NEW ZEALAND
Second needle case found
A needle has been found in a punnet of strawberries sold in the small South Island town of Geraldine over the weekend, police said yesterday, the second incident to hit the nation two months after a contamination crisis erupted in Australia. Supermarket owner Garry Sheed said he had since taken all strawberries off the shelves, but would not comment on whether the punnet was from Australia or New Zealand. The Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) said the person who found the needle was not harmed. “The matter has been referred to the police who are leading the criminal investigation,” a ministry spokesman told reporters. “At this stage, MPI does not have any reason to believe this is more widespread than the single discovery. However, as a precautionary measure the store has removed strawberries from shelves.”
ITALY
Di Maio open to deficit cut
Vice Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio yesterday said he was open to lowering the nation’s draft budget deficit, boosting stocks in Milan on hopes it could ease a stand-off with Brussels. The European Commission has rejected the draft budget because it sharply increases spending and the deficit to 2.4 percent of GDP from the previous government’s 0.8 percent, which it says would only add to the nation’s already massive debt mountain. “If, during the negotiating process, the deficit has to be reduced a bit, that’s not a big deal,” Di Maio told Radio Radicale. “The important thing is that not one person misses out on the [pledged] measures,” he said, in reference to a universal basic income and a pension reform promised by the ruling coalition. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, Economy Minister Giovanni Tria, Di Maio and his fellow vice prime minister, Matteo Salvini were to discuss the budget late yesterday.
AUSTRALIA
Bhutan twins leave hospital
Formerly conjoined twins from Bhutan were yesterday released from a hospital more than two weeks after they were separated in a delicate surgery. The 15-month-old girls — Nima and Dawa — were joined from the lower chest to just above the pelvis and shared a liver. They were separated during an operation at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital on Nov. 9 that lasted almost six hours. A major challenge had been to reconstruct their abdomens. “Thank you, everyone,” their grateful mother, Bhumchu Zangmo, said, as she wheeled her daughters from the hospital where their lives have been transformed since their arrival on Oct. 2. The hospital’s head of pediatric surgery, Joe Crameri, told reporters the twins had made an “excellent recovery” and were acting independently. Before they return to Bhutan, the girls are to continue their recovery at a retreat in the town of Kilmore outside Melbourne run by the Children First Foundation.
UNITED KINGDON
Royal Mail sending music
Children writing to Father Christmas will have a chance to hear festive jingles break out as they post their wish list. Four letterboxes in as yet undisclosed locations in London, Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh are to be installed with sensors that will trigger either the sound of sleigh bells or a jolly message from Old Saint Nick. Anyone putting mail in the special postboxes will hear the merry messages in the coming weeks. The red postboxes are adorned with snowflakes and will be in place throughout the festive season. “We enjoy any way we can add a little extra fun to posting Christmas cards this year,” Royal Mail operations director Simon Barker said.
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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