■AFGHANISTAN
Three militants killed
US troops killed three Taliban militants and detained another during a raid, a military statement said yesterday. The troops were targeting a militant leader coordinating Taliban activities in Ghazni Province on Tuesday when insurgents fired on them, the statement said. Three insurgents were killed in the ensuing firefight in Ghazni’s Andar district, the statement said. The US military has said it will continue its offensives against insurgents throughout the winter months.
PHOTO: AP
■CAMBODIA
China offers aid and loans
China is to give Cambodia aid and loans worth US$215 million for road construction and the two countries have also agreed to step up trade between them, officials said yesterday. They expected trade flows to reach US$1 billion by 2010 from US$933 million last year, the officials said. Beijing, which gave Cambodia US$600 million in assistance last year, is looking to expand cooperation in oil and mineral exploration, Cambodian Information Minister Khieu Kanharith said. The announcements came as a Chinese delegation visited to mark the 50th anniversary of diplomatic ties between them.
■CHINA
Fire strikes nursery home
A fire in a nursing home yesterday killed seven elderly residents who were too frail to escape the early-morning blaze, Xinhua news service reported. All seven of the fatalities, five men and two women who occupied the same apartment, were seniors with disabilities, it quoted a fire official as saying. The fire broke out around 1:35am at the Kuanxin Apartment Building for Aged People, a privately owned 32-room facility in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province. None of the home’s other roughly 60 residents was harmed. The report gave no information on how the fire started.
■CHINA
Foreign tourism down
The number of foreign tourists visiting the country fell in the first 10 months of the year and the global economic crisis was expected to make things worse next year, authorities said in comments published yesterday. The number of overseas visitors staying overnight between January and October fell 1.9 percent year-on-year, the official China Daily said. The report, citing the National Tourism Administration, said the trend was expected to continue next year. The domestic tourism market remained strong, the China Daily said. The report did not give any reasons for the fall in foreign tourist numbers, but unrest in Tibet and the earthquake in Sichuan in May may have contributed to the drop.
■FRANCE
SarkObama poster a puzzle
Mysterious posters of French President Nicolas Sarkozy inspired by an iconic election image of US president-elect Barack Obama have sprung up across Paris, sparking a media guessing game about the origin of the campaign. Modeled closely on a pop-art design by the US street artist Shepard Fairey in support of the Democrat’s presidential bid, the dozens of posters pasted up in Paris last week show Sarkozy against a red, white and blue backdrop. Each spells out a progressive policy goal — “Making polluters pay?” or “Producing clean and sustainable energy for Europe?” — above Obama’s slogan “Yes, We can.” Suspecting a pro-Sarkozy publicity stunt, French news Web site L’Express has launched a reader appeal to try to identify the poster gang, who responded with a trail of online clues. They have posted photo galleries of themselves — faces masked behind the “SarkObama” images — plastering the posters at emblematic sites across Paris, on the file sharing Web sites FlickR and Dailymotion.
■JORDAN
Man guilty in ‘honor crime’
A man has been convicted of wounding his sister in a knife attack because of a perceived slight to her family’s honor. He was sentenced to four years in prison. It is the third such conviction this week in the country, where about 20 women are killed each year by male relatives in so-called “honor killings.” A court said on Tuesday the man stabbed his sister in the stomach because she had a romantic relationship with a man she was not married to and became pregnant.
■SUDAN
Activists fear more arrests
Rights campaigners are afraid the authorities will arrest more activists suspected of giving prosecutors evidence for a war crimes case against President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, a senior campaigner said on Tuesday. Amir Suleiman of the Khartoum International Center for Human Rights said he and two other activists had been held and later released last week. International Criminal Court judges are considering a request made by the court’s chief prosecutor for an arrest warrant against al-Bashir, accusing him of genocide and other war crimes in Darfur.
■GREECE
Acropolis marble returned
Greece welcomed back on Tuesday a marble fragment from a frieze decorating the Parthenon temple that an Austrian soldier removed during World War II, but renewed a call for all its stolen treasures to be returned. An inscription on the fragment, measuring 7cmx30cm, says it was taken from the Acropolis in Athens on Feb. 16, 1943 — in the midst of the three-year occupation of Greece by the Axis powers, led by Germany. Martha Dahlgren inherited the piece — broken from the frieze adorning the Parthenon’s inner colonnade — from her grandfather and decided to return it to Greece. “Today we honour the return of an architectural part of the Acropolis ... It is a very symbolic return,” Greek Culture Minister Michalis Liapis said in a statement.
■IRAQ
‘Chemical Ali’ gets death
A court sentenced “Chemical Ali,” the cousin of the late dictator Saddam Hussein, to death on Tuesday for the killing of thousands of Shiites in a ruthless crackdown on their uprising after the 1991 Gulf War. It was the second death sentence to be handed down against Ali Hassan al-Majeed, who earned his nickname for his role in using poison gas against Kurdish villages.
