■ NEPAL
Protest shuts down capital
Shops were shuttered, cars stayed off the streets, schools were closed and demonstrators burned tires in Kathmandu yesterday in a protest against the murder of two men blamed on the Maoists. Media reports this week said police had dug up the decomposing bodies of two young men who were allegedly taken by members of the Maoist Young Communist League last month from a district near Kathmandu. The league has been accused of violence and intimidation in the past but denied involvement in this incident. The victims’ families and friends called for the closure of transport, businesses, schools and colleges to protest the killings and demand compensation. “We called the strike to warn the Maoist government that their cadre should obey the law,” a protest coordinator said.
■PHILIPPINES
No Xmas for airport staff
Manila airport workers have been banned from wishing travelers a Merry Christmas, the Manila Standard Today reported yesterday. The warning was issued by airport general manager Alfonso Cusi who claimed the polite yuletide greeting was a “not so subtle way of asking for money” from arriving passengers, the paper reported on its front page. The directive, which is issued every year to airport employees, aims to “prevent airport personnel and security officers from soliciting money from passengers,” Cusi was quoted as saying. Anyone found violating the order would be punished, he said.
■PHILIPPINES
Church battles family bill
The Roman Catholic Church said yesterday that it has sufficient support in the Congress to defeat a controversial family planning bill promoting sex education and the use of contraceptives. “The bishops are confident they have the numbers,” said Maria Fenny Tatad, executive director of the lobby group Bishops-Legislators Caucus of the Philippines. Only 99 members of the 238-member House of Representatives have said they will support the Reproductive Health Care Act, while the rest are expected to side with the church, Tatad said. The country’s annual population growth rate is 2.04 percent.
■JAPAN
Toy lets you crush your boss
If the financial crisis makes you want to poke a finger in your boss’s eye or unleash some high karate kicks, toymaker Bandai may have the answer. Bandai has created the tuttuki bako, or poking box, a palm-sized plastic box with a simple digital display on the front, a coin-size hole on the side and a motion sensor inside. The display shows moving images including a panda on a hanging tire, a karate-fighting stickman and a human face. When you stick your finger in the hole, a virtual finger appears on the screen for petting or even torturing the animal or stickman. “Bored office workers can ... occasionally stick their fingers into the hole to work off stress,” said Hajime Kondo, who helped create the toy.
■INDIA
Boy killed over love letter
A teenager was beaten, paraded through the streets with his head shaved and then thrown under a train for writing a love letter to a girl from a different caste, police in Bihar state said yesterday. Fifteen-year-old Manish Kumar was kidnapped by members of the rival caste on his way to school, had his head shaved and was thrown under a train as his mother begged for mercy, police said. One man has so far been arrested and a policeman suspended.
■ JORDAN
King warns Israel
King Abdullah has held secret talks with Israeli leaders in Amman and asked them to refrain from a large-scale incursion into the Gaza Strip, Israeli radio stations said yesterday. Israel Radio said an official source confirmed Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak travelled secretly to Jordan where Abdullah told them he was concerned such violence could cause trouble for his country. Israel has said it will not tolerate rocket fire from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. Dozens of rockets have been fired since Israel raided Gaza two weeks ago. Israel has killed at least 12 militants. The violence has shaken a five-month-old truce
■RUSSIA
‘Newsweek’ warned
Moscow prosecutors say they have warned the Russian-language edition of Newsweek magazine for allegedly insulting Muslims. The Moscow Prosecutor’s Office says the magazine published two stories that could be “insulting or humiliating” to Muslims. It said on Tuesday one article also included one of the 2005 Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. The magazine published the stories on Muslims in the EU late last month. About 20 million Muslims live in Russia.
■GERMANY
Lawmaker sorry for block
A member of parliament (MP) who got a court order to block online encyclopedia Wikipedia in Germany for two days because of entries linking him to communist-era security police apologized on Tuesday for overreacting. Lutz Heilmann, a little-known MP of the Left party, made headlines nationwide and stirred complaints about censorship for winning the court injunction temporarily blocking the popular reference data base.
