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.
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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