■ SOUTH KOREA
Grenade wounds soldiers
Five soldiers were wounded yesterday when a grenade exploded at their barracks along the heavily fortified border with North Korea, military officials said, ruling out the North’s involvement. The incident was reported at a guard post inside the 4km-wide demilitarized zone that separates the two countries, the defense ministry said. The pre-dawn blast came amid worsening relations between Seoul and Pyongyang. The military dispatched a 27-member team of investigators to determine what happened at the 17-man post, a ministry spokesman said. “The explosion injured five soldiers who had been sleeping in the guard post,” he said.
■PHILIPPINES
Floods displace thousands
Two people have died and more than 32,000 families have been displaced by flash floods in the north, disaster relief officials said yesterday. Heavy rains over the past several days have led to flooding in 18 towns and more than 200 villages in the provinces of Isabela and Cagayan on Luzon island, said Anthony Golez, head of Manila’s civil defense office. “There were two incidents of drowning,” he said, adding that damage to agriculture was also expected to be in the millions. Social workers as well as emergency teams from the national police and the army have been working with local officials to respond to the situation, Golez said.
■PHILIPPINES
Jose Arroyo out of hospital
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s husband was discharged from a hospital yesterday, two days after he suffered severe abdominal pains, his doctor said. Jose Miguel Arroyo, 62, was accompanying the president on a flight to Peru for the APEC summit when he fell ill, forcing an emergency landing in Japan on Friday night. His doctor said Arroyo had suffered a severe abdominal pain accompanied by vomiting because of “acute infectious diarrhea,” and that the incident was not related to the heart surgery he underwent last year.
■INDONESIA
Quake strikes Sumatra
A 6.8-magnitude earthquake struck Sumatra island late on Saturday, the US Geological Survey said. The quake hit at 11:01pm, 164km southwest of Bengkulu, it said. It was registered at a depth of 26km and was followed 10 minutes later by an aftershock with a magnitude of 5.7. There was a magnitude-5.1 aftershock at 5:05am yesterday, the National Meteorology and Geophysics Agency said. There were no immediate reports of any casualties or damage and the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said there was no threat of a widespread tsunami. However, it said there was a “very small possibility of a local tsunami.”
■CHINA
Protest leads to clash
A protest by villagers over a mining company led to injuries and damaged cars, a local newspaper reported yesterday, in the latest spell of unrest in the country. The inhabitants of a village in Chongqing clashed with personnel from the Zhongyuan Mining Company on Friday, said a report from the Chongqing Evening News posted on popular Web portal sina.com. They were angry about what they claimed was the inadequate resolution of allegations that the firm’s coal mining activities were damaging the area’s environment, leading to landslides and a lack of water, the report said. The clashes led to minor injuries, but calm had returned to the area, the report said.
■ EGYPT
Police arrest brotherhood
Police detained 17 members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s strongest opposition group, on Saturday on suspicion of holding an illegal meeting, security sources said. They said the Brotherhood members were arrested in Fayyoum, south of Cairo. Some were detained while leaving a mosque after evening Muslim prayers, while others were taken into custody from their homes, the sources said. The men were being held on accusations of belonging to a banned group and holding a gathering without a permit, charges authorities frequently levy against Brotherhood members.
■LEBANON
Hezbollah protests TV ban
The director of Hezbollah’s satellite TV station says a German ban on the network violates international laws protecting media freedom. Al-Manar TV director Abdullah Kassir asserts the German government acted on a request from what he called “Zionist lobbies” in Europe in deciding to ban broadcasts of the Arabic language network. Hezbollah has been fighting Israel since the early 1980s and is a powerful political force. Germany banned Hezbollah’s television station on Friday on grounds that it violates the country’s Constitution. The ban prevents German satellite television companies from offering the channel. The station said on Saturday it violated no laws and vowed the ban would not stop it from doing its job.
■RUSSIA
Police station attacked
News agencies say the police headquarters building in Ingushetia’s principal city came under attack by grenade and automatic weapons fire. No police were injured in the Saturday night attack in Nazran, the ITAR-Tass agency cites the republic’s Interior Ministry as saying. ITAR-Tass and Interfax said the attack lasted several minutes. Officials could not immediately be reached for comment. Ingushetia is plagued by violence variously attributed to criminal gangs and to a spillover of separatist insurgency from neighboring Chechnya.
■UKRAINE
Russia denies history
The decision to honor millions of people who died of famine in the 1930s has drawn cries of historical revisionism from Russia, which disputes claims that the Stalin-era government targeted Ukrainians with policies that allowed the famine. Historians generally agree that the famine was a side effect of a campaign by dictator Josef Stalin’s communists against rich farmers in the former Soviet Union. President Viktor Yushchenko called on Russia to finally acknowledge and “clearly condemn” the death of millions from hunger in 1932 and 1933 during a ceremony on Saturday, the Interfax news agency reported.
