■ CHINA
New Year killing spree
A 21-year-old man in the north has been arrested after allegedly murdering nine of his relatives who had gathered to celebrate the Lunar New Year, state press reported yesterday. A five-year-old child was among the victims of the killing spree on Tuesday, the final day of the week-long New Year holiday, Xinhua news agency said. The killings were believed to have followed a family dispute, Xinhua said in a brief report that gave few other details, such as how the people were murdered. Police arrested the man on Wednesday not far from the where the murders took place in Baoding City, Hebei Province.
■ CHINA
Ghost stories spook Beijing
Authorities have added ghosts, monsters and other things that go bump in the night to its list of banned video and audio content in a crackdown ahead of the Beijing Olympics. Producers have around three weeks to check their tapes for "horror" and report it to authorities, the General Administration of Press and Publications said. Offending content included "wronged spirits and violent ghosts, monsters, demons, and other inhuman portrayals, strange and supernatural storytelling for the sole purpose of seeking terror and horror," it said.
■ KOREA
How deep is your love?
Valentine's Day means chocolates, romantic dinners and a high-tech mobile phone device that can secretly check the passion in the voice of a lover. The "Love Detector" service from mobile operator KTF uses technology that is supposed to analyze voice patterns to see if a lover is speaking honestly and with affection. Users who speak by pointing their phones at themselves for video conferences can see a "love meter" bar on the screen of their handset during a conversation. They later receive an analysis delivered by text message that breaks down the amount of affection, surprise, concentration and honesty of the other speaker.
■ CAMBODIA
US debt low on priority list
There are more pressing concerns than repaying millions of dollars to the US, a government spokesman said yesterday, rebuffing Washington's latest demand for settlement of loans from the 1970s. "We have many affairs to attend to," said government spokesman Khieu Kanharith, noting that repaying the US$339 million was not high on its priority list. The comments came a day after Scot Marciel, the US State Department's deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs, urged Cambodia to sign a draft agreement on repaying the debt. The debt stems from rice, cotton and other commodities financed by low-interest loans the US provided during the regime of General Lon Nol in the early 1970s.
■ JAPAN
Dog saves elderly man's life
Police on Thursday praised a dog who found an elderly man who fell over in freezing conditions at night. The three-year-old black Lab, named Dor, started barking when she was taking a walk with owner Koichi Wada in Iwade last month, a police officer said. "The dog led Mr. Wada to a nearby irrigation ditch, where an elderly man was lying face up," the officer said. The 86-year-old man had been soaked in water up to his ears. "Since it was cold and already dark, the man would have been frozen to death if she had not smelled something and told it to her owner." Iwade police on Wednesday gave a certificate of gratitude to Wada. "The certificate went to the owner as there is no precedent for a dog getting a certificate," the officer said.
■ SWEDEN
School to forgo roses
A primary and middle school said on Thursday it had decided to no longer sell roses to students on Valentine's Day to protect the feelings of sweetheart-less students. "We decided to stop selling roses ... because some students received dozens and others received none," the vice-principal of Gaerdes school in Stockholm, Lars Wikander, said. He said pupils who received no roses could feel excluded and suffer "from getting no attention at all throughout this special day." According to a study published on the Web site of the Swedish organization Friends, more than two-thirds of youngsters feel left out on Valentine's Day.
■ GERMANY
Sex auction sparks row
A woman who became pregnant after an online sex auction has won a court battle to force the Web site that hosted the sale to reveal the names of the winners so she can find out who the father is. Six different men won Internet auctions to have sex with the woman in April and May last year. They were only known to her by their online names, a spokesman for a court in the southwestern city of Stuttgart said on Wednesday. The woman asked the site's operator to reveal the true identity of the men, but it refused, citing a confidentiality clause in its terms and conditions. The court ruled in her favor, saying the child's right to know who its father was took precedence.
■ SWITZERLAND
Submersible car developed
In The Spy Who Loved Me, James Bond takes his sports car underwater, swapping his wheels for fins. Now a Swiss company says it has created a vehicle that really can turn into a submarine. The concept car developer Rinspeed calls its "sQuba" the first real submersible car, which will be unveiled next month. Rinspeed says its car can provide a stable "flight" at a depth of 10m. "For three decades I have tried to imagine how it might be possible to build a car that can fly underwater," says Frank Rinderknecht, Rinspeed's 52-year-old CEO and a professed Bond fan. "Now we have made this dream come true."
