■HONG KONG
Kidnapper starts jail term
A social worker was beginning an 11-year jail sentence yesterday for kidnapping a friend’s son, aged 7, a court report said. Pakistani national Mohammad Nadim, 22, said he plotted the abduction with his pregnant partner to raise money for his unborn child. The court was told that Nadim picked up the boy on his way to school on a morning last June, telling him the bus had broken down, a report in the South China Morning Post said. They took him to their apartment where he was blindfolded and gagged with adhesive tape. Nadim then called the boy’s mother, demanding she bring HK$20,000 (US$2,580) to a rail station for his return. The boy was bundled into a nylon bag in the boot of a car. Nadim was arrested later the same day when police intercepted the car and rescued the boy.
■CHINA
Labor disputes double
Labor disputes doubled last year amid the financial downturn that triggered mass layoffs of migrant workers and factory closures, state media reported on yesterday. Human Resources and Social Security Vice Minister Yang Zhiming (楊志明) said there were 693,000 labor dispute cases last year, 98 percent higher than the year before, and involved 1.2 million workers, the Xinhua news agency reported. Yang, speaking in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen — a major factory belt in the export engine of the Pearl River Delta hard hit by the slump — said there were 22,000 collective labor disputes involving more than three workers each.
■MALAYSIA
‘Nude run’ probed
Authorities are investigating claims that an island in the Muslim-majority country was used as a location shoot for a “nude run” on a European reality show, a report said yesterday. Photographs of a group of men and women running naked on a beach allegedly taken from an episode of Survivor reportedly broadcast in Denmark were published on the front page of a local tabloid. The tabloid said 16 out of the 22 participants stripped naked for the run while five others got to keep their underwear on. A female participant who refused to strip was kicked out of the show.
■MALAYSIA
Possible outbreak kills one
A man died and 12 others are in serious condition following a suspected outbreak of bacterial meningitis at a training camp in the southern state of Malacca, a news report said yesterday. State health director Ghazali Othman said three patients have been placed in intensive care while the others are in the isolation ward of a state hospital. A total of 85 trainees from the Road Transport Department have also been quarantined at the department’s training academy following the outbreak, Ghazali was quoted as saying by the Star daily.
■INDIA
LET commander killed
A top commander of the Islamic militant Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET) group was killed along with his aide by security forces in the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir yesterday, news reports said. Acting on a tip about the presence of militants, Indian security forces threw a tight cordon around the Dhar forest area in Doda district, about 140km southeast of the state capital Srinagar, late on Friday, the IANS news agency reported. The militants were surrounded and the gunbattle began early yesterday, senior Doda district police official Hemant Lohia was quoted as saying.
■GERMANY
Paint ball to be banned
The government is planning to ban paintball and laser shooting games after a recent school massacre in which 15 people died. The proposal would make using air rifles to shoot paint-filled pellets at opponents illegal and punishable with fines of up to 5,000 euros (US$6,810). The decision, which is expected to be fast-tracked through the Bundestag before the summer recess, comes two months after 17-year-old Tim Kretschmar shot dead 15 people at his former school in Winnenden, with a weapon he had taken from his father’s bedroom.
■GERMANY
Killer IC chips rejected
A Saudi inventor’s proposal to implant semiconductors under the skin of tourists and remotely kill them if they misbehave will not be granted a patent in Germany, officials in Munich said on Friday. A German Patent Office spokeswoman said the application was received on October 30, 2007, and published 18 months later, as required by law, in a patents database. But inventions that are unethical or a danger to the public are not to be recognized. A model B of the system would contain a poison such as cyanide, which could be released by remote control to “eliminate” people if they became a security risk.
■HUNGARY
Drugs buried in cemetery
Three kilos of heroin were found hidden in a cemetery near the border with Austria in the grave of a suspected drug dealer’s grandmother, police said on Friday. The discovery followed the arrest in the Austrian town of Graz on Tuesday of two Hungarian men as they attempted to sell 100g of the drug. The Austrian police alerted their Hungarian colleagues, who used sniffer dogs in a search of the suspects’ homes in the Hungarian border town of Sopron. They found nothing. However, Austrian police subsequently arrested a third man, allegedly the leader of the drug ring, who revealed the whereabouts of the macabre cache, which has a street value of around US$250,000.
