China
Hospital throws out baby
A hospital has suspended four medical workers for mistakenly diagnosing a stillbirth and disposing of a baby that was alive, state press said yesterday. Health authorities in Guangdong Province have launched an investigation into the incident on Oct. 26 at the Nanhai Red Cross Hospital in Foshan City, Beijing News said. Liu Dongmei (劉冬梅) — eight months pregnant — had been rushed to the hospital with internal bleeding and stomach cramps. She later had an emergency birth, but the baby was neither breathing nor crying when it came out and its skin had turned purple, the report said. Believing it was dead, the medical team disposed of the child, but did not follow proper procedures, it said. When Liu’s sister-in-law asked to see the body about 30 minutes after birth, she was handed a yellow plastic bag containing the infant and found it was still alive, said the Foshan News, a local Web site. Following the discovery, the newborn was rushed to intensive care, where he remains in stable condition. Liu and her husband are seeking to sue the hospital, Beijing News said.
SOUTH KOREA
No-smoke zones to expand
Seoul will expand no-smoking zones to cover one-fifth of its area by 2014, the municipal government said yesterday, as part of a clampdown in a city once noted for its tolerance for smokers. Over the next three years, smoking will be banned in 21 percent of the metropolis’ 605km2 area, including 1,305 school zones, 1,910 parks and 5,715 bus stops. The city government said in a statement that after 2014, it would consider banning smoking in all public outdoor areas except for designated zones. Seoul this year banned smoking in three major plazas and 20 parks to try to reduce second-hand smoke. Offenders face a fine of 100,000 won (US$90).
SOUTH KOREA
‘Bald’ label not libelous
Calling somebody “bald” is not derogatory and does not constitute libel, the top court ruled on Thursday. A 30-year-old man only identified as Kim living in the southern port of Busan was charged last year with defamation after calling a man named Park “bald” during an online chat. An investigation found that Park was not even bald, and Kim was convicted and fined 300,000 won. The Supreme Court overturned the decision, calling for caution in restricting free expression. “The word ‘bald head’ might have been used to insult the plaintiff, but we cannot say from an objective viewpoint that it implies damage to the social status or reputation of people,” it said.
CHINA
Baby sellers arrested
Police in Zoucheng, Shandong Province, broke up a human trafficking ring involving poor migrant couples who were selling their babies, a state-run newspaper reported yesterday. Police in Zoucheng found last month that 17 infants had been sold in the city to Chinese buyers, the Global Times newspaper said. Police rescued 13 of the babies and sent them to welfare centers and a search is under way for the other four, the paper said. The report cited an investigating police officer as saying the couples were mainly migrants who had moved from poor areas in Sichuan Province to Zoucheng to seek work. It quoted the officer, Chen Qingwei (陳慶偉), as saying the husbands would go out to work while their wives sold their babies to raise money. One couple had sold three children, the newspaper said. Chen said baby boys could be sold for up to 50,000 yuan (US$7,730), while the price for girls was 30,000 yuan, much more than the parents could earn from farming.
UNITED STATES
Troop drawdown questioned
Republican House Speaker John Boehner warned on Thursday against hasty troop drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan he said could be fueled by political expediency trumping security concerns. Asked about a Wall Street Journal report that President Barack Obama could be eyeing a quicker-than-expected shift to a supporting role in Afghanistan, Boehner noted Obama’s move to withdraw all combat forces from Iraq by the end of the year and warned that “there are serious gaps in Iraq’s ability to protect itself, especially from their neighbors to the east,” Iran.
UNITED KINGDOM
Whale meat warning issued
The government is warning travelers to Iceland that bringing whale meat back with them could lead to a fine or a jail term. Iceland continues to hunt whales despite a 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling and the meat is widely sold there. The Foreign Office on Wednesday updated its travel advice page for the North Atlantic nation, noting that “any importation of whale meat will result in seizure of the goods, possibly a fine of up to ￡5,000 [US$8,000] and a custodial sentence.” The government’s international travel advice pages typically warn of risks from crime, terrorism or natural disaster. Whale meat imports to the EU are banned under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.
UNITED STATES
Glacier crack grows
A crack in western Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier stretching at least 30km and running 50m deep is growing and could break apart the Arctic ice sheet in the coming months, forming an iceberg the size of New York City, NASA scientists said on Thursday. The rift is widening at a rate of 2m a day, NASA project scientist Michael Studinger said. When the ice breaks apart, it would produce an iceberg of more than 880km2 said Studinger, who is part of the US space agency’s IceBridge project. However, the process is not a result of global warming, he said. “We expect that later this year or early next year there will be a pretty large iceberg forming as part of a natural cycle,” he added. The rift was first seen in late September by scientists monitoring changes on the ice shelf via airplane flyovers in order to fill in the gaps left between a pair of satellites, ICESAT, which ended in 2009, and ICESAT 2, which launches in 2016.
FRANCE
Wrong Web site hacked
A fansite for a rugby union team is recovering after hackers mistook it for the Web site of the German stock exchange and launched an attack. The allezdax.com Web site for second-division Dax in the rugby-loving southwest of the country was shut down for two weeks after its usual 700 daily page hits — 1,200 on match days — skyrocketed to 80,000 because of the attack. “Our defenses were certainly inadequate,” one of the site’s administrators who gave his name as Stephane told the France Bleu Gascogne radio station. He said the hackers had “insulted us copiously in German” thinking they were something to do with the DAX, Germany’s blue-chip stock market index. “I only have one thing to say to them: ‘Leave us alone,” Stephane said. “Having been attacked full-on by a young, spotty Teuton, the site is back with more security,” the site’s home-page said on Thursday. The site notes that as a result of the attack, it is now twice as popular as the Dax club’s official site.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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