■THAILAND
Plane crew kept longer
Prosecutors extended the detention period of the crew of a plane carrying weapons from North Korea that was seized in Bangkok last month, said Kayasit Pissawanprakan, director-general of the Department of Criminal Litigation. The five crew members, from Kazakhstan and Belarus, will now be held until at least Feb. 11, Kayasit said. Prosecutors have yet to decide whether to bring the case to trial.
■AUSTRALIA
Author snubs China for Liu
Award-winning author Frank Moorhouse said yesterday he would boycott an upcoming tour of China to protest the jailing of dissident Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波). Moorhouse said he could not condone Beijing’s punishment of Liu and stifling of free speech by going ahead with his March trip. The outspoken writer said he had discussed, but ultimately rejected, the possibility of going ahead with the tour and requesting an empty chair symbolizing Liu on stage during his events. Moorhouse, who won the Miles Franklin award in 2001 for his novel Dark Palace, was to take in Beijing and Chengdu and international literary festivals in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Liu was jailed last month for 11 years by a Beijing court for subversion after co-writing Charter 08, a widely circulated petition that called for political reform and was signed by more than 10,000 people. The 53-year-old writer was previously jailed for his involvement in the 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy protests and has been honored by Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders and other rights groups.
■INDIA
Two troops killed in Kashmir
Islamic militants killed two Indian army soldiers during a mountain gunbattle in Kashmir, the military said yesterday, in the latest of a series of clashes this month. The fighting erupted late on Thursday in the mountains of southern Kishtwar district, army spokesman Biplab Nath said. Troops have launched an intensive search to “arrest or eliminate” the militants, he said. The attack came hours after suspected rebels shot and wounded Ismail Lone, a senior official of the Communist Party of India in southern Kulgam district, a police spokesman said. Lone’s nephew was also hurt in the shootout.
■NEW ZEALAND
Dog slayers weapons seized
Police yesterday seized weapons used by two men to slaughter more than 30 dogs owned by a neighbor in what animal welfare authorities said could be the country’s worst animal cruelty case. Inspectors from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), shocked at the slaughter near Auckland, said it planned to file charges over the killings when it finishes forensic examination of the dead dogs. Police are investigating the incident, looking at firearms’ registration and possible charges of reckless discharge of a gun, spokesman Kevin Loughlin said. Media reports said Russell Mendoza had confronted a neighbor, Rowan Hargreaves, complaining that one of Hargreaves’ 39 dogs had killed his fox terrier. Mendoza and another man, armed with a .22 rifle and a shotgun, later returned to Hargreaves’ property and shot 33 dogs, including 23 puppies and very young dogs. SPCA investigator Sascha Keltie said bullet entry and exit wounds to some of the dogs indicated they had not died instantly, and blood trails were consistent with an injured dog moving. The men could face up to three years in prison.
■SPAIN
Charges filed against imam
Charges have been filed against an imam accusing him of threatening a woman who refused to wear a headscarf or abide by Islamic customs, prosecutors said on Thursday. Prosecutors are seeking a jail sentence for Mohamed Benbrahim on charges of calumny, coercion and menacing behavior against Fatima Ghailan. In a statement to the court in the town of Vendrells, Ghailan said Benbrahim had harassed her and campaigned to have her removed from her job in the town hall’s cultural department because she had a job, dressed in a Western style, drove a car and associated with non-Muslims. She said the imam and his supporters also pressured her husband and children. Ghailan filed a complaint after she said she and her husband were accosted in the street by the imam, who told them they would be run out of the town.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Morning-after pill a success
A new morning-after pill is more effective than the most widely used drug at preventing pregnancies, a new study says. The report was published yesterday in the British medical journal, Lancet. Levonorgestrel, the most widely used emergency contraceptive pill, is sold under the brand name Plan B. International researchers compared Plan B to the new drug, sold as ellaOne in Europe. Experts tracked nearly 1,700 women who received emergency contraception within three to five days of having unprotected sex. About half got Plan B while the rest got ellaOne. In the group that got Plan B, there were 22 pregnancies. In those that got ellaOne, there were 15.
