CHINA
Internet use still increasing
China’s number of Internet users — already the world’s largest — has risen to 450 million this year, more than a third of the population. A senior Chinese official says that statistics show that the new figure, as of the end of last month, is an increase of 20.3 percent compared to last year. China’s boom in Internet usage has come with the growth of an equally extensive policing system, from technical filters that block sites based on certain words to human monitors who scan bulletin boards and micro-blogging posts for political dissent. A yearlong government crackdown on pornography, violence and other harmful material has resulted in the shutdown of 60,000 Web sites.
SOUTH KOREA
Lee urges military to help
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak urged the military yesterday to help more in the battle against the country’s worst-ever outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, after half a million animals were culled. “I know the military is already offering active support [in slaughtering the animals], but I want more cooperation from the military,” he told Cabinet members. Lee also urged the military to “cooperate when the outbreak spreads to new regions” and all related government agencies to offer “special treatment for those involved in culling efforts.” A total of 66 cases have been reported across the nation since Nov. 29, prompting the culling of nearly 550,000 cattle, pigs and other cloven-hoofed animals, Yonhap news agency reported. The agriculture ministry estimated losses due to the outbreak at 400 billion won (US$350 million). About 160,000 animals were killed during the previous worst outbreak in 2002. The army has deployed some 35,000 troops as well as 400 pieces of equipment including excavators to help contain the disease.
SOUTH KOREA
North boosts forces: review
South Korea says in a major military review that rival North Korea has boosted its special forces and deployed huge artillery guns and a new kind of tank close to the heavily fortified border. The report, released by the Defense Ministry once every two years, also says the North intends to rely on its nuclear program as a counterweight to South Korea’s high-tech military. The document says North Korea has 200,000 special operations forces, an increase from 180,000 in its last previous assessment in 2008. It says those forces are aimed at infiltrating and disrupting sensitive facilities.
JAPAN
Tokyo mulls use of drones
Japan is to consider using unmanned aircraft for surveillance flights, a newspaper reported yesterday, at a time of heightened tensions with neighboring China and North Korea. Japan will send military officials to the US, which uses the cutting-edge Global Hawk high-altitude surveillance aircraft, to study how they operate and maintain the drones, the Yomiuri daily said. The defense ministry will start fully fledged research in the next fiscal year starting April, and intends to make a final decision on whether to deploy such aircraft by the end of fiscal 2015, the report said. The drones can fly at an altitude of 18,000m and have a surveillance radius of 550km in any direction, the daily said. Three of them would cover Japan and surrounding maritime territories, it said. The report did not say where Japan might deploy the drones or say whether they would be used to overfly foreign territories. The drones, excluding sensors, cost about ￥2.5 billion (US$30 million) each, the report said.
RUSSIA
No sentencing yet for tycoon
The judge in the case against jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky has finished his third day of reading the verdict without announcing the prison sentence. The judge made clear on Monday that Khodorkovsky has been found guilty and since then has been reading the verdict, a lengthy summation of the trial. The sentence is to be announced last, which Khodorkovsky’s lawyers expect to occur by the end of the week. The conviction on charges of stealing almost US$30 billion worth of the oil that his Yukos company produced from 1998 to 2003 and laundering the proceeds could keep him behind bars for several more years.
NIGERIA
Explosion rocks rally
Police say that an explosion during a political rally in the oil-rich southern delta has wounded two people. The state police chief said that an explosion went off in the city of Yenagoa during a rally on Wednesday for Beimo Rufus Spiff, who is running for governor. Chief Aliyu Musa said that two people had been hurt. It was the latest in a series of blasts to rock Africa’s most populous nation. Authorities are still counting the dead and wounded from a recent bombings in the nation’s central region. Four bombs went off in the city of Jos on Christmas Eve, leaving at least 32 people dead and dozens hurt, police say.
GREECE
Bomb explodes outside court
A bomb exploded outside a court in Athens yesterday, causing damage to the building after a warning phone call had enabled police to evacuate the area, a police source said. There were no immediate reports of injuries as television footage showed smoke billowing in front of the Athens court complex near the city center. Several of the building’s windows were smashed. Early information indicated that the device had been placed on a motorbike, the police source said. “It was a rather strong explosion,” a local kiosk owner told Alter television, which received the warning phone call about 40 minutes before the blast and notified police. There was no claim of responsibility for the bombing, which comes about two weeks before the scheduled trial of more than a dozen suspected members of a radical anarchist group.
