■MALAYSIA
Official jailed for polygamy
An Islamic court sentenced a senior politician to a month in prison yesterday for taking a second wife without the permission of his first wife. Muslims are allowed to take up to four wives and the multiple marriage has become more popular with a “polygamy club” being set up, although it remains a minority practice in the mainly Muslim country. However, the man must ask the permission of his current wife before taking another and she must agree before the second marriage is considered legal. Bung Mokhtar, 51, is deputy president of the parliamentarians’ club of the National Front coalition that has ruled the country for 52 years. He was also fined 1,000 ringgit (US$310) in addition to the jail sentence.
■CHINA
Two shackled girls freed
A man kept two teenaged girls shackled in a secret underground chamber for nearly a year and the pair were only rescued after smuggling out a note, state media said yesterday. The girls, aged 19 and 16, were found on Friday, naked except for shackles on their feet, in the secret lair built by the man under his home in Wuhan, Hubei Province, the Beijing News reported. The 19-year-old, whose home was just 200m from where she was held, went missing in July. No details on the other girl were provided and neither victim was identified.
■PHILIPPINES
Electoral fraud probe starts
Legislators yesterday launched an inquiry into allegations of fraud in last week’s national elections, officials said. The House of Representatives suffrage committee will look into allegations of irregularities surrounding vote-counting machines in the nation’s first automated ballot, committee vice-chairman Matias Defensor said. “It seems that the complaints are not isolated but came from all over the country,” Defensor said. Congress is set to convene on Monday to confirm the apparent winner, Benigno Aquino, as the next president. More than 17,000 other positions were contested from vice president to local town mayors. While Aquino’s lead is so big over his rivals that the final verdict appears not to be in doubt, some of the losing candidates have alleged some of the results were pre-programmed in computer memory cards.
■HONG KONG
Tycoon faces more charges
China’s one-time richest man, Huang Guangyu (黃光裕), may face fraud charges in the territory even after he was jailed for 14 years by a Chinese court for bribery and insider trading, a report said yesterday. The daily South China Morning Post reported that the Securities and Futures Commission could pursue Huang, the billionaire founder of the GOME electronics and appliance chain, on stock market fraud allegations. Huang received his jail sentence from a court in Beijing on Tuesday, capping a spectacular fall from grace. In August, the market watchdog won a court order freezing HK$1.66 billion (US$213 million) in GOME shares controlled by Huang and his wife Du Juan (杜鵑).
■CHINA
Mine technicians arrested
Prosecutors have issued arrest warrants for nine technicians and engineers in connection with a mine flooding two months ago that killed 38 people but also riveted the country because 115 were rescued after more than a week trapped underground. Xinhua news agency said yesterday the nine have been accused of failing to take measures to prevent flooding and neglecting signs of the imminent flood.
■IRAN
Director on hunger strike
Film director Jafar Panahi has started a hunger strike in prison, his wife told an opposition Web site on Tuesday. Panahi, a winner of many international awards, was arrested in early March along with his wife and daughter. His family was later released and he was taken to Tehran’s Evin prison. “I was taken to interrogation on Sunday morning and was accused of having filmed the cell, which is a sheer lie,” Panahi told his family by telephone on Tuesday. “I have not eaten or drunk since Sunday morning and will continue to do so until these demands are met,” Jaras Web site quoted him as saying.
■FRANCE
Activists hold mass ‘kiss-in’
Gay rights activists staging a mass “kiss-in” to protest homophobia faced off with Roman Catholic protesters late Tuesday outside Lyon cathedral in the southeast. About 200 campaigners gathered outside the cathedral were heckled by dozens of counter-protesters, including skinheads wearing dark blue uniforms and gloves who gave a Nazi salute. Police and gendarmes kept the groups apart, as they shouted slogans at each other in a face-off that lasted more than two hours. An hour into the demonstration, around 10 gay couples staged their “kiss-in” to applause from their supporters and heckling from the counter-protesters. “It is a victory against obscurantism and intolerance,” David Souvestre, president of Gay Pride Lyon, told reporters.
■NIGER
France invites coup leader
France on Tuesday invited the leader of a Feb. 18 military coup in Niger to its Africa summit, welcoming his promise to hand over power within a year. The invitation for junta leader General Salou Djibo to attend the May 31-June 1 summit in Nice, France, was announced on Nigerien state television by Andre Parant, a French presidential diplomatic aide, in the capital Niamey. Djibo led a bloodless coup against former president Mamadou Tandja, who last year defied critics to remove constitutional limits on his term in office.
■ITALY
Senior officers convicted
An appeals court has convicted several senior police officers acquitted at their original trial over the violent crackdown on protesters at a G8 summit in 2001. The court, in the northwestern city of Genoa where the summit took place, handed down its judgment late Tuesday, the ANSA news agency reported. The original trial in November 2008 had jailed 13 Italian police officers but acquitted 16 others including the most senior officers involved in policing the summit. The appeal court convicted Francesco Gratteri, former head of the anti-crime unit, now heading up the anti-terrorism unit, who received a four-year jail sentence; Vincenzo Canterini, former head of Rome’s first rapid-intervention unit, received five years; and Spartaco Mortola, currently vice-prefect of the Torino police, was jailed for three years and eight months.
