CHINA
Lawyer demands ruling
The lawyer for an activist arrested for seeking compensation in a 2008 tainted milk scandal said yesterday he had asked a Beijing court to rule on the months-old case or release the man. Li Fangping (李方平), who represents activist Zhao Lianhai (趙連海), said he had told a Beijing district court on Thursday that it was violating judicial procedural laws by delaying a ruling on the case. Zhao — whose own child was one of 300,000 who were sickened in 2008 by drinking milk laced with the industrial chemical melamine — was arrested in December. He was charged with causing public disturbances as he rallied other victims in the scandal to protest and demand compensation. His trial opened in March, but there has not yet been a ruling.
CHINA
Pollution up amid car boom
Booming car sales have had a devastating effect on the environment, the Ministry of Environmental Protection warned in its first-ever report on pollution caused by vehicle emissions. About a third of 113 cities surveyed failed national air standards last year, as the number of vehicles swelled to 170 million, up 9.3 percent from a year ago and 25 times the number on the roads in 1980, the ministry said. Vehicle exhaust emissions exceeded 51 million tonnes last year, including more than 40 million tonnes of carbon monoxide, nearly 5 million tonnes of hydrocarbons and about 6 million tonnes of nitrogen oxide, the report said.
CHINA
Highway pileup kills 12
A 41-vehicle pileup on a fog-shrouded highway in Jiangsu Province yesterday left at least 12 people dead and 13 injured, Xinhua news agency reported. The accident occurred on a 600m stretch of an expressway near Zhangshu City early yesterday in heavy fog, Xinhua said. Most of the vehicles involved in the chain-reaction wreck were trucks, seven of which caught fire, it said. One truck was carrying fireworks when the accident happened, but it was not immediately clear if the vehicle caught fire or exploded. More than 120 people were involved, including passengers on a bus, it said.
MALAYSIA
Four killed in floods
Four people were killed and almost 50,000 forced out of their homes and into relief camps as floods hit the north, state media said yesterday. Rising waters have hit the three states of Perlis, Kedah and Kelantan. An airport and a major highway have been closed, and train services and water supplies have also been disrupted by the nation’s worst floods in five years. The first fatalities were a 13-year-old boy and a 64-year-old German woman whose bodies were recovered in Kedah state earlier this week. The bodies of two girls who fell into an irrigation canal in Kedah were recovered on Thursday, state news agency Bernama said. Another two children who disappeared while playing in a flooded paddy were feared drowned.
PAKISTAN
Forty dead in mosque blast
A suicide bomber demolished a mosque in the northwest as Friday prayers were ending, killing at least 40 people after a relative lull in militant violence, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa provincial government officials said. The blast occurred in Darra Adam Khel, a suburb of the provincial capital, Peshawar. “It was a suicide attack, and there are 40 dead so far,” said Shahid Ullah, a senior provincial government official. At least 60 people had been wounded, provincial information minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain said. It was the biggest attack since a September suicide blast that killed 54 in the city of Quetta.
CROATIA
Presidents pay respects
Serbian President Boris Tadic on Thursday apologized for war crimes in Vukovar, the site of the bloodiest episode of the 1990s conflict in Croatia, on an historic reconciliation visit to the town. “I am here to pay respects to the victims and to express words of apology and regret,” Tadic said at the Ovcara memorial, a notorious site where about 200 people were gunned down and buried in a mass grave in 1991. In the past year, Tadic and Croatian President Ivo Josipovic have visited several symbolic war sites in Bosnia and Croatia to honor the victims and express their regrets.
GREECE
Mail bombs used gunpowder
The two young Greeks who allegedly mailed a wave of micro-bombs to embassies and foreign leaders used a simple mix of gunpowder and hollowed-out books to rattle nerves across Europe, according to investigators and court documents. Pretending to represent Greece’s top cleric, the deputy prime minister and the debt-ridden country’s finance ministry, a 22-year-old chemistry student and a jobless 24-year-old were allegedly able to send explosive packages as far as German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office. Nobody was hurt and only two devices made it out of Greece. Only two of the 14 went off where intended, while Greek authorities believe one or two may still be in the mail.
NETHERLANDS
Carbon plan scrapped
Plans for storing carbon dioxide underneath a small town, a strategy that reduces harmful emissions to combat global warming, were scrapped on Thursday by the government. The government had planned to pump 10 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from a Royal Dutch Shell oil refinery into two depleted gas fields 2km under Barendrecht, a town of 43,000 people. However, Economic Affairs Minister Maxime Verhagen said the plan “is no longer possible in the short term.” Homeowners in the town have fiercely objected to the proposal.
SWEDEN
Book shatters king’s peace
King Carl XVI Gustaf has appealed for peace and quiet after a new book shattered a long-held tradition among Swedish media not to print intimate details about his private life. Speaking to throngs of reporters at his annual moose hunt on Thursday, the monarch said he had not read the book, which includes claims of visits to seedy nightclubs and an extramarital affair in the 1990s. Without addressing those claims directly, the 64-year-old king said he understood from media headlines that the book dealt with events that happened “far back in time” and that he had spoken with his wife, Queen Silvia, about it. “We’re turning the page, much like you do in your newspapers, and looking ahead instead,” he said. Rumors about the king’s private life have swirled around for years, but even the tabloids had refrained from putting them in print until the book, Carl XVI Gustaf — The Reluctant King.
UNITED KINGDOM
Tubby lawmakers stay home
The Ministry of Defence says two lawmakers from Northern Ireland have been barred from visiting troops in Afghanistan until they can find flak jackets big enough to fit their bellies. The ministry says Ken Maginnis and David Simpson were scheduled to fly to Kabul this week, but army-issued body armor does not exceed 124.5cm, too snug for both. A ministry spokesman said on Thursday the British army offers “a wide range of sizes, but, regrettably, none was suitable on this occasion.”