RUSSIA
Giant cargo jet crashes
A giant Antonov cargo jet crashed on Wednesday during a training exercise in the region of Tver, leaving all 12 military pilots aboard the aircraft missing and presumed dead, officials said. Investigators found the first body parts and black box of the An-22 military cargo plane — one of the world’s largest — which crashed into a snowy field about 200km south of Moscow. The Antonov was carrying no cargo but 12 pilots were performing a training run between Voronezh and Tver when it came down, a spokeswoman for military prosecutors of the Moscow military district said. “All those aboard died,” the Moscow-based investigators of the incident said in a statement, adding that local witnesses heard an explosion.
FRANCE
Torched car figures go silent
The government will no longer announce how many cars are burned in traditional New Year’s Eve vandalism, Minister of the Interior Brice Hortefeux announced on Wednesday. The tally of cars torched in last year’s New Year mischief was put at 1,137, with a similar number — 1,147 — destroyed in 2008. Instead, the number would be included as part of annual vandalism figures.
ARGENTINA
Air Force to investigate UFOs
The air force has created a commission to record and investigate reports of unidentified flying objects (UFO) in the country’s airspace, a spokesman said on Wednesday. The Commission for the Investigation of Airspace Phenomenon “is in the process of being formed,” Captain Mariano Mohaupt said. Officials said the air force already holds records of reported UFO sightings, but the interdisciplinary commission would formalize the data keeping.
CANADA
Avalanche kills snowmobiler
Police say a snowmobiler has been killed in an avalanche at a western mountain range. Royal Canadian Mounted Police Coporal Dan Moskaluk said on Wednesday the 43-year-old man was swept off a mountain in southern British Columbia in a remote site about 200km northeast of Vancouver after the snowslide hit on Tuesday afternoon. The man, from British Columbia, was snowmobiling with 11 others who were exploring a network of trails.
COLOMBIA
Six tonnes of cocaine seized
Authorities on Wednesday seized 6 tonnes of cocaine in the port town of Buenaventura, as it was being readied for transport to Guatemala en route to the US, police said. The drugs were found in 991 small packets tightly wrapped in dark plastic tape, marked with a variety of symbols such as a puma and a crescent, and stuffed inside 32 duffel bags. Police chief General Oscar Naranjo said the seizure was a blow for the drug gang run by the major drug runner “Comba,” whose real name is Luis Enrique Calle Serna. He heads the criminal network called “Los Rastrojos,” made up largely of former paramilitary troopers. The country remained the world’s top cocaine producer, with 410 tonnes last year, the latest year for which the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has figures.
CUBA
Soap subsidies stopped
Suds will no longer be quite so subsidized by the state.
The government says it is cutting “personal cleanliness products” from its monthly ration books, effective tomorrow. Soap and toothpaste follow a string of other products slashed from the ration book. People currently pay about 25 centavos (US$0.01) for a rationed bar of soap. The Official Gazette released on Wednesday says they’ll soon have to fork out four to six pesos. Under recent cost-cutting measures, the government dumped cigarettes, salt and potatoes from the ration books that islanders rely on for a small supply of basic goods. The ration program began in 1962 as a temporary measure in response to the US embargo.
NICARAGUA
Perez aided Sandinistas
A former vice president in the country’s Sandinista government says the movement received crucial financial aid from former Venezuelan president Carlos Andres Perez, who died this week. Novelist Sergio Ramirez tells the Managua newspaper La Prensa that Perez gave the movement more than US$1 million to help the guerrillas topple Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979. The revelation is notable partly because current Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez mounted an unsuccessful 1992 coup against Perez. And Chavez himself is now a key backer of the Sandinista party that Perez helped first aided. Ramirez eventually split with the Sandinista party because of his opposition to its leader, former Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RUSSIAN INPUT: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov called Washington’s actions in Asia ‘destructive,’ accusing it of being the reason for the ‘militarization’ of Japan The US is concerned about China’s “increasingly dangerous and unlawful” activities in the disputed South China Sea, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ASEAN leaders yesterday during an annual summit, and pledged that Washington would continue to uphold freedom of navigation in the region. The 10-member ASEAN meeting with Blinken followed a series of confrontations at sea between China and ASEAN members Philippines and Vietnam. “We are very concerned about China’s increasingly dangerous and unlawful activities in the South China Sea which have injured people, harm vessels from ASEAN nations and contradict commitments to peaceful resolutions of disputes,” said Blinken, who
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