AUSTRALIA
Aboriginal health improves
The nation is on track to halving Aboriginal child mortality and progress is being made in raising indigenous life-expectancy rates overall, Prime Minister Julia Gillard said yesterday. Indigenous children are twice as likely to die before their fifth birthday as other children and Aboriginal men are estimated to die 11.5 years earlier than other males. Delivering her annual report on the nation’s indigenous people, Gillard said bridging the gap on life expectancy was a 25-year project and “while the challenge is very large ... some progress is being made. The target of halving the infant mortality rates for indigenous children under five by 2018 is on track.”
INDIA
New Delhi holds quake drill
More than 40,000 people in New Delhi yesterday took part in a mass earthquake drill as the tremor-prone city of 16 million seeks to improve its disaster preparedness. “We want to find out how capable we are to deal with natural and man-made disasters. ‘Be prepared’ is the slogan for today,” said R.K. Dheer, an official at the National Disaster Management Authority in New Delhi. Students and volunteers took part in the drill in schools, colleges, hospitals, metro stations and crowded markets. Experts have long questioned Delhi’s ability to withstand a major earthquake because of lax safety standards, widespread illegal building and a lack of emergency planning.
AFGHANISTAN
New rules for TV presenters
Kabul has instructed female TV presenters to stop appearing on screen without a headscarf and to wear less make-up, officials said, raising fears about creeping restrictions on the media. “All the TV networks are in seriousness asked to stop female presenters from appearing on TV without a veil and with dense make-up,” the Ministry of Information and Culture said. “All the female newscasters on Afghan TV channels are also asked to respect Islamic and Afghan values,” it added. A spokesman for President Hamid Karzai said on Tuesday that the ministry took the decision after coming under pressure from the Ulema council, the country’s highest religious body of Islamic scholars.
JAPAN
TEPCO eyed tsunami review
A Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) briefing paper indicates that the utility was planning a reassessment of tsunami risks just before last year’s tsunami devastated its Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. TEPCO presented the paper to Japan’s nuclear regulators on March 7 last year, four days before the tsunami. It promised a new risk assessment by October last year. The paper summarized recent studies that suggested the plant could be hit by a tsunami up to 10m in height, higher than the 6m surge it was designed to withstand.
MALDIVES
Nasheed rejects summons
Ousted president Mohamed Nasheed rejected a police summons to take a statement about his actions in office, his spokesman said yesterday. Nasheed’s former foreign minister Ahmed Naseem said the police had asked the former president to explain his controversial order to arrest a judge last month. Nasheed said he was forced to resign following threats of violence from rebel police and army officers. International diplomatic pressure has mounted on President Mohamed Waheed not to escalate tensions. A visiting EU delegation in a statement asked the government to stop a campaign of “political retribution” targeting Nasheed’s supporters.
UNITED STATES
Mormons apologize to Jews
Mormon church leaders in Salt Lake City, Utah, apologized to the family of Holocaust survivor and Jewish rights advocate Simon Wiesenthal after his parents were posthumously baptized, a controversial ritual that Mormons believe allows deceased people a way to the afterlife, but offends members of many other religions. Wiesenthal died in 2005 after surviving the Nazi death camps and spending his life documenting Holocaust crimes and hunting down perpetrators who remained at large. Mormons believe posthumous baptism by proxy allows deceased persons to receive the Gospel in the afterlife. The church believes departed souls can then accept or reject the baptismal rites and contends the offerings are not intended to offend anyone.
LIBYA
Fighters stage show of force
Thousands of fighters have held a mass parade in Tripoli, showing off heavy machine guns and rocket launchers and firing rifles in the air. The procession on Tuesday was a show of force by members of 100 militias that announced a new, unified military council the day before. It appeared intended as a warning to anyone who might stage attacks during celebrations this week of the one-year anniversary of the start of the uprising that ended with the death of former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi in October last year. Fears of pro-Qaddafi activities have mounted following a call by one of his sons for a new uprising.
FRANCE
African leaders probed
Investigators have searched the luxury Paris home of a son of the president of Equatorial Guinea. Tuesday’s search was part of a lengthy probe into claims that three African leaders have misspent public funds. Police said investigating judges were present. It wasn’t immediately clear if possessions were seized. In September, judicial officials seized 16 luxury cars, including a Bugatti Veyron, allegedly belonging to the son of Equatorial Guinean President Teodoro Obiang as part of the probe. Obiang, and the leaders of Gabon and Congo-Brazzaville, are targeted in the probe, which opened in December 2010.
RUSSIA
Jewel thieves arrested
Police arrested 10 Colombian nationals who were attempting to smuggle stolen jewelry valued at US$1.4 million out of the country, the transport police said on Tuesday. The criminals were carrying some of the jewelry in their luggage, while a female accomplice wore some on her body, the press release said. The jewelry belongs to several companies that were planning to display the pieces at an international exhibition next month. It was stolen earlier this month.
FRANCE
Tiny bird flies far
A tiny songbird weighing as much as two tablespoons of sugar migrates from the Arctic to Africa and back, a distance of up to 29,000km, scientists reported yesterday. The size of an undernourished sparrow, the northern wheatear (Oenanthe oenanthe) tips the scales at just 25g, but biologists who tagged the tawny-and-white insectivore were stunned at its flight endurance. They attached minute geolocators, each weighing just 1.2g to the legs of 46 wheatears in Alaska and on Baffin Island in northeastern Canada. The Alaskan birds spent the winter in Africa before returning, a journey of about 14,500km each way, in which they flew on average 290km a day.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
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