CHINA
CCP denies megacity plans
Authorities in Guangdong Province have denied planning to unite nine towns to create the world’s biggest city in the Pearl River delta, state media reported yesterday. “The reports were totally false. There is no such plan,” Guo Yuewen, spokesman for the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) provincial committee, was quoted as saying by the China Daily. Media had reported on a project to unite nine urban areas — including both Guangzhou and Shenzhen — into a megalopolis with a population of 42 million, according to the China Daily. The Pearl River delta was one of the first regions to open up to foreign business in the 1980s and is now among its richest, a giant manufacturing hub that produces about 10 percent of the country’s GDP.
CHINA
Web service blocks ‘Egypt’
The word “Egypt” was blocked from the country’s wildly popular Twitter-like service, while coverage of the political turmoil has been tightly restricted in state media. The Chinese Communist Party is sensitive to any potential source of social unrest. A search for “Egypt” on the Sina microblogging service brings up a message saying, “According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, the search results are not shown.” The service has more than 50 million users. News on the Egypt protests has been limited to a few paragraphs and photos buried inside major news Web sites, but China Central Television had a report on its midday broadcast.
PHILIPPINES
Fake nuns caught at airport
Six women were detained at Manila Ninoy Aquino International Airport after being caught trying to sneak into Lebanon dressed as nuns in a bid to get around a travel ban to the country, the immigration bureau said yesterday. The women were pretending to be on their way to Hong Kong for a religious seminar, but their unusual dress and behavior alerted officials, the bureau said. Under questioning they eventually admitted they were actually on their way to Lebanon to work as domestic helpers. Filipinos have been banned from going to Lebanon to work as domestics since 2007 because of the security situation and inadequate legal protection for laborers. “Their appearance aroused our suspicion especially after we noticed that one of them had red shoes, a colorful handbag and wore her nun’s costume improperly,” airport immigration officer Joel Valencia said in a statement. Investigators are now trying to locate the man who illegally recruited them for work in Lebanon, the bureau said.
UNITED STATES
Turtle smugglers indicted
A grand jury in Los Angeles has indicted two men from Japan for allegedly smuggling more than 50 live turtles and tortoises into the country. US attorney’s office spokesman Thom Mrozek said Atsushi Yamagami and Norihide Ushirozako were indicted Friday on counts of animal smuggling, conspiracy and wildlife trafficking. Each man could receive up to 26 years in prison if convicted of all charges. The two Osaka men were arrested this month at Los Angeles International Airport. US Federal prosecutors said they hid the reptiles in snack food boxes found in a suitcase. The indictment alleges the men planned to sell or trade the smuggled turtles. The arrests were tied to an undercover investigation that began last year into a turtle-smuggling operation. The men are scheduled to be arraigned on Monday morning and are being held without bond.
RUSSIA
Schools shut down by flu
Moscow and at least two other cities will close their elementary schools for a week because of a major flu outbreak that has mostly affected the young, media reports said yesterday. Grades one to eight of all Moscow schools will close tomorrow and only reopen the following week, Komsomolskaya Pravda quoted a spokesman for the city’s education department as saying. “Even today, some classes are already missing half their students,” said an official with Moscow’s health control service, which recommended the shutdown on Friday. Nearly 92,000 Muscovites are currently suffering from the flu or respiratory infections.
SWITZERLAND
Men dominate at Davos
Research shows that investing in women is good business and some firms have taken significant steps to increase their female staff, especially at the top — but at the world’s premiere economic forum, men still outnumber women by a ratio of about 6 to 1. Still, the World Economic Forum is making progress — not only in tackling the gap between men and women appearing in several panels, but in producing an index ranking 134 countries on their success in eliminating inequality and establishing a group of 50 influential men and women to focus on ways for women to crack the glass ceiling, especially in business. Responding to a suggestion from this Global Gender Parity Group, the forum in April asked its 100 major business members to include at least one woman in its delegation to Davos.
VENEZUELA
Chavez opponent to be tried
A Caracas court on Friday ordered an opponent of President Hugo Chavez to be tried on charges of hiding explosives in his home. Alejandro Pena Esclusa, who was arrested on July 12, called the case a politically motivated vendetta, saying in a statement that he was a “victim of a plot by the Venezuelan government” in response to his vocal criticisms. Authorities said agents who raided his apartment found about 100 detonators and 900g of C-4 explosives. Pena called the charges preposterous, saying authorities planted explosives in his eight-year-old daughter’s desk drawer. It’s unclear when his trial could begin.
