■AUSTRALIA
Jellyfish out of water
A sailor had an unlucky encounter with a potentially deadly irukandji jellyfish after the tiny marine animal somehow hit him as he fished off a bulk carrier, officials said yesterday. The man was taken to a Queensland hospital and survived. The Central Queensland Helicopter Rescue Service said it was not known whether the man reeled in the jellyfish, which is the size of a small fingernail, or whether it was splashed onto him by a freak wave. The man was fishing from the deck of the carrier about 25m above the water level.
■THAILAND
‘Red shirts’ cry foul
Thousands of supporters of fugitive former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra rallied yesterday outside the house of a royal adviser to protest against alleged judicial double standards. The demonstrators allege that the home of privy councilor and former prime minister Surayud Chulanont in the Khao Yai Tieng forest, 200km northeast of Bangkok, is built illegally in a national park. The protest is the first by Thaksin’s so-called “Red Shirts” this year. Police said around 2,000 protesters had rallied opposite the entrance to the house and were expected to stay until the evening, when there would be a telephone speech from Thaksin. Around 1,500 police officers were providing security.
■SOUTH KOREA
Ministries will not relocate
Seoul announced a US$14.6 billion blueprint yesterday to develop a new city as a science and education hub, dropping controversial plans to move several ministries there. The country’s biggest business group, Samsung, has signed a deal to move some operations to Sejong City, along with the Hanwha, Woongjin and Lotte groups, Prime Minister Chung Un-chan said. The announcement officially scraps a plan announced in 2005 by then-president Roh Moo-hyun to relocate nine ministries and four subsidiary agencies to the city 150km south of Seoul.
■AUSTRALIA
PRC proceeds with Rio case
A Chinese investigation into a detained Australian Rio Tinto mining executive has been sent to prosecutors, Australian media said yesterday. Four Rio staff, including Australian citizen Stern Hu (胡士泰), have been in Chinese custody since July over accusations of illegally obtaining commercial secrets. The case, which has caused tensions between Australia and China, has placed a cloud over already contentious iron ore price negotiations between China and miner Rio, its fellow Australian miner BHP Billiton and Brazil’s Vale.
■ITALY
Mom has sextuplets
A woman has given birth to sextuplets in the first such case in the nation since 1997. The ANSA news agency says the babies are in good condition. They were born on Sunday to 32-year-old Carmela Oliva in Benevento, near Naples. Father Pino Mele said he hopes the sextuplets’ grandparents would help out, saying they’re the first grandchildren in the family.
■FRANCE
UK minister’s niece on trial
The niece of a British government minister went on trial yesterday accused of the murder of a man whose throat was slit after she picked him up in a bar and brought him to her home. Jessica Davies contacted police in November 2007 to say she had stabbed the 24-year-old at her apartment west of Paris, judicial sources said. Police found the now 30-year-old niece of Britain’s junior defense minister Quentin Davies so drunk that she could not be brought before a judge until the evening, sources said. Davies claimed to remember nothing of the stabbing, only that she had met Olivier Mugnier in a pub a few hours before his death, one source said. Davies was reportedly depressed after splitting up with her boyfriend. Legal sources said psychiatrists who had examined Davies found she suffered from psychological problems.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Islamist march canceled
A radical Islamic group on Sunday abandoned plans to hold an anti-war march through a town where processions are held for British soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Islam4UK had provoked anger with the plan to parade through Wootton Bassett. A statement from Islam4UK’s leader, Anjem Choudary, said the group had “successfully highlighted the plight of Muslims in Afghanistan.” He went on: “We at Islam4UK have decided, after consultation with others including our Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, that no more could be achieved even if a procession were to take place in Wootton Bassett and in light of this we would like to announce today that there will no longer be a procession through this market town.”
■SOUTH AFRICA
‘Crime lord’ loses ‘penis’
Police caught more than they expected in a Cape Town drug raid when a strap-on dildo fell off a suspected crime lord during a search, the Sunday Times reported. Fat Murphy told a court that he is a hermaphrodite who holds male and female identity documents — one under the name Fadwaan, the other under Hilary. Police and a tearful Murphy recounted the saga during a bail hearing for Murphy’s charges of possession of stolen property, which come on top of earlier charges of kidnapping and intimidation, the paper said. “I had a vagina that could not be penetrated. But I also had male organs, testes. But I always knew I was really a man and that was what I wanted to be,” Murphy told the court, the newspaper said. Murphy said he received his male identity documents after undergoing surgery to remove his female organs in his teens, the paper said.