■SWEDEN
Ex-police chief accused
A former high-ranking police chief has been ordered held in jail on suspicions of rape and plotting to rape children. The Stockholm district court approved a request on Thursday by prosecutors to keep Goran Lindberg in custody until Feb. 5 while the investigation continues. Lindberg has denied the allegations. Lindberg has served as police commissioner in the city of Uppsala and as head of the national police academy.
■UNITED KINGDOM
University broke law
Britain’s data protection watchdog says the university at the center of a climate change dispute broke the law by refusing to comply with public requests for climate data. The Information Commissioner’s Office says the University of East Anglia broke the Freedom of Information Act. The organization said e-mail exchanges between leading climate scientists — stolen from the university’s climate research center and made public — show that the institution failed to deal with a request for information submitted in 2008. Climate skeptics had seized on the leaked e-mails as proof that the case for man-made climate change has been exaggerated.
■GERMANY
Abuse scandal rocks school
Students at one of the country’s most prestigious high schools were sexually abused for years by teachers, the school’s director said on Thursday. Father Klaus Mertes says he has sent letters to alumni of Berlin’s private Catholic Canisius Kolleg after seven ex-students recently reported they were abused in the 1970s and 1980s. Mertes said that the seven, and likely many more, were abused by two ex-teachers who were members of the Jesuit order.
■UNITED STATES
Suspects to sue officials
Two white suspects cleared in the death of a black man who was allegedly dragged beneath a vehicle are suing the Texas officials who kept them jailed for more than eight months. The federal lawsuit filed this week seeks at least US$4 million for Shannon Finley and Ryan Crostley, once the main suspects in the 2008 death of their friend, Brandon McClelland. Authorities accused the men of running down the 24-year-old and dragging his body as far as 20m beneath a pickup truck, but murder charges were eventually dropped because of a lack of evidence. A gravel truck driver gave a sworn statement that he might have accidentally run over McClelland.
■UNITED STATES
Teen arrested over photo
A 14-year-old boy in Washington state has been arrested after police say he sent a photo of his naked 13-year-old ex-girlfriend by mobile phone to other students. Police say the image was forwarded to dozens of students in at least three different schools. A Thurston County prosecutor told KIRO-TV that the Chinook Middle School student and two other teens could face child pornography charges. If convicted, they could serve up to a month in detention. The students have been released to their parents until a decision is made whether to file charges.
■PERU
Tourists airlifted to safety
Rescue teams evacuating thousands of tourists trapped for four days around the rain-drenched ruins of Machu Picchu stepped up their efforts on Thursday, as better weather allowed a flurry of helicopter flights. Thursday saw 1,400 people rescued from jungle-covered areas surrounding the Inca site by midday, the Peruvian Minister for Tourism Martin Perez said. Twelve helicopters took advantage of a break in the torrential downpours to run some 93 flights laden with weary tourists from the town of Aguas Calientes at the foot of the ruins. Authorities said 800 tourists were still stranded, either in or near Machu Picchu or along the Inca Trail, a narrow Andean pathway up to the ruins that takes four days to complete.
■UNITED STATES
Singer duped, attorney says
An attorney says an Islamic singer accused of concealing ties to a terrorist group was duped into supporting the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. Mohamad Masfaka agreed on Thursday to remain jailed in Detroit while his case moves through federal court. The 47-year-old faces charges that include attempted fraud in naturalization proceedings. Masfaka, who is from Syria, is also known as the popular Islamic singer Abu Ratib. The government alleges he worked for Holy Land Foundation in 1997 and 1998, but didn’t mention it in a 2002 naturalization application. The US government has labeled the foundation a terrorist group, alleging it supported the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
■BRAZIL
Heavy rains kill 64 people
Two months of heavy rains have killed 64 people in Sao Paulo State and flooded several areas in its huge city of the same name, officials and media reported on Thursday. The near-constant precipitation has filled to capacity two of the six dams supplying the city, requiring the release of millions of liters of water, Sao Paulo’s sanitation authority said. The two big rivers cutting through Sao Paulo, the Pinheiros and the Tiete, also broke their banks in parts, blocking adjacent freeways. Many of the fatalities were the result of mudslides or building collapses, the state civil defense service said.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
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