AUSTRALIA
‘Dead’ Briton arrested
A British man who allegedly faked his own death and made off with the life insurance payout has been arrested, federal police said yesterday. Hugo Jose Sanchez, 47, also known as Alfredo, was taken into custody overnight in Sydney, ending a six-year manhunt. Ecuadorian-born Sanchez and his wife, Sophie, allegedly faked his death to claim more than ￡1 million (US$1.6 million) in life insurance in 2005, but the plot reportedly unraveled after his fingerprints were found on his own death certificate. She was arrested after returning to Britain for her sister’s wedding in September last year and was sentenced to two years in jail over the scheme. The pair are not the first Britons to try such a scam — former teacher John Darwin made international headlines after faking his disappearance in a canoe off Hartlepool in 2002 so his wife, Anne, could claim his life insurance. Darwin turned up alive in 2007.
AUSTRALIA
ADFA still sexist: review
A review into the treatment of women at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) yesterday reported “widespread low-level sexual harrassment” after a scandal over an Internet sex broadcast. Human Rights Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick said there was a culture of “accommodating” women rather than including them as equals at the academy, where she investigated claims of a sexist culture. Broderick was asked to examine the treatment of women at the school after a female cadet was unwittingly broadcast having sex with a male colleague online to other classmates, sparking political outrage. The review found that the culture had vastly improved since the last major review of sexual harrassment at the college in 1998, but Broderick said there was still some way to go on addressing gender imbalances. According to one cadet there was a “strong culture of commodification of women, particularly as sexual objects,” with females “often treated as ‘game’ after hours rather than as respected colleagues.”
JAPAN
No fission at reactor
Tokyo Electric Power Co yesterday said radiation detected at the No. 2 reactor at its Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant was not the result of sustained nuclear fission. On Wednesday, the company said it had discovered xenon, a susbstance produced as a byproduct of fission, in the reactor and had poured in a mixture of water and boric acid, an agent that helps prevent nuclear reactions, as a precaution. “Analysis suggests that it was not a criticality,” Ai Tanaka, a spokeswoman for the company, said yesterday.
INDIA
Final answer revealed
The question that made a poor clerk the first person to win US$1 million on a TV game show has been revealed. It is: “Which colonial power ended its involvement in India by selling the rights to the Nicobar Islands to the British on Oct. 16, 1868?” The answer: Denmark. Last week, it was announced that Sushil Kumar had won the top prize on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, but producers declined to reveal the question until the show aired on Wednesday. When he won, the audience whooped and gave him a standing ovation, while Kumar and his wife wept. His win echoes the 2008 Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire.
RUSSIA
Putin hails 7 billionth person
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin hailed a two-day-old boy as the world’s 7 billionth person on Wednesday, weighing into a bizarre scramble to claim a title that is almost impossible to verify. Russia’s Pyotr Nikolayev was born on Oct. 31, two minutes after midnight in a maternity hospital in Kaliningrad, wedged between Poland and the Baltic Sea. “How did you manage to do it on the very 7 billion mark?” Putin asked the child’s mother in front of a group of television reporters. “It was all down to him. I am just a normal mom,” Yelena Nikolayeva replied as she handed the boy to Putin. The pictures were aired on state television at peak viewing times. The UN says the population reached the 7 billion mark on Oct. 31 — 13 years after reaching 6 billion. Though it is impossible to say which person is the 7 billionth, there have been claims to the title from people in countries such as the Philippines, India, Sri Lanka and Britain.
RUSSIA
Spy accused of plagiarism
Since her expulsion from the US last year for spying, Anna Chapman has reinvented herself as an entrepreneur, TV personality and cheerleader for the Kremlin, but the 29-year-old has also become a target for ridicule over her role in state-promoted publicity stunts. Now she faces claims that she plagiarized a Kremlin spin doctor in the column she writes for a tabloid. Prominent bloggers say Chapman copied almost word for word a passage from a book by Oleg Matveyechev in her article for Komsomolskaya Pravda on the poet Alexander Pushkin. Chapman argued that the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 would never have happened had Pushkin not been killed in a duel in 1837, but bloggers said her text was almost a direct copy of a passage by Matveyechev. Since returning to Russia, Chapman has remained in the spotlight as a member of United Russia’s Young Guard group and via a raunchy photo spread in Maxim magazine. Last week, she was heckled during a speech at St Petersburg University. Students held up signs saying: “The Kremlin and the porn studio are in the other direction.”
GERMANY
Mock corpse causes panic
A mock corpse of Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei (艾未未) in an art gallery has caused commotion in a small German town, leading some panicked residents, mistaking the statue for a real body, to alert the police. The life-size sculpture of a dead-looking Ai — which lies face down on the floor in front of large glass windows — has shocked passersby on the street. “Several people had already called within days of the exhibition going up,” Peter Steger said from the police office in Bad Ems, the town where the work can be seen. Chinese artist He Xiangyu (何翔宇) said he intended to praise Ai’s efforts to criticize corruption and censorship in the Chinese government, despite the threat of imprisonment. He used actual human hair hand-knotted onto plastic and fiberglass to create the statue’s realistic qualities.
