■ INDONESIA
Amphibious tank sinks
Six marines were killed when their amphibious tank sank during an exercise off East Java, according to a report yesterday. A marine spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Novarin Gunawan, was quoted by the Detikcom news Web site saying that six marines died on Saturday in the accident. "Yes, it is true," he told Detikcom, but declined further comments. Navy spokesman Commodore Iskandar Sitompul could not be reached for comment. Detikcom said a total of 14 men were on board the tank when it sank. They have all been located, including the six dead.
■ INDIA
Five die in building collapse
At least five people were killed and at least seven others injured yesterday when a hotel building collapsed, with many still trapped in the debris, a local official said. "Five people have died and seven are injured. They have been taken to hospitals," said a city official in the city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat state. Rescue workers were struggling to reach people under mounds of debris at the hotel in the heart of the city, a photographer said. The dead included students who were visiting the city to take job tests, the official said.
■ JAPAN
Snow injures 16 people
Winter's heaviest snowfalls hit Tokyo yesterday, hampering traffic, forcing sports events and air travel to be canceled and seeing more than a dozen people hurt, officials said. Three centimeters of snow was observed in the capital by noon, with a low-pressure system moving northeast along the archipelago's Pacific coast, Japan's Meteorological Agency said. At least 16 people were sent to hospitals in snow-related incidents, said a spokesman for the Tokyo Fire Department. "Most of them were injured after they slipped and fell on snow-covered pavements. Four broke legs or arms," the spokesman said.
■ AUSTRALIA
Cases to be heard online
Some court cases will soon be heard online, with judges receiving lawyers' arguments by e-mail, a state minister said yesterday. The system, known as JusticeLink, is to be rolled out in courts across the largest state over the next 12 months, New South Wales state Attorney General John Hatzistergos said. Prosecutors and defense lawyers will log in to a bulletin board and type their arguments, which would then be sent to the judge by e-mail. The judge would make orders in real time. "While the time-honored traditions of our legal system will remain intact, JusticeLink will streamline the process, saving millions of dollars in costs and countless hours spent in the courtroom," the attorney general said.
■ AFGHANISTAN
Three held for kidnapping
Police detained three guards of a warlord early yesterday for kidnapping and beating up one of their boss's political rivals and his son, an official said. Dozens of guards of northern strongmen Abdul Rashid Dostum abducted Akbar Bai -- Dostum's political rival -- and his son, in his 20s, from their house in Kabul on Saturday, said Ali Shah Paktiawal, head of criminal investigations for the Kabul police. They beat the two hostages and took them to Dostum's house in an affluent Kabul neighborhood, Paktiawal said. "At midnight we surrounded Dostum's house and we freed the two,'' Paktiawal said. Police arrested three of Dostum's guards, and Bai and his son were taken to a hospital for treatment, Paktiawal said.
■ MEXICO
Shaving drivers beware
Motorists in the northern part of the country who are caught dabbing on lipstick, shaving or carrying a pet at the wheel will now face hefty fines as authorities try to cut down on traffic accidents. Putting on make-up or shaving with an electric razor will land drivers fines of up to 346 pesos (US$32) in Torreon from this month, media reported on Saturday. Along with a slew of higher fines for common traffic offenses such as driving while intoxicated, speeding, and talking on a telephone without a headset, Torreon city hall said new misdemeanors included throwing trash out of a car window, and driving with another person or an animal on a motorist's lap. City halls across the country are stiffening traffic laws as motorists regularly ignore stop lights, drive drunk or with children in the front seat, and carry passengers in the back of pick-up trucks.
■ PARAGUAY
Fire disaster trial ends
The owners and a security guard of a supermarket that was chained shut after it caught fire killing 400 people inside were sentenced to 12 years in prison on Saturday, in the second trial over the disaster. Juan Pio Pavia, his son Victor Daniel Pavia and private security guard Daniel Areco were convicted in the 400 deaths and 600 injuries from the Aug. 1, 2004 fire after the court blamed them for chaining shut the exits of a supermarket in Asuncion. During the trial, the defendants said they closed down the market after the fire broke out because they feared the 2,000 people inside would loot the premises. An earlier trial that ended in December 2006 with five-year-prison sentences for each of the defendants was annulled by the Supreme Court because the uproar of the outraged families of the fire victims cut short the reading out of the sentences.
■ UNITED STATES
Giraffe gets Tiki coat
Like many a lady of a certain age, Tiki feels the cold these days. So workers at the Oakland Zoo in California had a custom-fit coat made to keep the giraffe cozy this winter. At age 18, venerable for giraffes, Tiki is subject to the vicissitudes of age. She already gets regular visits from an acupuncturist, a chiropractor, and a masseuse. Those are usual treatments for horses, at least in the always edgy San Francisco Bay area, and provide a gentle way to treat animals without drugs, said zoo keeper Melissa McCartney. Massage helps get Tiki used to interacting with keepers. Acupuncture helps with her shoulder and withers. However, coping with the effect of Bay Area winter chills on the African mammal had baffled keepers..
■ UNITED STATES
Groundhog sees shadow
The country's most famous groundhog emerged from his burrow early on Saturday and declared that winter will last another six weeks. Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow shortly before 7:30am to the cheers of more than 30,000 people from as far away as Alaska and Texas, one of the largest crowds in the 122-year history of the event in the central Pennsylvania town of Punxsutawney. The rodent was taken out of a tree stump on a hill called Gobbler's Knob, and delivered his forecast to William Cooper, president of Punxsutawney's Inner Circle, who organizers say is the only person in the world who can speak "groundhog-ese." Cooper read a scroll containing the groundhog's prediction. It said: "As I look around me, a bright sky I see, and a shadow beside me. Six more weeks of winter it will be."
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
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