■ PHILIPPINES
Lightning kills mourner
A woman who was on her way to a neighbor's wake was fatally struck by lightning, while seven other mourners were injured on the island of Guimaras, officials said yesterday. Marilou Ecol, 45, suffered severe burns and died on the spot as she and the seven others huddled under a shed in Nueva Valencia in Guimaras Province during a rain storm on Tuesday, provincial disaster relief coordinator Teresita Siazon said. Ecol's 12-year-old daughter, Mariel, who was hugging her mother when the lightning struck, suffered second degree burns, Siazon said in a telephone interview. Two boys, aged 12 and 16, also suffered burns but were not seriously hurt, Siazon said. The victims were walking to the wake of a dead neighbor and sought shelter from the rain under the shed, she said.
■ MYANMAR
Famous poet arrested
A prominent poet was arrested after authorities deciphered a poem that contained a hidden message criticizing junta leader Than Shwe, colleagues said yesterday. Authorities arrested Saw Wai on Tuesday, a day after his poem February 14 was published in a popular weekly magazine, said friends and colleagues who spoke on condition of anonymity. The eight-lined poem was about love and romance ahead of Valentine's Day. But if read vertically, the first word of each line formed the phrase: "Power crazy senior general Than Shwe." Head of the junta since 1992, Than Shwe has little tolerance for criticism. He keeps himself sequestered in his newly built capital, Naypyitaw, deep in the countryside. Several news vendors said the journal, A Chit (Love), an entertainment and gossip magazine, had been removed from news stands.
■ MALAYSIA
Cow killed after car crash
Thieves stole an adult cow, squeezed it into the back seat of a car and drove off with it, but abandoned the animal when the vehicle crashed into a tree, police said yesterday. The cow, injured in the crash, was slaughtered by villagers. The thieves managed to push the cow into the back of a mid-sized sedan on Tuesday night, but were spotted by villagers who gave chase, said a police official in the northern state of Kedah. It was not clear how the thieves managed to get the cow into the car. A blurry photograph in the New Straits Times showed the cow's head with closed eyes sticking out of the back seat window of the crashed car.
■ CHINA
CCP pushes `pure' texting
Chinese Communist Party officials in Henan Province have urged mobile phone-wielding citizens to send rousing "red" text messages instead of blue jokes, but the response has been more derision than revolution. Nanyang city recently told residents to "mobilize to compose and send healthy, positive, uplifting red text messages," the China Youth Daily reported yesterday. "Red sentences occupy the text message culture front!" party officials urged in a local newspaper, the report said. "The broad masses of residents should mobilize ... and fight the vulgar with the healthy,"the announcement said. But many people have responded to the campaign with only more catcalls, the newspaper reported. "Too funny, this itself is a joke," said one message pasted on an Internet site. Others wondered whether officials should be doing more useful things. "All of you wallow in wine and women and want us to be pure-minded and puritanical," one Nanyang resident told the paper. "It's going a bit far."
■ CHINA
Leprosy rebounding
The Health Ministry said yesterday that it is recording an annual average of more than 1,600 new leprosy cases and will spend US$30 million this year to renovate leprosy villages. The country has a little more than 6,000 sufferers, drastically down from the estimated 500,000 in 1949 when the Communists took power, the official Health News said. "But every year there are still more than 1,600 new leprosy cases, and there are still people suffering relapses," the ministry-run newspaper said. There were about 100,000 survivors who had been permanently disfigured and some 20,000 lived in leprosy villages, it said.
■ AFGHANISTAN
Policemen, villagers killed
At least eight policemen were killed yesterday during an operation by US-led coalition troops in the village of Ghariban, Ghazni Province, during an operation that included airstrikes, Ghazni provincial council deputy head Habeb-ul Rahman said. It was unclear whether local troops had also taken part in the raid. Two other villagers, including a woman, were killed in the clash, Rahman said. The US-led coalition said it had yet to receive any information about fighting in that area.
■ JAPAN
Astronaut to test boomerang
Japanese astronaut Takao Doi plans to throw a boomerang inside a space station to test how it can fly in zero gravity, an official said on Wednesday. Doi, 53, is set to travel on a US shuttle in March to the International Space Station, where he will be in charge of construction of a Japanese scientific testing room. It is believed gravity is needed for a boomerang to fly back to the throwing spot, but no one has tried in zero gravity.
■ ANGOLA
UNITA accuses government
The opposition National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) party accused members of the country's ruling party of vandalizing the tomb of Jonas Savimbi, the rebel leader who led a 27-year bush war against the government. Savimbi, who is seen as a freedom fighter by some but a war criminal by many others, was killed by government troops in 2002. He is buried in a cemetery in Luena in the eastern Moxico Province. His tomb was attacked on Jan. 3 and a bronze plaque honoring his life was stolen, the UNITA Web site said.
■ SERBIA
Prosecutor receives threats
The nation's chief war crimes prosecutor has received death threats for his role in trying to arrest fugitive suspects from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, his office said on Wednesday. "As a proven enemy of the Serbian people, you will be punished," said a letter sent to prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic by an unidentified "Serb Group" from Chicago, which has a large Serbian immigrant community. "This is not the first time the prosecutor has had death threats," his spokesman Bruno Vekaric said. Three months ago, the prosecutor received a phone call saying "have your documents on you always so you can be easily identified when you're dead." Four war crimes suspects indicted by the UN tribunal in the Hague are still on the run, and the court says they are within the reach of Serb authorities.
