■KOREAS
North envoy flees to South
A North Korean embassy official in Ethiopia has defected through Seoul’s diplomatic mission in Addis Ababa, YTN cable news network in Seoul said yesterday. YTN said the 40-year-old medical doctor, identified only as Kim, fled to the South Korean embassy and asked for political asylum last October. It said the defection prompted the North Korean ambassador in Ethiopia to make a protest call to his South Korean counterpart. South Korean foreign ministry officials escorted him to Seoul in early November, it said. The South’s foreign ministry declined to comment.
■VIETNAM
New probe over Japan aid
A Vietnamese official jailed for abuse of power in a scandal that led Japan to suspend aid to Vietnam is under investigation for graft in the same case, the official police newspaper said yesterday. The new probe into Huynh Ngoc Sy, a former transport official, was announced on Monday, the Cong An Nhan Dan (People’s Police) newspaper said. After finding new evidence in files received from Japanese prosecutors, Vietnamese police are investigating whether Sy received bribes of up to US$262,000 from Tokyo-based Pacific Consultants International (PCI), the Thanh Nien newspaper reported. Sy is already serving a three-year sentence after being convicted last September of abusing his position.
■MALAYSIA
Japanese faces charges
A Japanese woman appeared in court yesterday on charges of trafficking 3.5kg of methamphetamines, which will see her executed if convicted. Mariko Takeuchi, 35, appeared tired and nervous during the appearance at a sessions court outside the capital Kuala Lumpur. “We have received the chemist report. It said she was carrying 3.493 grams of methamphetamines. She faces the mandatory death sentence if convicted,” her lawyer S. Prakasah told reporters outside the sessions court. The lab results reduced the amount of drugs in question from an earlier allegation of 4.7kg of methamphetamines. Judge Zulhelmy Hasan agreed to a prosecution request to transfer the case from the Sepang sessions court to the High Court, which is empowered to deal with capital cases. No date has been fixed for the start of the trial.
■MALAYSIA
Court removes ban on book
The Kuala Lumpur High Court on Monday overturned a government ban on a book about Muslim women that authorities claimed was a misinterpretation of Islam and a threat to public stability, a lawyer said yesterday. The verdict marks a rare occasion that a publisher has successfully challenged the home ministry’s power to block books considered inappropriate. The court ruled that Muslim Women and the Challenge of Islamic Extremism did not pose any threat to national security, said Malik Imtiaz Sarwar, a lawyer for Sisters in Islam, the Malaysian women’s advocacy group that published the book.
■CHINA
No more cat and dog meat
Dog and cat meat could be off the menu under China’s first law against animal abuse, the Chongqing Evening News said yesterday. People who eat either animal would face fines of up to 5,000 yuan (US$730) and up to 15 days in jail if the law is passed, the report said. It said “organizations” involved in the practice would be fined from 10,000 to 500,000 yuan. The report gave no other details.
■FRANCE
Burton to head Cannes jury
Visionary screen storyteller Tim Burton is to head the jury at this year’s Cannes film festival from May 12 to May 23, in what the US director said “is a dream come true.” “After spending my early life watching triple features and 48-hour horror movie marathons, I’m finally ready for this,” the US director said in a statement released by the festival yesterday.
■YEMEN
Seven ‘militants’ jailed
A court yesterday sentenced seven suspected al-Qaeda members to between five and 10 years in jail after convicting them of plotting to attack foreign interests and tourists. The seven were arrested while preparing explosives and monitoring tourist buses to attack them, police said. Their trial began on Oct. 17. They were convicted of “plotting to form an armed gang to execute criminal acts targeting foreign tourists and interests and government installments,” the verdict read.
■KUWAIT
‘Illegal’ car race kills eight
Eight Kuwaiti youths were killed and 14 others injured, seven in critical condition, when several cars collided during an unofficial car race, a security source and witnesses said yesterday. Dozens of youths were watching the race in Doha, 20km west of Kuwait City, around midnight on Monday when the accident took place, witnesses said. Two of the racing cars went astray, smashed into four other parked vehicles, hitting many spectators, which caused the number of casualties to rise, a security source said. Illegal car races are common in this affluent Gulf state where car ownership is very high.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Americans sought asylum
Government figures show that dozens of Americans and Canadians have applied for asylum in the UK in the past few years on the grounds that they were persecuted in their own countries. Home Office figures show 45 Americans and 15 Canadians tried to obtain asylum in Britain between 2004 and 2008. The British government says all of the applicants were refused. The Home Office was unable to give information explaining why.