■SPAIN
Garzon to work for ICC
The same body that suspended crusading judge Baltasar Garzon last week for alleged abuse of power on Tuesday approved his request to work for the International Criminal Court (ICC). The General Council of the Judiciary voted by a margin of three-to-two to grant Garzon leave of absence to work as an adviser for the ICC for seven months because it found no “legal reasons” to oppose the request.
■UNITED STATES
Dads also get ‘baby blues’
It’s not just moms that can get postpartum depression with a study finding that one in about every 10 new dads also suffers from the “baby blues.” Researchers from the Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk pooled data from 43 studies involving about 28,000 participants that documented depression in fathers from the first three months of pregnancy to the first year after delivery. Overall, they estimated that about 10 percent of fathers experience depression before or soon after the birth of a child. By comparison, about 5 percent of men in the general population will suffer depression over the course of one year. “This suggests that depression in expecting or new dads represents a significant public health concern,” researchers James Paulson and Sharnail Bazemore said in a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. While up to 30 percent of new moms may suffer postpartum blues, little is known about how fathers fare mentally with the impending birth of a child and soon after the little one comes home from the hospital.
■UNITED STATES
McPrankster not guilty
Not McGuilty. That was the verdict from a Utah judge on Tuesday in the case of a teen cited with disorderly conduct after he and some friends went through a McDonald’s drive-through, rapping an order into the speaker. Spenser Dauwalder, 18, was cited with the infraction in October after he, along with three 17-year-old friends, imitated a rap from a popular YouTube video that begins, “I need a double cheeseburger and hold the lettuce.” Dauwalder, 18, said employees at the fast-food restaurant told him and his friends they were holding up the line and needed to order or leave. But Dauwalder said no one else was in line, and he left with his friends without buying anything. He added that he wasn’t even the one rapping. He said he was just driving the car.
■UNITED STATES
Scientists tracking oil spill
Scientists are anxiously awaiting signals about where a massive oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico may be heading, while containment of the looming environmental catastrophe proves elusive. With fears growing that the gushing well could spread damage from Louisiana to Florida, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told a Senate panel on Tuesday that his agency had been lax in overseeing offshore drilling activities and that may have contributed to the disastrous spill. Government scientists were surveying the Gulf to determine if the oil had entered a powerful current that could take it to Florida and eventually up the East Coast. Tar balls that washed up on Florida’s Key West were shipped to a Coast Guard laboratory in Connecticut to determine if they came from the spill.
■CYPRUS
Workers find ancient coffins
The antiquities department director said yesterday work crews had accidentally unearthed four rare clay coffins estimated to be about 2,000 years old. Maria Hadjicosti said the coffins adorned with floral patterns date from the east Mediterranean island’s Hellenistic to early Roman periods, between 300BC and the 1st century. She said the coffins were dug up this week from what is believed to be an ancient cemetery in the eastern coastal resort of Protaras. Hadjicosti said similar coffins dating from the same period have been found, but she called the latest find significant because the coffins were untouched by grave robbers. She said other items found at the site included human skeletal remains, glass vessels and terra cotta urns.
‘GREAT OPPRTUNITY’: The Paraguayan president made the remarks following Donald Trump’s tapping of several figures with deep Latin America expertise for his Cabinet Paraguay President Santiago Pena called US president-elect Donald Trump’s incoming foreign policy team a “dream come true” as his nation stands to become more relevant in the next US administration. “It’s a great opportunity for us to advance very, very fast in the bilateral agenda on trade, security, rule of law and make Paraguay a much closer ally” to the US, Pena said in an interview in Washington ahead of Trump’s inauguration today. “One of the biggest challenges for Paraguay was that image of an island surrounded by land, a country that was isolated and not many people know about it,”
DIALOGUE: US president-elect Donald Trump on his Truth Social platform confirmed that he had spoken with Xi, saying ‘the call was a very good one’ for the US and China US president-elect Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) discussed Taiwan, trade, fentanyl and TikTok in a phone call on Friday, just days before Trump heads back to the White House with vows to impose tariffs and other measures on the US’ biggest rival. Despite that, Xi congratulated Trump on his second term and pushed for improved ties, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. The call came the same day that the US Supreme Court backed a law banning TikTok unless it is sold by its China-based parent company. “We both attach great importance to interaction, hope for
‘FIGHT TO THE END’: Attacking a court is ‘unprecedented’ in South Korea and those involved would likely face jail time, a South Korean political pundit said Supporters of impeached South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol yesterday stormed a Seoul court after a judge extended the impeached leader’s detention over his ill-fated attempt to impose martial law. Tens of thousands of people had gathered outside the Seoul Western District Court on Saturday in a show of support for Yoon, who became South Korea’s first sitting head of state to be arrested in a dawn raid last week. After the court extended his detention on Saturday, the president’s supporters smashed windows and doors as they rushed inside the building. Hundreds of police officers charged into the court, arresting dozens and denouncing an
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
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