■JAPAN
Sakai’s hubby gets jail term
The surfer husband of disgraced Japanese pop star Noriko Sakai yesterday received a suspended two-year jail term for illegal drug use, weeks after his wife was also found guilty, court officials said. The Tokyo District Court ruled that Yuichi Takaso, 41, illegally used stimulants in early August, and that he encouraged Sakai to follow suit. His jail sentence was suspended for four years. Sakai was handed a suspended jail term of 18 months for illegal drug use on Nov. 9.
■AUSTRALIA
‘Rickrolling’ creator hired
An unemployed computer whiz who last month generated headlines around the world by creating a landmark virus affecting Apple Inc’s iPhones said yesterday he had scored a job with the nation’s leading iPhone application developer Mogeneration Pty Ltd. Ashley Towns released a harmless worm — Rickrolling — that installed on the iPhone wallpaper a photograph of 1980s pop singer Rick Astley. The 21-year-old said it was a wake up call for iPhone owners who “jailbreak” their devices and leave them unprotected by pass codes.
■HONG KONG
Police probe online suicide
Police said yesterday they were hunting the creator of a second Facebook group encouraging teenagers to commit suicide. A police spokeswoman said experts from its Commercial Crime Bureau were investigating a social networking group named “I have to (practice) suicide” after a page with an almost identical name was exposed earlier this week. “We are now investigating the two cases. No one has been arrested so far,” she said. The new group emerged on Wednesday and nearly 100 people signed up, media reports said.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Watchdog wary of reactors
The Health and Safety Executive has warned that French and US-Japanese reactors planned for construction in Britain could be rejected unless safety concerns are met. It said it had concerns about features of both designs of the reactor technologies proposed for use in a new generation of nuclear power stations. The executive conducted a safety review of the AP-1000 reactor put forward by US nuclear firm Westinghouse, now owned by Japan’s Toshiba, and the European Pressurized Reactor from France’s Areva.
■SAUDI ARABIA
Pilgrims pelt the devil
Pilgrims pelted pillars symbolizing the devil with pebbles on the third day of the hajj yesterday as Muslims worldwide marked the Eid al-Adha holy day. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims filed by the three jamarat pillars in Mina tossing stones to mark Abraham’s three rejections of the devil’s attempts to persuade him to ignore God’s instructions to sacrifice his son Ishmael as related in the Koran. The stoning was orderly during the night and early morning yesterday, as Saudi authorities hoped enlarged pillars and a newly built five story pilgrim walkway would avert the deadly stampedes of previous years.
■IRELAND
Abuse covered up: report
The Irish government on Thursday vowed to bring pedophile priests to justice after a report revealed that the Roman Catholic Church had covered up the “systematic abuse” of children while the state turned a blind eye. The report concluded that “hundreds of crimes” were committed against children in the diocese of Dublin between 1975 and 2004. It said the Catholic Church hierarchy in Ireland was “granted immunity to cover up child sex abuse” while the authorities enjoyed a “cosy relationship with the church.” Justice Minister Dermot Ahern said that the offenders would be brought to court regardless of the time that has passed. The inquiry was based on a sample of complaints involving 320 children and 46 priests. It revealed that four former archbishops did not pass on the information they were given on the abuse cases to the authorities and alleged that the police treated the clergy “as though they were above the law.” The state authorities had facilitated the cover-up by failing to ensure that the law was applied equally to all.
■GERMANY
Garbage dumping probed
Police investigating how garbage from Italy was dumped in a scenic German state raided 27 premises on Thursday in a bid to uncover graft and tax evasion. Prosecutors in the city of Halle said there was no immediate evidence that environmental laws were broken. They said prosecutors in nearby Leipzig were also involved in the inquiry into irregularities. Part of the garbage was dumped at a tip in Saxony-Anhalt, a largely unspoiled rural state.
■GERMANY
Police bust Web gang
Police closed down a Web gang that stole private credit card data and used viruses to create a network of 100,000 robot computers, the Federal Crime Office said on Wednesday. In Germany, three persons were detained during the raids on 46 homes. One was held in Austria. The offenders, aged 15 to 26, knew one another via an Internet forum devoted to hacking and hid behind nicknames. The administrator of the forum set up the so-called bot net, in which computers were infected with virus software and were doing his bidding, providing him with both massive networked computing power and secrets.
■CANADA
Pig farm killer appeals
The Supreme Court agreed on Thursday to hear the appeal of the country’s most prolific serial killer, a pig farmer sentenced to life in prison for murdering six prostitutes. Robert Pickton was found guilty in December 2007 of picking up drug-addicted prostitutes from a run-down part of Vancouver and butchering them and disposing of their bodies, sometimes by feeding them to his pigs. A request by Pickton’s lawyers to appeal the conviction was granted, the Supreme Court said in a brief statement. Pickton’s defense team did not dispute at the original trial that the women’s body parts, DNA or belongings were found on Pickton’s farm, but suggested others with access to the property could have been responsible. Police testified about finding three severed heads and other body parts in a freezer and buckets, human bones beneath a pig pen, and a gun with a dildo over its muzzle holding traces of DNA from Pickton and one of the women.
■CANADA
CRTC approves Al Jazeera
The broadcasting regulatory commission announced on Thursday it would allow Qatar-based Al Jazeera news network to broadcast in English in Canada. In a statement, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) said authorizing Al Jazeera to broadcast “will expand the diversity of editorial points of view in the Canadian broadcasting system. Further, despite concerns expressed by certain parties, there is nothing on the record of the current proceeding that leads the commission to conclude that [Al Jazeera] would violate Canadian regulations, such as those regarding abusive comment,” the commission said. The 24-hour, seven-day-a-week English-language international news service is available in more than 100 countries and on the Internet.
■ARGENTINA
Gay couple to marry
A gay man tying the knot next week in Latin America’s first same-sex marriage predicted on Thursday that his ground-breaking wedding would inspire other homosexual couples to follow suit. “Our December 1 civil wedding service will launch a new campaign in the coming months in different major cities to allow same-sex couples to do the same,” said Alejandro Freyre, 39, at a press conference in Buenos Aires. A judge paved the way for the region’s first gay marriage earlier this month when she granted Freyre and his partner, Jose Maria Di Bello, 41, permission to marry. Buenos Aires, known for its active if low-key gay movement, became the region’s first city to approve civil unions for gay couples in 2002, granting gay couples some but not all the rights enjoyed by heterosexual married couples.
■HONDURAS
Zelaya criticizes US
Ousted president Manuel Zelaya slammed the US for supporting tomorrow’s presidential election. “The United States is not just supporting the elections but it is supporting the de facto regime, it is supporting the dictatorship, it is supporting the coup-perpetrating regime,” Zelaya said in a telephone interview published on Thursday by the Brazilian Web site UOL. “We are going to formally question that election,” Zelaya said. “Latin America already experienced about 80 coups, but they led to a new constitution, a social pact toward a new constitution, and not to an illegitimate call to elections under the leadership of a dictatorship, without international observers, without the OAS [Organization of American States], without the United Nations,” he said.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
North Korea yesterday fired a ballistic missile, Seoul’s military said, about a week after US President Donald Trump approved South Korea’s plan to build a nuclear-powered submarine. Analysts have said Seoul’s plan to construct one of the nuclear-driven vessels would likely draw an aggressive response from Pyongyang. South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said North Korea fired an unidentified ballistic missile toward the East Sea, referring to the body of water also known as the Sea of Japan. The missile landed in the sea outside Japan’s economic waters and no damage or injuries had been reported, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said. The missile
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