■THAILAND
Health minister resigns
The Public Health Minister resigned yesterday after being implicated in a corruption scandal over a health care scheme funded under the government’s US$43 billion economic stimulus package. It was the third ministerial resignation since the government took office a year ago and the latest setback for Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, who is facing mounting pressure to dissolve parliament and call an election.
■MALAYSIA
Bird abusers fined
Two courts fined 27 men for abusing birds prized for their singing abilities by making them fight in a cage, an official said yesterday. The men paid fines of 130 ringgit (US$38) each after pleading guilty on Monday in two Kuala Lumpur courts to charges of committing cruelty to animals, a Magistrate’s Court official said on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to make public statements. The men gathered at a recreational club where bird-watchers and other enthusiasts meet and placed two Oriental Magpie Robins in a cage to watch them fight.
■INDIA
Mock self-kidnapping fails
A 22-year-old with a taste for the high life unsuccessfully staged his own kidnapping at the weekend, demanding US$40,000 from his father to fund a trip to Macau, reports said yesterday. His bungled attempt landed him in jail rather than in the Chinese gambling resort when he was caught red-handed picking up the ransom at a New Delhi shopping mall. “His girlfriend wanted to celebrate the New Year’s Eve in Macau,” a senior police officer in New Delhi told the Hindustan Times daily yesterday. “He wanted to fulfill her wish but was not able to bear the expenses.”
■JAPAN
Susan Boyle to perform
Scottish singing sensation Susan Boyle has brought her act to the country. The 48-year-old church volunteer who rocketed to fame with her surprising performance on Britain’s Got Talent arrived at Tokyo’s international airport yesterday to prepare for a guest appearance on the country’s premier vocal variety show, which will be aired live on New Year’s Eve by Japan’s public broadcaster, NHK.
■CHINA
Special parking for women
A shopping center has opened a car park that offers women drivers bigger-than-normal parking spaces to accommodate what it sees as their special needs. Wang Zheng, an official at the Wanxiang Tiancheng shopping center in Hebei Province’s Shijiazhuang City, said on Monday the women-only parking lot aimed to address women’s “strong sense of color and different sense of distance.” The spaces are “1m wider than normal parking spaces,” Wang said, adding that the mall had “installed signs and security monitoring equipment that corresponded more to women’s needs.”
■SOUTH KOREA
Magnate gets special pardon
Convicted former Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee will be granted a special pardon to allow the influential business magnate to rejoin efforts to bring the Winter Olympics to South Korea, the government said yesterday. Lee, 67, stepped down in April last year after 20 years at the helm of the Samsung Group after being indicted in connection with losses at a Samsung affiliate and for tax evasion. He was cleared of culpability for the business losses but was fined in August and sentenced to a suspended three-year prison term for tax evasion.
■ISRAEL
Vanunu arrested
Police arrested nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu yesterday for violating a ban on speaking to foreigners, a police statement said. Vanunu was jailed as a traitor in 1986 and served an 18-year sentence after discussing his work as a technician at Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor with a British newspaper, an interview that led experts to conclude the facility had produced fissile material for as many as 200 atomic warheads. After his release from jail in 2004, defense authorities barred him from traveling abroad or having contact with foreigners.
■NIGER
Three Saudi tourists killed
Unidentified gunmen shot dead three tourists from Saudi Arabia in an attack on Monday in the remote western desert, officials said. Three other Saudis were also wounded in the assault, government spokesman Mamane Kassoum Moktar said. Saudi Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled bin Saud told Saudi-owned al-Arabiya TV the tourists were leaving for Mali when they were attacked around dawn after stopping their vehicle to perform morning prayers. It was not clear what sparked the violence, but local insurgents, bandits and members of al-Qaeda’s Algeria-based North Africa branch are believed to be active in the remote deserts near the Mali frontier. “It appears to us so far that it was a robbery,” Saud said.
■ETHIOPIA
Farmers jailed for talking
Seven farmers from the north of the country were jailed last week after agreeing to testify to human rights groups that they were denied international food aid by the government for political reasons, two opposition leaders said. The farmers, six of whom are members of the Arena party, were detained last Wednesday after they went to Addis Ababa to give evidence, said Gebru Asrat, the leader of Arena. They were released on Sunday. The move is part of what the opposition says is a campaign by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front to use food aid to intimidate the population ahead of national elections scheduled for May. The government denied the allegations, saying the seven men were merely sent back to their homes and not arrested.
■RUSSIA
Whistleblower faces charges
Prosecutors are filing fraud charges against a police officer who had complained on YouTube of abuse and corruption in the law enforcement system. The prosecutor’s office in the southern Krasnodar region said on Monday that Alexey Dymovsky embezzled about US$800 while working as a narcotics investigator. Dymovsky posted three videos on YouTube last month in which he said he was promised a promotion in return for jailing an innocent person. He also accused his superiors of forcing officers to fake reports on unsolved crimes. He was later fired.
■FRANCE
Discos open till morning
Discotheques nationwide can now stay open until 7am under new regulations that business leaders said on Monday would liven up Paris and other cities. The measure seeks to harmonize closing hours for bars across the country and cut down the number of partygoers who drive from one area to the next in search of a place to spend the night on the dance floor. Any place that serves alcohol and has a dance floor can now stay open until 7am, but last call will be at 5:30am, allowing for a one-and-half-hour “dry period” when no alcohol will be served.