■FRANCE
Forced marriages prevented
Paris City Hall launched a manual on forced marriages on Wednesday to help officials spot and prevent cases of young women being coerced into matrimony. An estimated 70,000 teenage girls living in France are victims or potential victims of forced marriages, many of them from immigrant families, a government study showed. Municipal officials in charge of conducting weddings are often at a loss about what to do when faced with a suspicious situation, hence the new guidelines. The new manual, a 32-page booklet that will be distributed to officials in the 20 Paris districts, lists clues that can arouse suspicions and explains what the law allows officials to do. The manual lists signs that can alert officials to intimidation of the future wife. These include a state of distress or apparent submission to relatives, an inability to answer questions clearly, a lack of knowledge of the proposed husband’s personal history and a lack of plans for the future. It also gives guidelines on circumstances when officials can stop the actual wedding ceremony.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Drugless transplant succeeds
A Colombian woman has received the world’s first tailor-made trachea transplant, grown by seeding a donor organ with her own stem cells to prevent her body rejecting it, an international research team reported on Wednesday. The success of the operation, performed in June using tissue generated from the woman’s own marrow, raises the prospect that transplanting other organs may be possible without drugs to dampen the immune system, they said.
■ UNITED STATES
Matthiessen book wins
Judges for the National Book Award honored a comeback, giving the fiction award to Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country, a thorough revision of a trilogy of novels from the 1990s. The 81-year-old author last won a National Book Award nearly 30 years ago. “I’m back!” exclaimed Matthiessen, who received the nonfiction prize in 1979 for The Snow Leopard, and was a finalist in two previous years. Publishers, who paid up to US$25,000 for a table during a time of poor sales, dined on baked tagliolini and roast filet of beef at a literary celebration held under the 21m ceiling and Wedgewood dome of Cipriani on Wall Street, a setting unlikely for literature or celebrating.
■UNITED STATES
Postal service honors Hope
Bob Hope already has been named an “honorary veteran” by the government, but on Wednesday the Postal Service said it would give the late comedian another honor — a commemorative stamp. It will be released in the spring and its image will be revealed on Monday at New York’s Ellis Island, a former entry point for immigrants that Hope passed through when he came to the country from England in 1908 with his family.
■UNITED STATES
Police arrest armed man
A man who mentioned the White House and other landmarks before boarding a Washington-bound commuter train with an assault rifle was captured on Wednesday after breaking an ankle while running from two officers, police said. Police said they arrested Asa Seeley, 25, before the commuter train left the West Baltimore station for the nation’s capital, 56km to the southwest. An unlicensed taxi driver flagged down Officer Joshua Corcoran near the station about 7am on Wednesday after dropping off a passenger he had refused to drive to Washington, Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld said.
■PERU
Chinese ‘Bill Gates’ booed
Jack Ma (馬雲), a Chinese Web entrepreneur sometimes called his country’s “Bill Gates,” was jeered on Wednesday by angry textile workers in Lima who saw him as the negative personification of a China-Peru free trade agreement (FTA). Around 200 traders in the Gamarra district gathered to protest a visit by Ma, who had been invited to speak to them by Production Minister Elena Conterno, on the sidelines of an APEC meeting there. “Get out of here!” the vendors yelled as more than 20 riot police formed a line between them and Ma. Many considered their livelihoods threatened by the inflow of cheaper Chinese-made goods. One of the protesters, a woman in her 50s who gave her first name as Luz, said she saw the Chinese businessman as the dark side of the FTA whose negotiations were concluded on Wednesday. “Sooner or later,” she said, her country would be filled “with badly made, cheap Chinese products.”
■VENEZUELA
Officials firm Zimbabwe ties
Caracas and Zimbabwe have signed a cooperation deal to strengthen ties in energy, agriculture, economic and social affairs and culture, a government statement said on Wednesday. The government has in recent years upped its involvement in Africa, and has ties with all 54 countries on the continent. Once hailed as a model economy, Zimbabwe’s fortunes have nose-dived since 2000 when Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe seized white-owned farms and handed them over to landless blacks, often with no farming skills.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
HOLLYWOOD IN TURMOIL: Mandy Moore, Paris Hilton and Cary Elwes lost properties to the flames, while awards events planned for this week have been delayed Fires burning in and around Los Angeles have claimed the homes of numerous celebrities, including Billy Crystal, Mandy Moore and Paris Hilton, and led to sweeping disruptions of entertainment events, while at least five people have died. Three awards ceremonies planned for this weekend have been postponed. Next week’s Oscar nominations have been delayed, while tens of thousands of city residents had been displaced and were awaiting word on whether their homes survived the flames — some of them the city’s most famous denizens. More than 1,900 structures had been destroyed and the number was expected to increase. More than 130,000 people
A group of Uyghur men who were detained in Thailand more than one decade ago said that the Thai government is preparing to deport them to China, alarming activists and family members who say the men are at risk of abuse and torture if they are sent back. Forty-three Uyghur men held in Bangkok made a public appeal to halt what they called an imminent threat of deportation. “We could be imprisoned and we might even lose our lives,” the letter said. “We urgently appeal to all international organizations and countries concerned with human rights to intervene immediately to save us from
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
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