■GERMANY
No comment on Kosovo
Officials declined to comment on Saturday on reports that three citizens arrested on suspicion of throwing explosives at an EU office in Kosovo were intelligence officers. The explosive charge was thrown on Nov. 14 at the International Civilian Office, the office of EU Special Representative Pieter Feith, who oversees Kosovo’s governance, but caused only minor damage. The men were detained on Thursday. The three were questioned on Saturday by a Pristina district court judge who ordered them to be detained until Dec. 22. A defense lawyer told reporters that the three were suspected of having committed an act of terrorism.
■ HONDURAS
Lawmaker, three others slain
A top legislator and the state telecommunications chief were killed by gunmen in the northern industrial city of San Pedro Sula on Saturday. Political aides said the assassins intercepted the vehicle of Mario Fernando Hernandez Bonilla, a vice president of the legislature from the ruling Liberal Party, while he was campaigning for a party colleague 250km north of Tegucigalpa. Carlos Collier, chief executive of the state telecommunications company Hondutel, was also killed along with a lawyer accompanying them and another unidentified man, police sources said. Hernandez Bonilla was a member of the legislative Committee on Security and Narcotics Trafficking.
■UNITED STATES
Murderer executed
Convicted murderer Marco Allen Chapman, 37, was executed on Friday night in Kentucky, local press reported on Saturday. Chapman, who was convicted four years ago for the 2002 murders of two children, was administered a lethal injection and pronounced dead at 7:34pm. It was the first completion of a capital punishment case in Kentucky in nine years. At his trial Chapman “nearly begged to be sentenced to death,” press reports said. On death row Chapman abandoned all his appeals and even asked the Kentucky Supreme Court to expedite the process. His was the 34th execution in the country this year, including 18 from Texas alone.
■UNITED STATES
Granny bank robber nabbed
Police in Ohio have arrested a 68-year-old woman on a bank robbery charge — and they want to know if she’s the so-called “Granny Robber” they’ve been seeking since May. Police in the southwest town of Franklin say a woman handed a note to a teller in a Huntington Bank branch on Friday and made off with an undisclosed amount of money. Officers said Barbara Joly of Middletown was arrested a short time later, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported. Investigators say Joly had sunglasses and a scarf with her. Those were items an older woman wore during four bank robberies in the area since May.
■UNITED STATES
Man on jet pack stunt
A daredevil hopes to propel himself across a southern Colorado canyon using a jet pack powered by hydrogen peroxide. Eric Scott told the Rocky Mountain News that he’s never traveled as far as he wants to today: 457m. The Royal Gorge is more than 335m deep. A bridge spanning it was the site of a deadly stunt in 2003 when a parachute jumper miscalculated and fell. Scott works for Denver-based Jet PI. The company developed a jet pack for stunts and promotions that is based on one developed in the 1960s for the military. The original one could fly for only about 20 seconds.
■UNITED STATES
Man sues over wife’s nudies
A man is suing the McDonald’s Corp after he left his cellphone at one of the chain’s restaurants and nude photos of his wife that were on it ended up online. The suit was filed on Friday against the chain, the franchise owner, and the store manager, and seeks a jury trial and US$3 million in damages for suffering, embarrassment and the cost of having to move to a new home. The suit says that Phillip Sherman left the phone in the Fayetteville, Arkansas, store in July and that employees promised to secure it until he returned. Manager Aaron Brummley declined to comment and other company officials didn’t return messages.
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
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
US president-elect Donald Trump is not typically known for his calm or reserve, but in a craftsman’s workshop in rural China he sits in divine contemplation. Cross-legged with his eyes half-closed in a pose evoking the Buddha, this porcelain version of the divisive US leader-in-waiting is the work of designer and sculptor Hong Jinshi (洪金世). The Zen-like figures — which Hong sells for between 999 and 20,000 yuan (US$136 to US$2,728) depending on their size — first went viral in 2021 on the e-commerce platform Taobao, attracting national headlines. Ahead of the real-estate magnate’s inauguration for a second term on Monday next week,
‘PLAINLY ERRONEOUS’: The justice department appealed a Trump-appointed judge’s blocking of the release of a report into election interference by the incoming president US Special Counsel Jack Smith, who led the federal cases against US president-elect Donald Trump on charges of trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat and mishandling of classified documents, has resigned after submitting his investigative report on Trump, an expected move that came amid legal wrangling over how much of that document can be made public in the days ahead. The US Department of Justice disclosed Smith’s departure in a footnote of a court filing on Saturday, saying he had resigned one day earlier. The resignation, 10 days before Trump is inaugurated, follows the conclusion of two unsuccessful criminal prosecutions
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