when he will become immune from prosecution. But questions about his character would be used by liberals in an April parliamentary election, where they are battling to keep their majority, analysts said.
■ JAPAN
Litterer-cum-murder suspect
A man who caused a stir by tossing girls' underwear around his neighborhood in Osaka was arrested on Tuesday for alleged involvement in a murder-robbery 14 years ago, police said. Kazuo Oshitani, 48, was arrested earlier this month for scattering girls' underwear and nylons around his block, but a DNA test of bodily fluid found in the underwear matched a sample taken from the scene of a robbery-murder at a hotel, a police spokesman said. Oshitani, an office clerk and father of three, denied the charges, he said. He drew police attention after decorating his neighbors' bicycles, cars and even their front doors with girls' underpants. Police, who had received about 170 complaints from local residents, raided his house and confiscated more than 200 pairs of underwear and a few sex toys. Until the murder case arose, he was arrested only on charges of littering.
■ CHINA
Land grabs affect food safety
Illegal land grabs are threatening food supplies in China as scarce farming land is destroyed to make way for industrial and urban development, a minister was quoted as saying yesterday. "The illegal acquisition of arable land [for purposes other than agriculture] has endangered food safety and social stability," Land and Resources Minister Xu Shaoshi (徐紹史) said, according to the China Daily. "[But] given the growing population and fast industrialization and urbanization, illegal land acquisition will probably continue." Land grabs have been a well-known and much-hated phenomenon in China for many years, with corrupt local government officials and businessmen forcing farmers off their land for little or no compensation.
■ VIETNAM
Government to control blogs
Blogs need to be controlled to prevent the spread of subversive and sexually explicit content, communist government officials said according to a state media report yesterday. The ministry responsible for culture and information, which controls traditional media, in July said it was drafting regulations that would fine bloggers who post subversive and sexually explicit content online. Deputy Information and Communications Minister Do Quy Doan told a conference on press law that "controlling Weblogs is about developing them in accordance with the law, not forbidding them. We should provide guidelines that help people know what type of information they can upload online," Doan said according to a report in the English-language Than Nien (Youth Daily) newspaper. Bloggers would also be held responsible for information they access, he said.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
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