■ITALY
Father stabbed over game
A man who argued with his son over Sony PlayStation tactics was recovering in hospital on Monday after the teenager stabbed him in the neck with a 40cm kitchen knife, police said. The man suffered a deep cut to the throat after his 16-year-old son, Mario, attacked him during an argument on Sunday over the soccer video game FIFA 2009. Police said the argument broke out when the 46-year-old storekeeper offered his son advice on tactics to improve his play, and then turned the television off in response to his son’s behavior. Fetching a knife from the kitchen, Mario stabbed his father in the neck before returning to clean the weapon at the kitchen sink in front of his mother and leaving it to dry on the draining board. His mother told the Il Corriere della Sera daily: “I saw Mario come back into the room, he seemed calm, he went to the sink and I noticed him washing a knife,” Monica told the newspaper. “Then my husband came into the room with a hand round his neck, dripping blood.” The teenager shut himself in his bedroom after the attack and made no attempt to resist arrest, police said. The game had been given to Mario a few days earlier, as a birthday present. “We bought him FIFA 2009 because we didn’t want him playing violent games,” his mother told Il Corriere.
■UNITED STATES
Prince bids for office
Could actress Zsa Zsa Gabor be California’s next first lady? That may seem implausible, but her ninth husband, Prince Frederic von Anhalt, a German-born socialite with no previous political experience, on Monday announced his own independent campaign to succeed Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor. Von Anhalt, 65, launched his long-shot bid for office with a news conference in West Hollywood and the unveiling of a large billboard on the Sunset Strip, showing him smiling and dressed in a military-style coat adorned with various medals. Von Anhalt described himself as a longtime Republican and fiscal conservative who is liberal on social issues like gay marriage rights.
■UNITED STATES
No more ‘D&D’ for inmate
A convicted murderer serving life in prison in Wisconsin has lost his legal battle to play Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) behind bars. Kevin Singer filed a lawsuit against officials at Wisconsin’s Waupun prison after a policy was initiated in 2004 to eradicate all D&D game materials among concerns that playing it promotes gang-related activity. The 33-year-old Singer is a devoted player of the fantasy role-playing game that involves recruiting others to play as a group. He argued that his First Amendment rights were being violated and demanded that D&D material confiscated from his cell be returned. The 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Monday that the prison’s policy was reasonable.
■GUATEMALA
Huge Mayan head found
Archeologists have discovered a huge Mayan sculptured head that suggests a little-known site in the jungle-covered Peten region may once have been a significant city. The stucco sculpture, which is 3m wide and 3.5m tall, was buried for centuries at the Chilonche ruins, close to the border with Belize. The recent discovery of the head, which dates from the early Classic period between 300AD and 600AD, means the site is much older than previously thought. Unlike the famous Mayan cities of Tikal and El Mirador, little excavation has been carried out at Chilonche.
■UNITED STATES
Picasso to be repaired
A painting by late Spanish artist Pablo Picasso accidentally damaged by a visitor last week will be repaired in time for a large exhibition of the artist’s work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in April. The Actor, a painting from Picasso’s rose period, will be restored at the museum’s conservation laboratory, the Met said on Monday. The accident occurred when a patron participating in an art class lost her balance and fell on the canvas, creating a 15cm tear.
■UNITED STATES
Pernell Roberts passes on
Actor Pernell Roberts, who shocked Hollywood by leaving the TV Western Bonanza at the height of its popularity, then found fame again years later on Trapper John, M.D., has died. He was 81. Roberts, the last surviving member of the classic Western’s cast, died of cancer on Sunday at his Malibu home, his wife Eleanor Criswell told the Los Angeles Times. Although he rocketed to fame in 1959 as Adam Cartwright, eldest son of a Nevada ranching family led by Lorne Greene’s patriarchal Ben Cartwright, Roberts chafed at the limitations he felt his Bonanza character was given. Roberts agreed to fulfill his six-year contract but refused to extend it.
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
ISSUE: Some foreigners seek women to give birth to their children in Cambodia, and the 13 women were charged with contravening a law banning commercial surrogacy Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday thanked Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni for granting a royal pardon last year to 13 Filipino women who were convicted of illegally serving as surrogate mothers in the Southeast Asian kingdom. Marcos expressed his gratitude in a meeting with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, who was visiting Manila for talks on expanding trade, agricultural, tourism, cultural and security relations. The Philippines and Cambodia belong to the 10-nation ASEAN, a regional bloc that promotes economic integration but is divided on other issues, including countries whose security alignments is with the US or China. Marcos has strengthened
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