VENEZUELA
Cholera cases climb to 111
The number of cholera cases has jumped to 111 as more people tested positive after attending a wedding with contaminated food in the Dominican Republic, Health Minister Eugena Sader said on Friday. The patients were all receiving treatment and 27 were hospitalized, Sader told TV network Telesur. The number of cases rose swiftly on Friday. Authorities had said a day earlier that 37 people had the virus in the country and that 12 others were hospitalized in the Dominican Republic.
COLOMBIA
Two women fight over body
The body of deceased miner Edgar Carvajal, one of 21 killed on Wednesday in a gas explosion, was claimed by two women on Friday, both of whom insist they enjoyed a committed relationship with him. “I came to claim the body of my husband ... when I was approached by a woman who said she had been his wife and lived with him for 10 years,” Luz Marina Rodriguez said. The other woman, Martha Bustos, tells a story appearing to fit with an apparent double life. “My husband almost never came to my house, but we loved each other very much,” Bustos said, adding that he sporadically stayed with her during the week, but never on weekends as he claimed to be at his mining job.
UNITED STATES
Witness paid in Posada case
A prosecution witness has admitted receiving nearly US$80,000 from the government for agreeing to testify against an elderly ex-CIA operative. Government informant Gilberto Abascal also said on Friday in El Paso, Texas, that federal authorities helped him obtain US citizenship. Cuba-born Abascal has spent five days testifying that he was on a boat that carried anti--communist militant Luis Posada Carriles from Mexico to Miami in March 2005. Posada then sought US citizenship and underwent immigration hearings in El Paso — during which he said he paid a people smuggler to drive him across the Texas border. Posada faces 11 counts of perjury, obstruction and immigration fraud for lying about how he made it to the US, and for denying his role in 1997 hotel bombings in Havana.
MEXICO
Bodyguards face charges
Federal prosecutors have charged two federal police officers with killing a bodyguard assigned to the mayor of the northern border city of Ciudad Juarez, authorities said on Friday. The shooting has raised tensions, with Mayor Hector Murguia claiming that overbearing officers shot the bodyguard even though he obeyed their orders to lay down his weapon. The Attorney General’s Office said in a statement on Friday that the officers are charged with homicide, abuse of authority and improper behavior, and that two officers have already been detained.
CUBA
Authorities free Farinas
High-profile dissident Guillermo Farinas was set free by authorities late on Friday after his third arrest in 48 hours, his mother said. Farinas, last year’s Sakharov rights prize winner, was released by security services after an emergency medical check-up undertaken after the detainee complained about chest pain, Alicia Hernandez, the activist’s mother, said via telephone from her home in Santa Clara. She said prison doctors had been called after her son had suffered from a shortness of breath, fever and chest pains. Cuban authorities arrested Farinas earlier on Friday along with “more than 20” other activists who had gone to lay flowers at a monument to national hero Jose Marti. The dissident had been also detained late on Thursday with around 10 other political activists, hours after being released from his initial detention on Wednesday afternoon.
MEXICO
Ex-mayors face arrest orders
More than 30 former mayors in the Mexican Gulf coast state of Veracruz have been ordered arrested on suspicion of corruption. Veracruz Deputy Attorney General Reynaldo Escobar says they are among 115 ex-municipal employees in the state charged with corruption between 2004 and 2008. He says the total amount suspected embezzled is 67 million pesos (US$5.5 million). The first to be arrested on Friday was Leonardo Mendoza, former mayor of the town of Benito Juarez.
UNITED STATES
Nude prize-seeker sentenced
A New York man has been sentenced to two years’ probation for streaking at a rally for President Barack Obama in Philadelphia. Twenty-four-year-old Juan Rodriguez was arrested on charges of indecent exposure, disorderly conduct and open lewdness after streaking at the October rally before thousands in the city’s Germantown section. He was trying to win a million-dollar prize offered by Internet billionaire Alki David. Rodriguez didn’t get the US$1 million.
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