■ FRENCH
Warning issued over X-rays
Health authorities said on Wednesday they were advising thousands of people who had X-rays at five clinics to undergo medical checkups. Nearly 7,000 people were affected by the announcement -- mostly patients who had undergone mammograms and chest X-rays, the Health Ministry said. In a statement, it said radiographers at the clinics in the north of the country -- all closed last December -- were unqualified and had not respected hygiene and technical rules. A group of experts is to decide whether patients who underwent certain ultrasound procedures at the clinics are to be included in the advisory. It was suspected the procedures might have been performed with unsterilized instruments, putting patients at risk for hepatitis C and the AIDS virus, officials said.
■ FRANCE
Sarkozy OKs reform plan
President Nicolas Sarkozy gave the nod on Wednesday to a 300-point free-market reform plan commissioned to "unleash" the country's growth, but vetoed several flagship measures to quell a mini-rebellion in the ruling party ranks. Sarkozy had asked Jacques Attali, one of the country's best-known economists and a former advisor to the socialist president Francois Mitterrand, to lead a 43-member panel of international experts in identifying obstacles to growth. Their final report, entitled 300 Proposals to Change France, proposes a raft of sweeping changes, from job market deregulation to local government reform, life-long training, boosting Internet access, investing in green technologies or opening up French borders to immigration. Presenting his conclusions to Sarkozy and half a dozen key ministers at the Elysee palace, Attali said the combined effect of the reforms could add a percentage point to French economic growth by 2012 and that they would slash unemployment from 7.9 percent to 5 percent.
■ UNITED STATES
Mare not menu fare
Kristen DeGroat's plan for Foxy did not include placing the three-year-old mare on someone's menu. But human error landed the 25-year-old Akron, Michigan, resident's ad under "Good Things to Eat" in the classified sections of the Saginaw News and Bay City Times. "I was pretty outraged," DeGroat told the Saginaw News on Tuesday. "I've owned horses since I was a child. The worst part of all of it, if it had been any other section, it would have just been a mistake." DeGroat said she received dozens of calls from unhappy animal lovers after the ad ran on Sunday and Monday, but not under the classified heading for horses and stables as she wanted. About a third of the 60 or so calls she received were from people interested in buying horse meat. DeGroa sold Foxy to a man who wanted the horse for his grandchildren.
■ BOLIVIA
Morales shakes up Cabinet
President Evo Morales replaced four minor Cabinet ministers on Wednesday, but said they were not fired and had resigned of their own accord. At a ceremony in the presidential palace, Morales welcomed new heads of the Planning and Development, Economic Development and Small Businesses, Health and Public Works ministries. Twelve other ministers kept their posts. The outgoing officials stepped down for personal reasons such as family obligations, Morales said. "I have the same confidence in the ministers present here as I did in our ex-ministers," he said. "We always must continue improving."
■ BRAZIL
Pedophile suspect slain
A 61-year-old American man being investigated for pedophilia has been found shot dead in the northern city of Natal, where he resided, the Globo news network reported on Wednesday. The body of the man was found on Monday, buried in a vacant lot, the network said. He had been shot seven times. Police who went to his home in the same city found its front door broken open and its safe emptied. Hundreds of photos of naked children were also discovered. The US embassy in Brasilia said it was aware of the report and was investigating the matter, but had no immediate confirmation of a US citizen being killed.
■ BRAZIL
Drug kingpin's land sold
Hundreds of people campaigning for landless farmers on Wednesday ended a peaceful protest on a property seized from a Colombian drug kingpin and auctioned off by the state. The Landless Movement said its members had ended its two-day occupation of the ranch in the southern town of Guaiba, but warned "a new occupation in the area has not been ruled out." The protest had been to pressure authorities to turn the land over to the movement instead of selling it off. The property was bought by an unnamed Brazilian for 850,000 reais (US$465,000).
■ UNITED STATES
Doing the math earns cash
A Georgia high school is offering students who are weak in math and science US$8 an hour to go to study hall and review those subjects. "The kids are very enthusiastic," said Mike Robinson, the principal of Creekside High School in Fairburn. Forty students were selected on the basis of their grades and invited to attend two-hour remedial classes twice a week in exchange for money, which is provided by a private foundation. At the end of the 15-week experiment, a student who attended every session would be US$480 dollars richer.
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
The administration of US President Donald Trump has appointed to serve as the top public diplomacy official a former speech writer for Trump with a history of doubts over US foreign policy toward Taiwan and inflammatory comments on women and minorities, at one point saying that "competent white men must be in charge." Darren Beattie has been named the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, a senior US Department of State official said, a role that determines the tone of the US' public messaging in the world. Beattie requires US Senate confirmation to serve on a permanent basis. "Thanks to
‘IMPOSSIBLE’: The authors of the study, which was published in an environment journal, said that the findings appeared grim, but that honesty is necessary for change Holding long-term global warming to 2°C — the fallback target of the Paris climate accord — is now “impossible,” according to a new analysis published by leading scientists. Led by renowned climatologist James Hansen, the paper appears in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development and concludes that Earth’s climate is more sensitive to rising greenhouse gas emissions than previously thought. Compounding the crisis, Hansen and colleagues argued, is a recent decline in sunlight-blocking aerosol pollution from the shipping industry, which had been mitigating some of the warming. An ambitious climate change scenario outlined by the UN’s climate