CANADA
Lotto winners donate prize
A couple who won C$10.9 million (US$10.87 million) in the lottery just gave it away. Allen and Violet Large said on Thursday they won their fortune in a July 14 Lotto 649 draw and decided to donate 98 percent of it, about C$10.6 million, saving the rest for a rainy day. “We were quite happy with what we had and the way we were going,” said Allen Large, a 75-year-old retired welder. “We have no plans. We’re not travelers. We’re not night-prowlers. We’re not bar-hoppers.” After taking care of their family, the Larges donated the bulk of the prize to churches, fire departments, cemeteries and the Red Cross in Lower Truro, Nova Scotia, as well as hospitals where Violet, who has cancer, has undergone treatment.
UNITED STATES
Man sentenced in slaying
A Honduran man who admitted pulling the trigger in the execution-style killings of three college students in a Newark, New Jersey, schoolyard was sentenced on Thursday to three consecutive life terms in a case that jolted the state’s largest city into dealing with its crime problem. Melvin Jovel, 21, pleaded guilty to murder, attempted murder and weapons charges days before his trial was to begin in September. Prosecutors said Jovel and five other young men lined up Iofemi Hightower and Dashon Harvey, both 20, and 18-year-old Terrance Aeriel, against a schoolyard wall in Newark and shot each of them in the back of the head on a summer night in 2007.
UNITED STATES
Spacecraft snaps comet
A NASA spacecraft made a successful fly-by on Thursday of the Hartley 2 comet and within minutes began sending to Earth arresting images taken as the enormous space rock hurtled along the outer fringes of the solar system. “The mission team and scientists have worked hard for this day,” said Tim Larson, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which is monitoring the mission. The EPOXI reached the Hartley 2 after a 2.5-year journey across the solar system, a distance of about 4.6 billion kilometers. The EPOXI mission flew within about 700km of the comet on Thursday.
UNITED STATES
Oldest woman gains a year
The family of the newly designated world’s oldest person, Eunice Sanborn, says she is in fact 115 — a year older than official records indicate. Sanborn was vaulted into the spotlight on Thursday, recognized as the oldest living individual following the death of Eugenie Blanchard at age 114 in the French West Indies, based on a Web site that tracks living centenarians. When told of her “achievement,” Sanborn’s reaction was simple: “Oh, think of that.” Sanborn of Jacksonville, Texas, turned 115 in July although the US Census Bureau erroneously recorded her birth date as 1896 rather than 1895, her family claims.
UNITED STATES
Cops lose drug stash
Law enforcement officials want people to be on the lookout for a black box with white lettering that says “METH,” after a deputy lost a stash used to train police dogs. Sergeant Lloyd Funk says the deputy accidentally left the box on a bumper after a canine training exercise on Oct. 27. It contained about 28g of methamphetamine. The deputy drove off with the drugs perched on the vehicle. The Jackson Hole News & Guide reports that officers literally trying to get drugs off the street haven’t been able to find the box. Anyone with information is being asked to call the sheriff’s office.
Yemen’s separatist leader has vowed to keep working for an independent state in the country’s south, in his first social media post since he disappeared earlier this month after his group briefly seized swathes of territory. Aidarous al-Zubaidi’s United Arab Emirates (UAE)-backed Southern Transitional Council (STC) forces last month captured two Yemeni provinces in an offensive that was rolled back by Saudi strikes and Riyadh’s allied forces on the ground. Al-Zubaidi then disappeared after he failed to board a flight to Riyadh for talks earlier this month, with Saudi Arabia accusing him of fleeing to Abu Dhabi, while supporters insisted he was
‘SHOCK TACTIC’: The dismissal of Yang mirrors past cases such as Jang Song-thaek, Kim’s uncle, who was executed after being accused of plotting to overthrow his nephew North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has fired his vice premier, compared him to a goat and railed against “incompetent” officials, state media reported yesterday, in a rare and very public broadside against apparatchiks at the opening of a critical factory. Vice Premier Yang Sung-ho was sacked “on the spot,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency said, in a speech in which Kim attacked “irresponsible, rude and incompetent leading officials.” “Please, comrade vice premier, resign by yourself when you can do it on your own before it is too late,” Kim reportedly said. “He is ineligible for an important duty. Put simply, it was
‘TERRORIST ATTACK’: The convoy of Brigadier General Hamdi Shukri resulted in the ‘martyrdom of five of our armed forces,’ the Presidential Leadership Council said A blast targeting the convoy of a Saudi Arabian-backed armed group killed five in Yemen’s southern city of Aden and injured the commander of the government-allied unit, officials said on Wednesday. “The treacherous terrorist attack targeting the convoy of Brigadier General Hamdi Shukri, commander of the Second Giants Brigade, resulted in the martyrdom of five of our armed forces heroes and the injury of three others,” Yemen’s Saudi Arabia-backed Presidential Leadership Council said in a statement published by Yemeni news agency Saba. A security source told reporters that a car bomb on the side of the road in the Ja’awla area in
The Chinese Embassy in Manila yesterday said it has filed a diplomatic protest against a Philippine Coast Guard spokesman over a social media post that included cartoonish images of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Jay Tarriela and an embassy official had been trading barbs since last week over issues concerning the disputed South China Sea. The crucial waterway, which Beijing claims historic rights to despite an international ruling that its assertion has no legal basis, has been the site of repeated clashes between Chinese and Philippine vessels. Tarriela’s Facebook post on Wednesday included a photo of him giving a
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