■GERMANY
Thousands honor founders
Thousands of people held a rally in east Berlin to pay tribute to the founders of the German Communist Party. Organizers say some 9,000 people gathered at Friedrichsfelde cemetery to mark the 91st anniversary of the deaths of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who were killed on Jan. 15, 1919, by right-wing militiamen. The commemoration rally is traditionally held on the second Sunday of each year.
■MEXICO
Eighteen killed at weekend
Officials said 18 people were killed over the weekend in the north, eight of them in Ciudad Juarez, where the murder rate has already more than doubled this year compared with last year. Ciudad Juarez, ground zero for drug-related violence, has seen 94 homicides since New Year’s Day, against 46 for the same period last year, authorities said. Last year, drug violence claimed more than 2,500 victims in Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas. The eight murders on Saturday included a passerby riddled with bullets from a passing car and a shootout between a military patrol and drug traffickers that left two shooters dead, the Chihuahua state attorney general’s office said. Elsewhere, eight people were murdered in the state capital, also named Chihuahua, and two others in the Nuevas Casas Grandes township, it said.
■KENYA
Radical cleric kicked about
A radical Jamaican-born Muslim cleric who led a British mosque attended by convicted terrorists was flown back to Nairobi on Sunday after an attempt to deport him failed, officials said. Nigerian authorities refused to grant a transit visa for Sheik Abdullah el-Faisal and instead sent him back to Kenya early on Sunday, an official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information said. Al-Amin Kimathi, head coordinator for the Muslim Human Rights Forum, said el-Faisal was now being held in a Nairobi prison. He said el-Faisal had been invited to Kenya by Muslim youths to give lectures. Britain, South Africa, Tanzania and the US have declined to grant el-Faisal a transit visa that would allow him to connect to flights to Jamaica, which has said it would accept him but would keep a close eye on him.
■MEXICO
Wealthy die in copter crash
Three members of one of the wealthiest families were killed in a helicopter crash in the outskirts of Mexico City on Sunday night, a city official told the Milenio television station. Local prosecutor Antonio Grandos said three members of the Saba family, which controls businesses ranging from telecoms to pharmaceuticals, were among five people killed when a private helicopter crashed in cold and foggy weather, Milenio reported.
■MALI
Al-Qaeda threatens killing
The north African branch of al-Qaeda threatened to execute a French hostage unless four of its militants are freed from jail in 20 days, two US monitoring groups said yesterday. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb said last month it was holding Frenchman Pierre Camatte, who was seized in late November, as well as three Spaniards kidnapped in Mauritania four days later.
■MEXICO
Detainees moved for movie
Officials have transferred 214 detainees from a prison in the eastern state of Veracruz to make way for a Mel Gibson film, despite the protests of relatives. Ignacio Allende prison chief Victor Gerardo Hernandez said on Saturday that 1,100 detainees remained there, but did not rule out transferring more detainees to Villa Aldama penitentiary 50km away. Saturday’s operation lasted five hours. Military officers were deployed to keep relatives away from prisoners, who fought with police several days earlier after learning of the imminent transfer. Hundreds of family members protested the move.
‘GROSS NEGLIGENCE?’ Despite a spleen typically being significantly smaller than a liver, the surgeon said he believed Bryan’s spleen was ‘double the size of what is normal’ A Florida surgeon who is facing criminal charges after allegedly removing a patient’s liver instead of his spleen has said he is “forever traumatized” by that person’s death. In a deposition from November last year that was recently obtained by NBC, 44-year-old Thomas Shaknovsky described the death of 70-year-old William Bryan as an “incredibly unfortunate event that I regret deeply.” Bryan died after the botched surgery; and last month, a grand jury in Tallahassee indicted Shaknovsky on a charge of manslaughter. “I’m forever traumatized by it and hurt by it,” Shaknovsky added, also saying that wrong-site surgeries can happen “during
Kouri Richins, a Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband is to serve a life sentence for his murder without the possibility of parole, a judge ruled on Wednesday. Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing a cocktail given to her husband, Eric Richins, with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022. A jury also found her guilty of four other felonies, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Feb. 14, 2022, with a
Former Chinese ministers of national defense Wei Fenghe(魏鳳和) and Li Shangfu (李尚福) were both sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve over graft charges, state news agency Xinhua reported on Thursday, underscoring the severity of the purge in the military. The armed forces have been one of the main targets of a broad corruption crackdown ordered by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) after coming to power in 2012. The purges reached the elite Rocket Force, which oversees nuclear weapons as well as conventional missiles, in 2023. Earlier this year they escalated further, resulting in the removal of the top general in
‘PERSONAL MISTAKES’: Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison A southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government and has resigned from her city position, officials said on Monday. Eileen Wang (王愛琳), mayor of Arcadia, was charged last month with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favorable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected
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