GHANA
No gay rights: president
The president on Wednesday vowed not to back any bid to legalize homosexuality in the west African country, scoffing at Britain’s threat to cut off aid to countries that fail to recognize gay rights. “I, as president of this nation, will never initiate or support any attempts to legalize homosexuality in Ghana,” John Atta Mills told reporters. British Prime Minister David Cameron said at the weekend that his country would consider withholding aid from countries that do not recognize gay rights
ARGENTINA
Model smuggler convicted
Colombian lingerie model Angie Sanclemente was on Wednesday convicted of trying to ship cocaine to Europe in her suitcases and sentenced to more than six years in jail. Sanclemente, 31, is a former beauty queen and model whom authorities said tried to smuggle cocaine to Europe in late 2009 with a stopover in Cancun, Mexico. She was arrested in a Buenos Aires hostel in May last year. Her attorney German Delgado said he would appeal the conviction. He insisted there was no proof and that she should be acquitted as she had no criminal record. Nicolas Gualco, her boyfriend, was also sentenced to six years and eight months in the same case, while Venezuelan Gustavo Paez Arneses was sentenced to six years and two months, the court’s information center said.
CANADA
Doctors see divine testicle
Doctors in Ottawa saw a divine face in the testes of a man admitted to a hospital with severe pain and an inflamed scrotum, a scientific journal article said on Wednesday. Or at least, that is one possible explanation. Two years ago, doctors at a teaching hospital affiliated with Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, spotted what appeared to be a face in ultrasound images of a 45-year-old patient’s scrotum. “While scrolling through the ultrasound images, the residents and staff alike were amazed to see the outline of a man’s face staring up out of the image, his mouth agape as if the face seen on the ultrasound scan itself was also experiencing severe [pain],” doctors Gregory Roberts and Naji Touma wrote in the journal Urology. The growth turned out to be benign and surgeons removed the testicle.
UNITED STATES
‘Taliban Toyota’ redeemed
The owner of a large car dealership in Mobile, Alabama, derided as “Taliban Toyota” by a competitor has been awarded US$7.5 million in damages after a jury trial for his slander claim. Iranian-born Shawn Esfahani, owner of Eastern Shore Toyota in Daphne, Alabama, had sought US$28 million in compensatory and punitive damages from Bob Tyler Toyota, claiming employees at that Pensacola, Florida-based dealership falsely portrayed him as an Islamist militant to customers. Esfahani’s lawsuit said that Bob Tyler sales manager Fred Kenner told at least one couple considering buying from Eastern Shore Toyota in 2009 that Esfahani was of Middle Eastern descent and was “helping fund the insurgents there and is also laundering money for them.”
UNITED STATES
Video prompts investigation
Texas police launched an investigation on Wednesday into an online video that shows a Texas family law judge profanely berating and repeatedly lashing his 16-year-old daughter with a belt. The nearly eight-minute video, which has been viewed more than 600,000 times on YouTube since being uploaded last week, shows Aransas County Court-at-Law Judge William Adams violently whipping a girl on the legs more than a dozen times and growing increasingly irate while she screams and refuses to turn over on a bed to be beaten. “Lay down or I’ll spank you in your [expletive] face,” Adams screams. The girl wails and pleads for him to stop. The person who uploaded the video on YouTube signs the post as Hillary Adams, the judge’s daughter and the target of the beating. The post says the video was filmed in 2004. Her father said the footage “looks worse than it is,” and that he was simply disciplining his daughter for stealing.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
YELLOW SHIRTS: Many protesters were associated with pro-royalist groups that had previously supported the ouster of Paetongtarn’s father, Thaksin, in 2006 Protesters rallied on Saturday in the Thai capital to demand the resignation of court-suspended Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra and in support of the armed forces following a violent border dispute with Cambodia that killed more than three dozen people and displaced more than 260,000. Gathered at Bangkok’s Victory Monument despite soaring temperatures, many sang patriotic songs and listened to speeches denouncing Paetongtarn and her father, former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and voiced their backing of the country’s army, which has always retained substantial power in the Southeast Asian country. Police said there were about 2,000 protesters by mid-afternoon, although
MOGAMI-CLASS FRIGATES: The deal is a ‘big step toward elevating national security cooperation with Australia, which is our special strategic partner,’ a Japanese official said Australia is to upgrade its navy with 11 Mogami-class frigates built by Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles said yesterday. Billed as Japan’s biggest defense export deal since World War II, Australia is to pay US$6 billion over the next 10 years to acquire the fleet of stealth frigates. Australia is in the midst of a major military restructure, bolstering its navy with long-range firepower in an effort to deter China. It is striving to expand its fleet of major warships from 11 to 26 over the next decade. “This is clearly the biggest defense-industry agreement that has ever
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