SOUTH KOREA
Pears create scare
A warm-hearted elderly man sparked a security scare at the G20 summit in Seoul by trying to send a gift of pears to US President Barack Obama, Yonhap news agency reported yesterday. Staff at a post office in southern Seoul on Tuesday received a parcel addressed to Obama’s youngest daughter, Sasha, and intended for delivery to the summit venue. Employees on alert for suspect packages during the event investigated the contents. X-rays showed round objects resembling fruit, but wary staff still called in a SWAT team and a sniffer dog. The gift of Asian pears was returned to its elderly sender in the southern port city of Busan the same day, Yonhap said.
SOUTH KOREA
Gillard doll gets make-over
A doll representing Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard has been given a quick change of clothes after officials in Seoul mistakenly garbed her in Austrian national gear. The figurine of Gillard, dressed in a Sound of Music-style red and white puff-sleeved dress and pink apron, was part of a display of dolls representing leaders attending the G20 summit. The display at the showpiece Cheonggye Plaza was organized by the city government. “We changed the doll’s outfit yesterday after a protest call from embassy officials,” a spokesman said yesterday. “It’s now wearing a suit instead of traditional clothes.”
MICRONESIA
Bad turtles kill six
Six people died and more than 90 fell ill after eating endangered turtles, the Pacific nation’s government said yesterday. The deaths, which included four children, occurred after a feast on the island of Murilo in the middle of last month, where the rare hawksbill turtle was consumed, the public information office said. It said government health officials and the WHO found the deaths were a result of chelonitoxism, a type of poisoning caused by biotoxins in turtle flesh for which there is no known antidote. It said health authorities had recommended a complete ban on eating turtles and their eggs as a result of the deaths.
PAKISTAN
Karachi attack kills 18
Militants armed with guns and a truck bomb demolished a police department used to detain terror suspects in Karachi on Thursday, killing 18 people and wounding 130 others. Pakistan’s Taliban swiftly claimed responsibility for what was a rare attack on government security forces in Karachi, a politically tense city of 16 million in the south, far removed from militant strongholds in the northwest. The attackers targeted the police’s Crime Investigation Department in the most heavily protected heart of the city, not far from five-star hotel chains frequented by Westerners, the US consulate and government offices.
SRI LANKA
Two people killed in floods
Thousands of displaced people in Colombo were moving out of temporary shelters as flood waters receded, but a man drowned yesterday, raising the number of fatalities to two, officials said. The man perished when his makeshift boat capsized in a swollen river near the capital, which was deluged by the heaviest rains in 18 years on Thursday. “Nearly 300,000 people were driven out of their homes initially, but thousands have left the 16 temporary shelters we had set up,” a disaster management official said. The national assembly was also flooded.
SUDAN
Parasitic disease kills 260
A rare parasitic disease has killed 260 people in the past year, a figure that is threatening to double in the coming months, the WHO said on Thursday. “Since September last year, 260 people died of kala azar in southern Sudan, most of them children who suffer from malnutrition,” said Abdinasir Abubakar, head of the WHO in the south. Kala azar, or visceral leishmaniasis, is a rare tropical disease contracted by the bite of a sand fly.
GERMANY
Judge makes stand on speed
A judge has shot to popularity after letting 42 speeding drivers off without charges in the last week because he thinks speed controls merely serve to fill the state’s coffers rather than prevent accidents. Bernd Kahre, spokesman for Herford court where judge Helmut Knoener works, said the 62-year-old wanted to make a stand against the current practice of prosecuting speeders. However, the speeders who think they’ve got off scot free may be in for a shock yet — the Public Prosecution Service can still appeal the sentences, Kahre said.
JORDAN
Sister killers sent to prison
A Jordanian court has sentenced three men to between 10 and seven years in jail for killing their sister over a “love affair,” an official said on Thursday. The three brothers, all under 30, had agreed last year to kill the 40-year-old divorced woman from Abu Alanda, in southeast Amman, because of an alleged liaison. “She was stabbed 15 times. One of them said that the mother of five had a love affair with a man and that he saw pictures of her sitting with the alleged lover,” the official said. “They burned the victim’s body and set her house ablaze to cover up the crime.”
BRAZIL
Clown takes literacy test
A television clown elected to Congress submitted to a literacy test on Thursday to try to disprove critics who said he could neither read nor write and therefore should be disqualified from office. Francisco Oliveira, a 45-year-old comic better known by his stage name Tiririca, was ordered by a judge to undergo the test in Sao Paulo under a provision in Brazil’s constitution that requires lawmakers to be literate. Oliveira was given one dictation and two reading exams. A judge will now determine whether his performance in the test established he was literate. Oliveira was elected as a Sao Paulo federal representative in Oct. 3 legislative polls with 1.3 million ballots — the most of any of the candidates.
UNITED STATES
‘Garfield’ creator apologizes
Cartoonist Jim Davis apologized on Thursday for a Garfield strip that some veterans may have found offensive. The strip ran on Veterans Day in newspapers across the country. It shows a spider daring the pudgy orange cat to squash it. The spider tells Garfield that if he is killed, “they will hold an annual day of remembrance in my honor.” The final panel shows a spider-teacher asking its students if they know why spiders celebrate “National Stupid Day.” Davis, of Muncie, Indiana, said in a statement posted on his Web site that he didn’t know the strip would appear on Veterans Day. He said it was written nearly a year ago and called the publication on Thursday “the worst timing ever.” “It absolutely, positively has nothing to do with this important day of remembrance,” Davis said.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
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
The administration of US President Donald Trump has appointed to serve as the top public diplomacy official a former speech writer for Trump with a history of doubts over US foreign policy toward Taiwan and inflammatory comments on women and minorities, at one point saying that "competent white men must be in charge." Darren Beattie has been named the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, a senior US Department of State official said, a role that determines the tone of the US' public messaging in the world. Beattie requires US Senate confirmation to serve on a permanent basis. "Thanks to
‘IMPOSSIBLE’: The authors of the study, which was published in an environment journal, said that the findings appeared grim, but that honesty is necessary for change Holding long-term global warming to 2°C — the fallback target of the Paris climate accord — is now “impossible,” according to a new analysis published by leading scientists. Led by renowned climatologist James Hansen, the paper appears in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development and concludes that Earth’s climate is more sensitive to rising greenhouse gas emissions than previously thought. Compounding the crisis, Hansen and colleagues argued, is a recent decline in sunlight-blocking aerosol pollution from the shipping industry, which had been mitigating some of the warming. An ambitious climate change scenario outlined by the UN’s climate