HONG KONG
Publisher jailed for 10 years
A Chinese court has sentenced a Hong Kong publisher to 10 years in prison to stop him from putting out “subversive” books about China’s leaders, his son told a newspaper. Retired engineer-turned-publisher Yiu Man-tin (姚文田), 73, was found guilty and sentenced to jail for smuggling after failing to pay import duties on industrial paint he took to China from Hong Kong in October last year, his lawyer said yesterday. Yiu planned to release a book about Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) called China’s Godfather Xi Jinping by dissident Yu Jie (余杰) before he was detained on Oct. 27 last year, the South China Morning Post said, citing family and friends. Yiu’s son, Edmond Yiu Yung-chin (姚勇戰), told the newspaper he believed his father had been set up to prevent him from publishing subversive books.
JAPAN
Fetishist taxi driver arrested
A taxi driver who got a sexual thrill out of watching women desperate to urinate has been arrested for allegedly feeding passengers snacks laced with diuretics, police said yesterday. Toshihiko Nishi, 41, lured women into long rides in his cab, in at least one case by offering a half-price fare, and then plied them with crackers covered in a substance that would make them want to go to the toilet. Police who raided the man’s home said they found videos that Nishi said were from a security camera inside the cab that showed about 50 women wetting themselves on his back seat. One alleged victim told police she had got into Nishi’s taxi in Osaka, western Japan, in October last year and had been given a small paper cup containing water biscuits. A short time after eating the snack, she began to need the toilet, but when she told the driver to let her out of the car so she could relieve herself, he refused and instead passed back an absorbent sheet on which he encouraged her to urinate. “I got excited by watching women trying to withstand the urge to urinate,” the driver told investigators.
JAPAN
Bones left on firm’s doorstep
Two neatly sealed boxes of human bones — one containing a skull — were left on the doorstep of a real-estate agent, police said Wednesday. The 34-year-old manager of the firm in Chiba Prefecture east of Tokyo found the two sealed boxes outside the door of his office on Tuesday morning, police said. He called the emergency services after opening one of the boxes and discovering a human skull inside. The other box was found to contain a number of bones of varying lengths and sizes, believed to be from the same body. “The remains appear to have belonged to one person, but neither the sex nor the age of the person is yet known,” a police officer said, adding it was likely an adult.
AUSTRALIA
Missing Irishman found
Police said yesterday that an Irishman missing after last being seen in a Sydney pub has been found at the bottom of a stairwell after apparently being trapped for five days. Donal “Donie” O’Sullivan was last spotted at the bar in Bondi on Saturday morning, but never made it home. He was reported missing on Sunday night by relatives, sparking a search by friends and the local Irish community, with more than 800 people joining a Facebook page dedicated to finding him. The 33-year-old was eventually found on Wednesday lying in an emergency stairwell of a commercial building just meters away from where he was last seen, suffering head and back injuries. Police said they were treating the case as possible “misadventure.”
UNITED KINGDOM
‘Skull Cracker’ arrested
Police on Wednesday said that they have caught a fugitive armed robber nicknamed “Skull Cracker” five days after he escaped from a low-security prison in southeastern England. Michael Wheatley was given 13 life sentences in 2002 for a series of violent raids on banks. He absconded on Saturday after being granted a day-release license. Police said they arrested Wheatley, 55, and another man in east London on suspicion of conspiracy to commit armed robbery. The arrests came after a branch of the Chelsea Building Society in Surrey was robbed earlier on Wednesday. Wheatley got his nickname for striking his victims with his pistol during bank raids.
SPAIN
Sandwich carries cocaine
Police on Wednesday said that they arrested a Colombian man after he was found to be carrying a ham and cheese sandwich stuffed with more than 100g of cocaine. The 29-year-old was detained at a bus station in the Mediterranean beach town of Benidorm and he is suspected of drug trafficking, police said in a statement. A photograph released by police show a sandwich cut in half with nine small cylindrical plastic capsules on top of the ham and cheese. Police found more than 1kg of cocaine in the man’s home in Benidorm, as well as marijuana, and detained his roommate, a 20-year-old Colombian.
CANADA
‘Rehab like camp’: Ford
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford told the Toronto Sun on Wednesday that “rehab is amazing,” adding that it is a lot like a football summer camp he attended as a child. Ford, 44, took a leave of absence from city hall in the middle of his re-election campaign last week to enter rehab for drug and alcohol abuse after another video recently surfaced showing him allegedly smoking crack. “I feel great,” he told the newspaper. “Rehab is amazing. It reminds me of football camp. Kind of like the Washington Redskins camp I went to as a kid,” he said. Ford described daily meetings with four to eight people, including “two doctors, a captain of industry and a professional athlete... There are terrific people in my group. We are all supporting each other. We are connecting in a weird way.”
PERU
‘Miracle’ saves parachutist
A noncommissioned air force officer whose parachute malfunctioned during a training exercise survived a 1,500m fall without any broken bones. “It’s a miracle he’s alive,” emergency room doctor Guillermo Pacheco said. “It was the will of God he survived.” Amasifuen Gamarra, 31, underwent a battery of medical tests at the hospital in Arequipa, Pacheco said, “and there weren’t any fractures.” The doctor said Gamarra jumped from a military plane at 1,500m, but when he tried to open his parachute, the webbing wrapped around his neck and he lost consciousness. “We don’t know what cushioned his fall, but he’s alive. It’s a miracle,” Pacheco said.
VENEZUELA
‘Bird smuggler’ nabbed
A German woman attempted to board a plane to France with 103 tropical birds hidden in her luggage, some of them endangered species, authorities said on Wednesday. The birds were in boxes in her baggage when she was stopped on Friday last week at a Caracas airport and the National Guard carried out a search, state prosecutors said. The woman was charged “for the alleged offense of aggravated and planned smuggling,” officials said.
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
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
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of
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