NEPAL
Police break up protest
Police yesterday broke up demonstrations and arrested protesters who were demanding the release of the former crown prince Paras Shah, who was detained for questioning after he fired a gun into the air following an argument. Police official Babukaji Giri said about 150 protesters gathered in Kathmandu and 17 were detained for attempting to attack police officers and vehicles and for blocking traffic. Meanwhile, 500 protesters also imposed a general strike in two districts in the south, blocking highways and forcing markets and schools to shut down, Giri said. Shah was taken in for questioning on Tuesday about the firing incident that followed an argument on Saturday night with two guests at a restaurant in Chitwan. Shah has admitted firing his gun, but defended his action, saying he could not bear to hear insults against his family and country.
SOUTH KOREA
Runaway bear captured
A young bear that bolted from a zoo on the outskirts of Seoul has been captured on a nearby mountain after nine days on the run, zoo officials said yesterday. The six-year-old Malaysian black bear nicknamed “KKoma” (Kid) escaped from Seoul Zoo at Gwacheon on Dec. 6 and was sighted on a mountain about 6km away. Kkoma was found yesterday in a trap placed at the mountain summit and appeared to be in good shape, a zoo spokesman told Yonhap news agency. Zoo officials said they plan to move KKoma back to its cage after giving it a medical check-up. Plans to anesthetize the 30kg male bear so he can be moved more easily have, however, hit a snag: The weather on the mountain is cold enough to freeze the liquid.
JAPAN
‘Extinct’ salmon found
A salmon species thought to be extinct for 70 years is alive and well in a lake near Mount Fuji, Kyoto University science professor Tetsuji Nakabo said yesterday. The black kokanee, or kunimasu in Japanese, was thought to have died out in 1940, when a hydroelectric project made its native lake in Akita Prefecture more acidic. Before then, 100,000 eggs were reportedly transported to Lake Saiko, but the species was still thought to have died off. Nakabo said his team of researchers found the species in Lake Saiko, about 500km south of the native lake. He posed for pictures and video with a specimen that was dark olive with black spots on its back. The kunimasu grow to about 30cm in length. Nakabo said the lake had enough kunimasu for the species to survive if the current environment is maintained, though he said in interviews he hoped fishermen would not catch it.
UNITED STATES
Naked postman nabbed
A postal carrier says he simply wanted to cheer up a woman on his rounds who seemed “stressed out” when he decided to deliver mail in the buff. A police report says the 52-year-old man told the woman he would deliver the mail in the nude to her office in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, to make her laugh. The report says that on Dec. 4 he brought the mail wearing only a smile. The mail carrier was arrested for lewd and lascivious behavior several days later. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says the man admitted delivering the mail naked was a stupid thing to do.
UNITED KINGDOM
Fireman admits siren death
A fireman has admitted causing the death of a farmer who was crushed to death by his herd of cows after they were startled by fire engine sirens. Julian Lawford pleaded guilty at Exeter Crown Court to a charge of causing the death of Harold Lee by careless driving, the Press Association reported on Tuesday. Lee, 75, was trampled to death by his cows as he walked them along a country road near his home in Burtle, Somerset. Lawford, 49, was due to stand trial accused of manslaughter by gross negligence but admitted the lesser charge, which was accepted by the prosecution.
ARGENTINA
Archbishop slams Santa
A Roman Catholic archbishop surprised his parishioners by telling the children that Santa Claus was not real, but instead a commercialized symbol of Christmas. “That’s not Christmas,” Archbishop Fabriciano Sigampa of the city of Resistencia said in mass, insisting that children should not confuse celebrating the birth of Christ “with a fat man dressed in red.” Sigampa’s ire was aroused by plans for a snow covered cabin in the city’s main square where a Father Christmas figure would hear children’s wishes and receive donated toys to be given out to poor children. “Surely, in the coming days there will be a deluge of advertisements after they inaugurate the house where a fat man dressed in red lives. And we should not confuse ... Christmas with that.” Sigampa has attracted controversy before. In the 1990s, he caused a stir by ordering a mural for a cathedral that showed the Virgin Mary with then president Carlos Menem and members of the Catholic hierarchy.
RUSSIA
Uniform hospitalizes troops
Sharp new military uniforms, created by a top fashion designer, have landed hundreds in hospital after proving too thin to withstand ferocious winter cold, a state daily said yesterday. Rossiyskaya Gazeta reported that between 60 and 250 servicemen have been laid up with everything from flu to pneumonia as Arctic chills sweep through the country’s northern reaches. “They literally felt naked outside,” the paper quoted the mother of one solider as saying. “Many of them ended up in hospital. Ours developed pneumonia,” she said of her son. The government daily said defense officials have admitted not receiving complaints about the uniforms in time to do anything ahead of the winter season. Introduced in 2008, the parade uniforms designed by fashion celebrity Valentin Yudashkin are threaded with gold and more shapely and chic, in a throwback to the uniforms of the imperial Tsarist army. The field versions, meanwhile, are lighter and come with thinner but more mobile boots.
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
A Sherpa guide was found crawling to base camp on Mount Everest a week after he went missing and was reunited with his family, who had given up hope he would return. Dawa Sherpa was last seen on Friday last week descending the mountain, but he did not reach base camp even though his client did. The pair were among the last climbers on the mountain as the climbing season came to an end and the route was dismantled. Dawa was located by a cleaning crew on Thursday morning as he was crawling down the snowy slopes around the Khumbu Icefall, just above
Chinese authorities are snuffing out any remembrance of the deadly 1989 military crackdown on student-led pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, which happened 37 years ago yesterday, in a further tightening of a years-long campaign to erase what happened from public memory. Police told relatives of the victims they would not be allowed to visit a cemetery in Beijing on the anniversary of the crackdown, a person with knowledge of the matter said. Relatives of the victims visited the cemetery on the anniversary for more than 30 years to read memorial statements with police keeping watch, Amnesty International said. Hundreds of people,
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