■UNITED STATES
Singer Odetta dies
Odetta, the folk singer with the powerful voice who moved audiences and influenced fellow musicians for a half-century, has died at age 77. Odetta died on Tuesday of heart disease at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, her manager Doug Yeager said. She was admitted to the hospital with kidney failure about three weeks ago, he said. With her booming, classically trained voice and spare guitar, Odetta gave life to the songs by workingmen and slaves, farmers and miners, housewives and washerwomen, blacks and whites. First coming to prominence in the 1950s, she influenced Harry Belafonte, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and many others.
■UNITED STATES
Casino backtracks on debt
A Pennsylvania casino gambled and lost — big time. Now it’s asking thousands of customers to give it a break. Hollywood Casino at Penn National Race Course in Grantville set out to do something nice for its best customers, rewarding 1,000 of them with free slots playing credits. But instead of the elite 1,000, the promotion was sent to 55,000 people. If they all claim the reward, the casino could be out by US$29 million. Hollywood Casino decided on Monday to partially honor the offer. The reward program was for US$100 in slots credits per week from Monday through Jan. 4, plus two free visits to the casino buffet. The casino is now offering US$100 in credits per customer and two buffet passes, to be redeemed by Christmas.
■UNITED STATES
Pot-pusher pleads guilty
A Fort Worth, Texas, man shown on videotape coaxing two toddlers into smoking marijuana has pleaded guilty. Vanswan Polty was sentenced to seven years in prison in a plea deal on Tuesday, after pleading guilty to two charges of injury to a child and other unrelated charges. Polty, 20, and a teenage uncle of the two-year-old and four-year-old were seen in the video found by police last year. Drug tests performed on the children revealed they had marijuana and cocaine in their system.
■BRAZIL
Banker sentenced to prison
A judged sentenced banker Daniel Dantas to 10 years in prison on Tuesday for attempting to bribe a police officer. Dantas, the founder of the Opportunity financial group, was arrested in July along with a former mayor of Sao Paulo on charges of money laundering and tax evasion. Prosecutors accuse Dantas of having offered a police officer US$1 million in exchange for dropping investigations into his case, which was linked to a scandal over undeclared campaign funds being used to buy votes in Congress.
■GUATEMALA
Shootout kills 17
A shootout between inebriated rival drug traffickers who disagreed over the winner of a horse race left at least 17 dead and three more wounded, police said on Monday. About 100 soldiers were deployed to the town of Santa Ana Huista to restore calm after Sunday’s incident, a police spokesman said. The dead include both Guatemalans and Mexicans, some with previous convictions for drug trafficking. Two men, a Mexican and a Guatemalan, have been arrested in connection with the shootout.
RARE EVENT: While some cultures have a negative view of eclipses, others see them as a chance to show how people can work together, a scientist said Stargazers across a swathe of the world marveled at a dramatic red “Blood Moon” during a rare total lunar eclipse in the early hours of yesterday morning. The celestial spectacle was visible in the Americas and Pacific and Atlantic oceans, as well as in the westernmost parts of Europe and Africa. The phenomenon happens when the sun, Earth and moon line up, causing our planet to cast a giant shadow across its satellite. But as the Earth’s shadow crept across the moon, it did not entirely blot out its white glow — instead the moon glowed a reddish color. This is because the
DEBT BREAK: Friedrich Merz has vowed to do ‘whatever it takes’ to free up more money for defense and infrastructure at a time of growing geopolitical uncertainty Germany’s likely next leader Friedrich Merz was set yesterday to defend his unprecedented plans to massively ramp up defense and infrastructure spending in the Bundestag as lawmakers begin debating the proposals. Merz unveiled the plans last week, vowing his center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU)/Christian Social Union (CSU) bloc and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) — in talks to form a coalition after last month’s elections — would quickly push them through before the end of the current legislature. Fraying Europe-US ties under US President Donald Trump have fueled calls for Germany, long dependent on the US security umbrella, to quickly
Romania’s electoral commission on Saturday excluded a second far-right hopeful, Diana Sosoaca, from May’s presidential election, amid rising tension in the run-up to the May rerun of the poll. Earlier this month, Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau barred Calin Georgescu, an independent who was polling at about 40 percent ahead of the rerun election. Georgescu, a fierce EU and NATO critic, shot to prominence in November last year when he unexpectedly topped a first round of presidential voting. However, Romania’s constitutional court annulled the election after claims of Russian interference and a “massive” social media promotion in his favor. On Saturday, an electoral commission statement
Chinese authorities increased pressure on CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd over its plan to sell its Panama ports stake by sharing a second newspaper commentary attacking the deal. The Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office on Saturday reposted a commentary originally published in Ta Kung Pao, saying the planned sale of the ports by the Hong Kong company had triggered deep concerns among Chinese people and questioned whether the deal was harming China and aiding evil. “Why were so many important ports transferred to ill-intentioned US forces so easily? What kind of political calculations are hidden in the so-called commercial behavior on the
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