■CANADA
Mafia relative shot
Nick Rizzuto, the son and grandson of mafia bosses, was shot and killed in Montreal’s Notre-Dame-de-Grace neighborhood, police said on Monday. Rizzuto, 42, died from gunshot wounds he sustained while being transported to hospital. A suspect was seen fleeing on foot after firing four rounds into the victim, police said. Rizzuto is the grandson of Nicolo Rizzuto, 85, the reputed godfather of the Sicilian mafia in Montreal. The elder Rizzuto was last year convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to four years in prison, but he was released after serving two years in preventive detention.
■UNITED STATES
Crime figures improve
New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg say this year is another record setter in crime reduction. Figures released on Monday show overall crime in the nation’s largest city is down 11 percent from last year and 35 percent since 2001. Murders are down 11 percent. The only major crime that is rising is felony assault, which is up 2 percent. The figures reflect a nationwide trend. FBI crime figures for the first half of last year show crime falling across the country. Murder and manslaughter fell 10 percent for the first half of the year.
■UNITED STATES
Edwin Krebs dies aged 91
Edwin Krebs, who shared a Nobel Prize in 1992 for discovering a crucial bodily process that helps govern the movement of muscles, the shape and division of cells and even learning and memory, died on Dec. 21 in Seattle. He was 91. His death, at a chronic-care facility, was caused by progressive heart failure, said the University of Washington, where he taught and was a former chairman of the department of pharmacology. He lived in Seattle. The process Krebs discovered in the 1950s with Edmond Fischer, a colleague at the University of Washington, activates proteins that can change the entire character of cell functions, thus regulating them. Among other actions, the process can trigger the release of hormones that govern bodily functions.
■BRAZIL
Doctors remove needles
Doctors have removed four more sewing needles from the neck of a two-year-old boy who was stuck with dozens by his stepfather in an alleged plot to spite his wife. Doctors successfully operated on the toddler on Monday in the northeastern city of Salvador. One of the four needles was dangerously close to his spine. The boy was doing well following the three-hour surgery, Ana Neri Hospital spokeswoman Susy Moreno said. Last week doctors removed 14 needles from the boy’s intestines, liver and bladder, and in an earlier surgery they extracted four needles from near the toddler’s heart and lungs. Police have charged the stepfather, 30-year-old Roberto Carlos Magalhaes, with attempted murder.
■MEXICO
Emigration to US falls
Emigration, which is mainly to the US, has fallen almost 40 percent since 2007, according to figures from the National Statistics Institute on Monday. The figures, which compare the first six months of the past three years, showed a downward trend, with 281,678 Mexicans emigrating in the first half of last year, compared with 465,054 in the same period in 2007. There was not yet evidence of a mass return home of Mexicans, as predicted when the worldwide economic crisis first broke out in the US, the report said.
Australians were downloading virtual private networks (VPNs) in droves, while one of the world’s largest porn distributors said it was blocking users from its platforms as the country yesterday rolled out sweeping online age restriction. Australia in December became the first country to impose a nationwide ban on teenagers using social media. A separate law now requires artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot services to keep certain content — including pornography, extreme violence and self-harm and eating disorder material — from minors or face fines of up to A$49.5 million (US$34.6 million). The country also joined Britain, France and dozens of US states requiring
Hungarian authorities temporarily detained seven Ukrainian citizens and seized two armored cars carrying tens of millions of euros in cash across Hungary on suspicion of money laundering, officials said on Friday. The Ukrainians were released on Friday, following their detention on Thursday, but Hungarian officials held onto the cash, prompting Ukraine to accuse Hungary’s Russia-friendly government of illegally seizing the money. “We will not tolerate this state banditism,” Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said. The seven detained Ukrainians were employees of the Ukrainian state-owned Oschadbank, who were traveling in the two armored cars that were carrying the money between Austria and
Kosovar President Vjosa Osmani on Friday after dissolving the Kosovar parliament said a snap election should be held as soon as possible to avoid another prolonged political crisis in the Balkan country at a time of global turmoil. Osmani said it is important for Kosovo to wrap up the upcoming election process and form functional institutions for political stability as the war rages in the Middle East. “Precisely because the geopolitical situation is that complex, it is important to finish this electoral process which is coming up,” she said. “It is very hard now to imagine what will happen next.” Kosovo, which declared
MORE BANS: Australia last year required sites to remove accounts held by under-16s, with a few countries pushing for similar action at an EU level and India considering its own ban Indonesia on Friday said it would ban social media access for children under 16, citing threats from online pornography, cyberbullying, online fraud and Internet addiction. “Accounts belonging to children under 16 on high-risk platforms will start to be deactivated, beginning with YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Bigo Live and Roblox,” Indonesian Minister of Communications and Digital Meutya Hafid said. “The government is stepping in so that parents no longer have to fight alone against the giants of the algorithm. Implementation will begin on March 28, 2026,” she said. The social media ban would be introduced in stages “until all platforms fulfill their
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