CHINA
Public beatings disallowed
Members of a controversial law enforcement force in Henan Province’s capital, Zhengzhou, have been ordered to sign a pledge not to beat people up, state-run China News Service reported yesterday. The chengguan, a civilian force that enforces local laws, operates in all major cities, but is widely hated due to regular reports of violence by its members in the course of their official duties. The latest case involved a 76-year-old woman, who had come into the city on a donkey cart to sell sweet potatoes and make enough money to buy medicine for her sick son, but was stopped by a chengguan officer and beaten, media reports said. It was unclear why the beating took place, but the chengguan officer was subsequently fired, punished with 10 days’ administrative detention and fined 500 yuan (US$75), reports said.
MALAYSIA
Teens jailed for murder
A High Court official said yesterday that three teenage boys had been sentenced to indefinite imprisonment for beating their classmate to death in a boarding school hazing incident. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the boys were convicted on Monday of murdering their classmate in 2007 at a school on Borneo Island. A murder conviction carries a mandatory penalty of death by hanging for adults, but since the three were minors when they committed the crime at 16, they were sentenced to be imprisoned indefinitely. They are eligible for release if they receive a pardon from the constitutional monarch.
VIETNAM
Tiger smuggler detained
State media said police in Hanoi had detained a man for transporting the carcass of a wild tiger. The 39-year-old man was stopped by police on Sunday night as he transported the carcass in his car, the New Hanoi said. He was accused of violating regulations on the protection of endangered wildlife, an offense that carries up to three years in jail. The newspaper quoted the man as telling police that he bought the carcass, which was smuggled into the country, for 600 million dong (US$30,000) and planned to resell it for 900 million dong. In September, Hanoi police seized eight full tiger skeletons and other bones.
NEW ZEALAND
Japanese jailed over drugs
A Japanese couple who helped smuggle almost 6kg of methamphetamine into New Zealand were jailed for seven-and-a-half years yesterday. Takako and Kazuhiko Takiguchi pleaded guilty in the Auckland High Court to drug importing and conspiracy charges relating to a methamphetamine seizure at Auckland airport in November last year, NZPA news agency reported. Prosecutors estimated the drugs had a street value of US$6 million. Judge Ailsa Duffy said that Kazuhiko, 40, and Takako, 32, had faced up to 16 years in jail for their offenses, but she discounted their sentences for a number of reasons, including early guilty pleas.
VIETNAM
Rights activist in detention
Police have opened a probe against a prominent government critic who was arrested for “propaganda against the state” and will be detained for at least four months, the state-run Thanh Nien newspaper reported yesterday. Cu Huy Ha Vu, who studied law in France, was held on Nov. 4 in Ho Chi Minh City, where police allegedly found anti-state documents on his laptop, several with calls for a multiparty system, earlier reports said. His house in Hanoi had also been searched. If convicted, Vu faces a maximum of 20 years in jail.
UNITED KINGDOM
William and Kate engaged
Royal officials announced yesterday that Prince William and Kate Middleton will marry next spring or summer in London, ending years of rumored splits, reconciliations and will-they, won’t-they speculation. Prince Charles’ Clarence House office said the couple got engaged last month during a vacation in Kenya. Prime Minister David Cameron said he announced the news during a Cabinet meeting, and it was greeted by cheers and “a great banging of the table.” Kate and William’s engagement was considered so certain that bookies had stopped taking bets on a wedding next year.
UNITED STATES
Hero dog euthanized
A dog named Target that lived through explosions in Afghanistan couldn’t survive a brief stay at an animal shelter. An unidentified employee at the Arizona facility was placed on administrative leave after euthanizing the dog by mistake, county Animal Care and Control officials said on Monday. Sergeant Terry Young, the owner of the dog, said Target frightened a suicide bomber inside a military base and potentially saved dozens of soldiers’ lives. He brought Target to the San Tan Valley area in August, when he returned home from his tour of duty. The dog escaped from the family’s back yard on Friday. A neighbor found Target wandering later on Friday and called the pound. On Friday night, Young found Target’s picture on a Web site used by Pinal County’s dog catchers to help owners track lost pets. Young figured the shelter was closed for the weekend and showed up to claim his dog on Monday, only to find out she was dead.
UNITED STATES
Woman pushed to death
An 84-year-old woman was pushed to her death from a commuter train platform in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo by an apparent stranger, authorities said on Monday. Betty Sugiyama was on the platform of the Metro Gold Line station with her sister on Sunday morning when she was pushed onto empty tracks, Los Angeles County sheriff’s Captain Michael Parker said. Sugiyama died hours later at a hospital. Jackkqueline Pogue was arrested and authorities said they planned to seek a murder charge. Investigators said the attack appeared to be unprovoked.
PARAGUAY
Expedition called off
Authorities on Monday suspended a scientific expedition into the remote Chaco woodlands after indigenous rights groups raised concerns over the welfare of tribes in the region. The British-Paraguayan expedition planned to conduct a survey of animal and plant life in the savanna 800km north of Asuncion, the environment ministry said. The decision to suspend it followed “last minute” concerns raised by indigenous rights groups and recommendations by the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, the ministry said.
UNITED STATES
Waters open to fishing
Nearly all US federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico are now open to fishing, in the latest sign of recovery from a huge oil spill, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on Monday. The agency said it has reopened 21,764km2 of Gulf waters to commercial and recreational fishing, extending from the Louisiana state water line south of the Alabama and Florida state line. At its closest point, the newly reopened area is about 16km from BP’s busted wellhead, which gushed nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the sea after an April 20 explosion on a BP-leased drilling rig off Louisiana’s coast.
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
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