MALAYSIA
Textbook riles Indian party
An official says a high school text book that aims to emphasize the country’s racial harmony has riled the main ethnic Indian party by referring to the Hindu caste system. Malaysian Indian Congress Deputy President S. Subramaniam says the party wants the Education Ministry to withdraw the book Interlock or at least revoke portions that refer to the caste system. He said yesterday that the reference has hurt the minority Indians because they don’t want to be reminded of what they see as an outdated concept. The ministry says it will hear the party’s arguments before making a decision. The book is required reading for literature classes from this year.
JAPAN
Earthquake strikes north
A magnitude 4.8 earthquake struck off the coast of Niigata prefecture in the north, the Meteorological Agency said on its Web site. The quake hit at 1:45pm local time yesterday at a depth of 10km about 80km north of the city of Niigata and 330km north of Tokyo, the agency said. There were no immediate reports of damage. The epicenter was about 150km from Tokyo Electric Power Co’s -Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant, the world’s largest, which reopened in November after it was damaged during a magnitude 6.8 quake in July 2007. Officials at Tokyo Electric were not available for comment and spokesman Katsuya Uchino did not answer calls to his mobile phone. The country, which experiences about one-fifth of the world’s earthquakes annually, lies in a zone where four tectonic plates meet and shift.
JAPAN
Rice cakes kill six
Six people choked to death and five were in a serious condition after eating traditional glutinous mochi rice cakes to celebrate the New Year in Tokyo, fire department officials said yesterday. The victims, in their 70s or older, died of suffocation over the weekend after eating the New Year delicacy, the fire department said. During the New Year period, one of the country’s biggest holidays, families traditionally cook ozouni soup and put the sticky rice cakes in the vegetable broth. “Please be aware that mochi, which is so sticky, may cause suffocation if you swallow mochi without chewing it well,” the fire department said in a statement. The fire department is advising people, especially the elderly and infants, to cut mochi into small pieces before eating it. Every year, several people in the country, mostly older people or infants, die after choking on rice cakes.
ISRAEL
Palestinian ban extended
The country on Sunday extended for six months a ban preventing Palestinians married to Israelis immigrating to the Jewish state, the prime minister’s office said in a statement. “The ministerial committee for security affairs decided tonight [Sunday] to extend for six months a text on family unification, which expired on Dec. 31,” a statement from the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. That extension until June 30 denies Palestinians the right to acquire citizenship or resident status through marriage. The so-called Family Unification provision has been the subject of an outcry from leftist movements and groups representing the country’s Arab minority, who charge the ban is “inhumane” and “racist.” The ministerial committee also asked the justice minister “to work toward early finalization of a law on family unification, which will meet the national security and long-term interests of the government of Israel,” the statement added.
SPAIN
Man nearly bins fortune
A lottery player nearly lost 9 million euros (US$12 million) in winnings after tossing tickets in the garbage, only to later discover they were winners, Spanish media said on Sunday. Ignacio Gonzalez, a lottery ticket vendor in the country’s northern Basque Country, was stunned to discover on Friday that the number he had played along with 14 friends — 48104 — had come up in a charity draw run by a Spanish organization for the blind, ONCE. However, Gonzalez’s euphoria quickly turned to despair when he could not find the winning tickets. “The New Year was off to a very good start, with a shower of millions, but on the other hand I couldn’t find the tickets,” Gonzalez told Basque radio station Radio Euskadi. After a desperate search of his home and with hope running out, Gonzalez ran out to his neighborhood garbage bin. “Without thinking about it for two seconds and in front of stunned passers-by, he dumped over the container” and began rifling through its contents, newspaper ABC wrote on Sunday. Mixed in with the garbage, Gonzalez finally found the winning tickets, no worse for wear, allowing he and his friends to collect a little more than 600,000 euros each in winnings. After the close call, Gonzalez admitted that he feared his friends would have “crucified” him if he had lost the tickets for good.
RUSSIA
Opposition leader jailed
One of the nation’s most prominent opposition leaders has been sentenced to 15 days in jail after being arrested at a New Year’s Eve protest rally. Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy Russian prime minister during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency, was among 68 people arrested at an unsanctioned rally in a central Moscow square. He and other protesters gathered on the opposite side of the square from an authorized protest. Nemtsov was sentenced on Sunday for failure to follow police orders, state news agency RIA Novosti reported. News agency Interfax quoted Nemtsov as saying the court refused to allow police and TV video recordings from the scene to be used as evidence. Nemtsov is one of the Kremlin’s fiercest critics and a leader of Russia’s fledgling Solidarity movement.
IRAN
Valentine’s Day banned
Cupid beware: Iran says it’s cracking down on symbols of Valentine’s Day. The annual homage to romance on Feb. 14 has become popular in recent years in Iran and other places in the Middle East, but Iran’s semi-official ILNA news agency reported on Sunday that a state directive now bans any cards, gifts, teddy bears or other tokens of the day — which tradition says is named after an early Christian martyr. The backlash in the Islamic Republic is part of a drive against the spread of Western culture. Other Muslim countries have also sought to stamp out Valentine’s Day, but it is celebrated widely in nearby places, such as Dubai.
UNITED STATES
Dad to stand trial for murder
An Iraqi immigrant from the Phoenix suburb of Glendale accused of killing his 20-year-old daughter because he believed she had become too Westernized is scheduled to stand trial this month. Fifty-year-old Faleh Hassan Almaleki is accused of slamming his Jeep into Noor Almaleki in October 2009. She laid in a coma for two weeks before dying of her injuries, causing outrage across the country about the so-called honor killing. Another woman was injured. If convicted, he will face life in prison, since prosecutors decided not to seek the death penalty. The trial is set to begin on Jan. 18.
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
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
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
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