■ BOSNIA
Driver alcohol level at 0.6%
A driver was so drunk that he should have been dead when arrested with a blood alcohol level 20 times the legal limit, police said on Thursday. "I was shocked with the alcohol test results. Most people would slip into a deep coma and die with a concentration of 0.4 percent," police officer Damir Cutura said. After being warned by other drivers on Tuesday of a car zigzagging across lanes, police drove out and arrested Branko Milicevic near the southern town of Citluk. Police were shocked to see test results showing the man's blood alcohol concentration level was 0.6 percent. The legal limit in Bosnia is 0.03 percent.
■ BOSNIA
Peace accord goes missing
Bosnia's presidency has lost its original copy of the Dayton peace agreement that ended the country's 1992 to 1995 war, an official said on Thursday. The chairman of Bosnia's presidency, Zeljko Komsic, "discovered yesterday that the original copy of the Dayton peace agreement is missing from the archives of the presidency," spokeswoman Irena Kljajic said, adding that investigators had been called to look into disappearance of the document. The peace agreement was reached at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio in November 1995.
■ MEXICO
Kids break hug record
More than 9,000 children embraced each other in a long row for longer than a minute in Monterrey on Thursday to celebrate Valentine's Day and set a new Guinness World Records mass hug mark, a local mayor said. "More than breaking a record, it's a matter of showing affection on this Feb. 14, the day of love and friendship," said Cristina Diaz, mayor of Monterrey's Guadalupe suburb. "Guinness record authorities are here with us to certify that, in all, there were 9,402 children," she said. The children beat the previous "biggest hug" record set by more than 6,000 children in northern Chihuahua state.
■ MEXICO
Model policeman arrested
A two-time Mexico City "policeman of the year" has been arrested on suspicion of extorting money from illegal "car-watchers" who demand tips for curbside parking. Police said Alejandro Garnino, who was awarded the city's highest police honor in 2005 and 2006, is suspected of charging up to 1,000 pesos (US$94) to allow dozens of car-watchers to operate outside one a stadium. "It is a shock to all of us," an official at Mexico City's police force said on Wednesday. He said Garnino turned himself in on Monday night. Corruption plagues the country's underpaid police forces, where officers regularly take bribes.
■ UNITED STATES
Missing painting located
A US$8 million painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat has been found in a Manhattan warehouse. Federal prosecutors filed papers on Wednesday seeking to seize the 1982 painting, called Hannibal. A courier smuggled the painting from London into the US via John F. Kennedy International Airport in August. Its last known owner was Brazilian Edemar Cid Ferreira, a former bank owner. Ferreira was convicted in Brazil on charges of fraud. A Brazilian court ordered the seizure of US$20 million to US$30 million worth of his art, saying Ferreira had bought the works with proceeds from illegal schemes. But Hannibal was found to be missing.
■ UNITED STATES
Bai Ling accused of stealing
Chinese actress Bai Ling (白靈) has been arrested at Los Angeles International Airport, and police accuse her of shoplifting two celebrity magazines and two packets of batteries from a shop. Sergeant Jim Holcomb said Ling was taken into custody on Wednesday. He said the items in question had a total value of US$16. The 41-year-old actress was detained by a store employee who summoned police. She was booked for investigation of misdemeanor shoplifting and released after agreeing to appear in court on March 5.
■ UNITED STATES
Drunk driver gets 15 years
A motorist accused of hitting two pedestrians while driving drunk and making it home with one of them lodged in his windshield has been sentenced to 15 years in prison. Steven Warrichaiet, 40, pleaded no contest in December to charges of homicide by intoxicated use of a motor vehicle, hit and run resulting in death, injury by intoxicated use of a motor vehicle and hit and run causing great bodily harm. Authorities said he struck Tyrone Ware, 50, and Joann Carroll-Hildahl, 42, on the night of July 8 and then continued more than a kilometer to his home with Ware stuck in the windshield. Carroll-Hildahl was left lying on the pavement after the accident. She is paralyzed and in a nursing home, said Henry Williams, Ware's half brother.
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
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
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
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