■SWEDEN
Too much sun deadly: study
Too much sunlight in places like Greenland where long summer days often cause insomnia appears more likely to drive a person to suicide, researchers said on Friday. Despite a belief that suicides tend to rise in late autumn and early winter months because of darkness, the new findings suggest that places where constant sunlight in summer seasons is a fact of life may be just as dangerous. “During the long periods of constant light, it is crucial to keep some circadian rhythm to get enough sleep and sustain mental health,” Karin Sparring Bjorksten of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and colleagues reported in the BioMed Central journal BMC Psychiatry.
■ITALY
Racial segregation panned
A proposal to introduce racial segregation on trains, trams and buses in Milan provoked an outcry from opposition politicians on Friday. Matteo Salvini, secretary of the Northern League, told a rally to launch his party’s European election campaign that he wanted “seats or carriages reserved for the Milanese” on local public transport. Dario Franceschini, leader of the opposition Democratic party, said: “One’s thoughts go back to the affair of Rosa Parks, the black woman who refused to give up her place on the bus and inspired Martin Luther King’s struggle.” President Giorgio Napolitano also spoke of a “worrying” increase in intolerance, while the Italy of Principles party called on the government to disown the idea publicly.
■UNITED STATES
Woman keeps dead mom
A Florida woman has been indicted for keeping her dead mother’s body in a bedroom for six years while collecting more than US$200,000 in pension benefits, prosecutors said on Thursday. Penelope Sharon Jordan of Sebastian, Florida, was charged by a federal grand jury last week with Social Security fraud and theft. Police found the decaying body of Timmie Jordan on a bed in a spare bedroom at the mother’s home in late March, when they were called to investigate a report of nuisance cats. Penelope Jordan told police her mother had died in 2003. The indictment alleged Jordan concealed the death in order to receive her Social Security benefits and military survivor’s benefit.
■COLOMBIA
Fake nurse gives vaccines
After a row with her lover, a woman sought revenge by administering fake flu vaccines to 197 people at an institute before being caught, health officials said on Friday. The 26-year-old woman donned nurse’s attire and “vaccinated” 197 people using a single needle at the agriculture institute of Marsella. City health chief German Gomez said it was determined the woman had injected a benign medication into some patients and given water to others, without causing any health risks. Gomez said none of the “vaccine” recipients had been hospitalized at the center and all the victims remained under observation. A professor said the incident was linked to a row with the woman’s boyfriend.
■UNITED STATES
Parton receives doctorate
Award-winning entertainer, businesswoman and education advocate Dolly Parton has a new title. “Just think, I am Dr Dolly,” the country music star said on Friday after receiving an honorary doctorate of humane and musical letters from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Always joking about her buxom figure, she added: “So when people say something about ‘Double-D,’ they will be thinking of something entirely different.” The audience of 1,069 new graduates from the College of Arts and Sciences roared with laughter. Parton, a Tennessee native who is the fourth of 12 children from a poor Appalachian family, is well-known for her philanthropic work. Her Imagination Library sends a book to about 500,000 children each month from birth until they start school.
■UNITED STATES
Robber leaves wallet behind
Police charged Albert Vincent Perkins with robbing First Federal Bank in Kansas City, Missouri, on Thursday after he left his wallet at the scene of the crime. Police said the robber walked into the bank and ordered the teller to give him all of the US$100 bills. He then walked out of the bank, leaving his wallet on the counter. The teller and a customer in the bank identified the photo on the driver’s license as the robber.
■UNITED STATES
Sex ad used as revenge
A dispute between two nine-year-old girls in Hauppauge, New York, led to criminal charges against one of their mothers, police said, after she allegedly posted an Internet ad seeking sex and then directed respondents to call the other mother. Police said Margery Tannenbaum, who lives on Long Island near New York City, was cited for aggravated harassment after posting a classified ad on Craigslist seeking sex with men. She was accused of giving out the other mother’s phone number to all those who replied by e-mail.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It might sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this point, it’s: ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
The administration of US President Donald Trump has appointed to serve as the top public diplomacy official a former speech writer for Trump with a history of doubts over US foreign policy toward Taiwan and inflammatory comments on women and minorities, at one point saying that "competent white men must be in charge." Darren Beattie has been named the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, a senior US Department of State official said, a role that determines the tone of the US' public messaging in the world. Beattie requires US Senate confirmation to serve on a permanent basis. "Thanks to