■ INDONESIA
McDonald's bomber escapes
Police yesterday hunted for an Islamic militant who escaped from a prison where he was serving a 19-year sentence for transporting explosives used in a 2002 attack on a McDonald's restaurant that killed three people, officials said. Wirahadi, who goes by one name, was among 17 men convicted for involvement in the blast in South Sulawesi Province. Wirahadi, 26, broke out of Makassar prison on South Sulawesi on Sunday with an accomplice, using a rope to scale a 5m high barbed-wire wall, provincial prison chief Sumarni Alam said.
■ PHILIPPINES
Bank robbers die in shootout
Five suspected bank robbers, including a former policeman, were killed in a shootout with police in Manila yesterday, an official said. They opened fire from a van with stolen license plates after refusing to stop at a police checkpoint in northern Manila, Superintendent Edwin Butacan said. In the ensuing shootout five suspects were killed and a sixth was taken to hospital with unspecified injuries, Butacan said.
■ INDONESIA
Earthquake sparks fires
A strong earthquake in eastern Indonesia triggered electrical short circuits and toppled stoves, setting more than 20 homes on fire, officials said yesterday. The power of the temblor also sent coastal residents fleeing inland, but a feared tsunami never came. The 5.8-magnitude quake was centered 10km beneath the ocean floor and 15km north of Manokwari city in Papua Province, the US Geological Survey said. It struck at 12:12pm, as many people were preparing lunch. There were no immediate reports of injuries. Many residents living along the coast fled to high ground, but the quake was not strong enough to spawn a tsunami, police said.
■ CHINA
Buns don't have to be perfect
Thousands of Chinese snack vendors are happily digesting news that China's ubiquitous steamed bun, or mantou, does not have to be perfectly round. China has battled to boost food quality and standards in the wake of a string of food safety scandals, but media reports of a new standard for mantou, a cheap wheat-based snack sold on street corners, outraged Internet users and academics. China's quality watchdog denied that standards recommending a "perfect shape" for mantou held the force of law. "There are no specific regulations on the shape of wheat-flour mantou in the standard," the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said on its Web site.
■ MALAYSIA
Bookies refuse sex tape bets
Illegal betting syndicates in a northern state have refused bets on the number of the hotel room where an ex-government minister was allegedly filmed having sex, the New Straits Times said on Monday. Bookies in Perak declared the number 1301 off-limits in a numbers game, disappointing punters who had hoped to make a killing on the room where former health minister Chua Soi Lek was purported to have been taped engaging in sexual acts with an unidentified woman. Chua resigned after the video was widely circulated in the southern state of Johor. "We are not taking any more chances this time around," the paper quoted an unidentified source as saying. "The last time we accepted bets after a particular set of numbers was published on the front page of a Chinese daily, we were badly hit and lost several million ringgit.
■ EGYPT
Policemen jailed for abuse
A court in Alexandria has jailed a police officer for five years and two policemen for a year each for humiliating a detainee by forcing him to wear a woman's nightdress, a judicial source said on Sunday. The court on Saturday sentenced Yusri Ahmed Eissa to five years and two of his deputies to a year each for "degrading" local car park attendant Ibrahim Abbas in April 2006, the source said. Abbas, who had been detained for alleged theft, was beaten with batons in the police station and then forced to wear a woman's nightdress and walk down a street, the source said.
■ IRAN
Criminals lose hands, feet
Five criminals convicted of armed robbery and hostage-taking had their right hands and left feet amputated, the student ISNA news agency reported on Sunday. The amputations, a legally permissible but rarely used punishment in Iran, was carried out in the presence of doctors in the southeastern city of Zahedan. The men were found guilty of "acting against God" and "corruption upon this Earth" for taking part in the robberies and taking hostages. The report did not say whether the punishment was carried out in prison or in public.
■ UNITED STATES
`Ninja Bandit' strikes again?
The costumed crook known as the "Ninja Bandit" may have struck again in New York City, police said. A home burglary this week seems to fit the pattern of 18 previous heists attributed to the black-clad, masked thief since May, police saud. The "Ninja Bandit" was so named after an intruder wielded a set of nunchucks when he scuffled with a homeowner in his kitchen in September. Other residents have said they, too, have encountered the burglar, but the suspect has managed to escape each time. The latest incident happened between Wednesday and Friday at a home in the Castleton Corners neighborhood of Staten Island. News reports said the thief entered the home through a sliding door and left with thousands of dollars worth of jewelry.
■ AUSTRIA
Avalanches leave five dead
Avalanches killed five people over the weekend, with the latest victim buried on Sunday by a thick mass of snow while skiing in the northern Pongau region. The 33-year-old Italian woman, who was not identified by name, was dug out by her skiing partner within minutes of the avalanche, but she was already dead, the Austria Press Agency said, citing Alpine rescue officials. The two had been skiing in the northern Alps, in the Pongau region of Salzburg Province. The other four victims were killed on Saturday in other skiing regions in Austria.
■ FRANCE
Driving on the wrong side
A "visibly drunk" motorist was caught driving for up to 30km on the wrong side of the Paris ring-road, police said on Sunday. In a "manifestly inebriated state," a 21-year-old male spent the early hours of Sunday in a cell after a preliminary hearing set a court date for May, police said. The driver's Peugot 206 was spotted by police at near Porte de Clichy, one of dozens of gateways into the city served by the ring-road. The police car was on the inner ring-road and noticed the driver traveling at roughly the same speed on the outer portion, and thus in the wrong direction. The man turned on to the A1 motorway, heading north, again on the wrong side of the road. He was finally stopped by traffic cops near the Stade de France stadium.
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