CHINA
Artist offers river crabs
Outspoken artist Ai Weiwei (艾未未) says he is offering his supporters 10,000 river crabs — an autumn delicacy — to “celebrate” the government-ordered demolition of his new Shanghai studio. Ai, one of China’s most famous artists and social critics, was invited to build the US$1.1 million studio in a new art district in the city’s north, but officials have now declared it an illegal structure. “Nov. 7 is ‘River Crab Fest’ at Ai Weiwei’s Shanghai studio,” he wrote in a post on Twitter. The artist said he would offer a banquet on Sunday including Chinese wine and 10,000 river crabs — whose name in Chinese sounds like “harmonize,” a government euphemism for censorship.
AUSTRALIA
Gillard woos Indonesia
Prime Minister Julia Gillard sought Indonesian support yesterday for her proposal for a regional refugee center during talks in Jakarta with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. A surge of boats carrying more than 5,000 asylum seekers since January has made people-smuggling a hot-button issue in Australia and the center-left Labor government says offshore detention will be a deterrent. Australia hopes to build a refugee facility in neighboring East Timor and discussed the issue in a series of ministerial meetings in Jakarta and Dili last month. Yudhoyono said Indonesia believed the issue should be dealt with according to existing frameworks such as the Bali Process.
PAKISTAN
Flood victims still need help
Millions affected by July’s devastating floods will need humanitarian assistance for the next two years, with many still trapped by high water, the Red Cross and Red Crescent aid groups said on Monday. Three months on, more than 1 million people are still living in camps because of high water in southern Sindh Province and the situation is repeated in other affected areas, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said in a statement. In Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, most displaced families have returned home, but many basic services have been destroyed and there are few sources of income.
AFGHANISTAN
Bomb kills 2 NATO troops
NATO says a bomb has killed two coalition service members in the southern part of the country. Monday night’s statement did not provide further details or nationalities. NATO and Afghan troops began a major operation to wrest back control of the south from the Taliban insurgency in July. They have established some pockets of security, but insurgents still carry out daily attacks and bombings. Analysts say the operation’s ultimate test of success will be whether it enables the Afghan government to establish its presence and win public support by providing services to the people.
CHINA
Papers lash out at Japan
Japan is setting a “bad example” for Asia with its nationalistic attitude, stirring up trouble across the continent, a state Chinese newspaper said yesterday as a row between Beijing and Tokyo rumbles on. The Global Times — a sister publication of the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece the People’s Daily — on Monday hit out at Japanese Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara, branding him an “extremist,” but yesterday took aim at Tokyo itself. It accused Tokyo of failing to move past World War II. Memories of wartime atrocities linger in China and South Korea, where some residents say Japan has not done enough to make amends.
UNITED KINGDOM
iPhone makes workers late
Scores of iPhone 4 users said they were late for work on Monday after a software bug meant the alarm on the Apple device failed to adjust when the country’s clocks changed. Hundreds of angry comments were posted on microblogging Web site Twitter about the apparent glitch, which happened even though the rest of the phone’s features updated the time automatically. “Well done Apple — you’ve made me decide I need to use a proper alarm clock rather than relying on my iPhone,” one user tweeted.
UGANDA
Homophobic paper shut
A newspaper that published names and pictures of what it said were homosexuals and called on authorities to hang them has been ordered to cease publishing, a gay rights leader said on Monday. Frank Mugisha, chairman of the Sexual Minorities Uganda, said his group had petitioned the high court to order Rolling Stone to stop work because it was exposing innocent people to discrimination, ridicule, intimidation and possible violence. Uganda’s penal code outlaws homosexuality.
UNITED STATES
Singer’s drug trial delayed
Jamaican reggae singer Buju Banton’s retrial in Florida has been pushed back until February. Banton, whose real name is Mark Myrie, is accused of conspiring to buy cocaine from an undercover officer in Sarasota.
FRANCE
Princess Di’s thief jailed
A man who held the hand of Britain’s Princess Diana as she lay dying in a Paris car crash has been jailed after months on the run for robbing cash machines and handling stolen paintings, police said. Abdelatif Redjil, 54, opened the door of Diana’s wrecked Mercedes, held her hand and tried to comfort her, he testified in 2007 at London’s High Court during an inquiry into Diana’s death. A police source in Meaux, near Paris, said on Sunday that Redjil, known as “The Locksmith” for his skills at breaking and entering, was arrested on Wednesday for stealing 33,000 euros (US$41,000) from a cash machine.
UNITED KINGDOM
Lawmaker stabbed for Iraq
A 21-year-old woman stabbed a lawmaker in the stomach with a kitchen knife as revenge for his support of the Iraq war, police and prosecutors said on Monday. Legislator Stephen Timms said Roshonara Choudhry appeared to be smiling before she attacked him during an open-house session for constituents at a London community center in May. Choudhry is charged with attempting to murder Timms, who was a Treasury minister in the previous Labor government. Detective Inspector Simon Dobinson told a jury at London’s Central Criminal Court that when questioned by police Choudhry said: “I was trying to kill him because he wanted to invade Iraq.”
ROMANIA
Former hardliner dies
Former army general Mihai Chitac, convicted of trying to suppress the 1989 anti-communist revolution in a western city where dozens were killed, has died. He was 81. Chitac’s family said he died at home Monday, according to Mediafax news agency. A cause of death wasn’t announced. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison in October 2008, together with ex-army general Victor Stanculescu, for trying to quell the anti-communist revolt in Timisoara. Seventy people died in the city during the revolt.
UNITED STATES
Jenkins wins custody
A state supreme court said a lower court was right to award custody of an eight-year-old girl to her non-biological mother in a lesbian custody case. In a ruling released on Monday, the Vermont Supreme Court upheld an order last year giving Janet Jenkins sole custody of Isabella Miller-Jenkins. It rejected an appeal by attorneys for biological mother Lisa Miller. Jenkins is from Vermont. Miller is from Virginia. They were joined in a civil union in Vermont in 2000. The custody ruling may be a moot point: Miller has renounced her homosexuality and she and her daughter failed to appear for a court-ordered custody swap in January. Their whereabouts are now unknown.
UNITED STATES
Masked man arrested
A man faces charges of wearing a mask or hood in public after police arrested him on Halloween night and charged him under a rarely used old law designed to combat the Ku Klux Klan. The News & Observer of Raleigh reported that 20-year-old Lawrence Marqueal Rogers was cited for wearing a red bandana that police said concealed everything but his eyes. He was then arrested when he donned the garment again. Rogers was being held on Monday in jail on a US$7,500 bond.
CUBA
Three dissidents to be freed
The government has approved the release of three political prisoners who will leave for Spain, which will take the number of freed dissidents since July to 50, the Archbishop of Havana’s office said on Monday. There are still 13 dissidents in prison, however, out of a group of 52 the government specifically agreed to release, said the office which has been a mediator in the dissidents’ cases. The latest dissidents due to be freed are Adrian Alvarez Arencibia, who has been in jail for espionage since 1985; Fidel Basulto Garcia, who was arrested in 1994 for transport piracy; and Joel Torres Gonzalez, who has been in jail for illegal emigration-related crimes.
UNITED STATES
Sheen files for divorce
Charlie Sheen filed to end his marriage to his third wife on Monday and stated in documents that the couple separated the same day as a Christmas altercation last year that led to assault charges against the actor. Sheen cited irreconcilable differences for the divorce and indicated in court filings in Los Angeles that the couple have a prenuptial agreement. He and Brooke Mueller Sheen were married in May 2008 and have twin sons together. He is seeking joint custody, but is asking a judge not to award his wife any spousal support.
UNITED STATES
Missing girl’s fake leg found
A prosthetic leg found in North Carolina belonged to a 10-year-old Australian girl who has been missing for weeks, police said on Monday. The police department said the artificial left leg belonged to Zahra Baker, who lost her own leg to bone cancer. Police said the serial number on the leg recovered on Wednesday last week matched medical records that detectives collected from her native Australia. They said a scanner was used to pull the serial number from a transponder inside the leg. Authorities released no other details, saying only that investigators were continuing to search the family’s home in Hickory, North Carolina, for additional evidence. Zahra’s father reported her missing on Oct. 9. Searchers found the leg at a home where Zahra’s stepmother once lived, Hickory Police Major Clyde Deal said last week.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
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