■CHINA
Police may be disarmed
Police facing emotional strains because of financial or romantic problems could be stripped of their handguns in Jiangxi Province, a newspaper reported yesterday. The public security bureau in the province will begin inspections this month to make sure officers who have received administrative punishments, or are under investigation, will not be able to carry guns, the Southern Metropolis Daily said. Guns would also be retrieved from “officers who are suffering from serious illnesses or face psychological and emotional instability resulting from love or marriage frustrations and heavy debt,” it said.
■INDONESIA
Padlocked pants criticized
A move by massage parlors to padlock workers’ pants to prevent prostitution has caused outrage, with one minister branding it an “insult” to women, reports said yesterday. Minister Meutia Fardia Hatta Swasono reacted angrily to reports of locks being fitted to the pants of female staff in a small town where massage parlors are often used as a front for prostitution. “It’s not the right way to prevent promiscuity. It insults women as if they are the ones in the wrong,” Swasono, the minister for women’s empowerment, told the Jakarta Post. The daily said authorities in Batu in East Java had ordered masseuses to wear the locks to protect the town’s reputation.
■MALAYSIA
Opposition leader has stroke
The leader of the fundamentalist opposition Islamic party was hospitalized yesterday after suffering a mild stroke, his party said. Parti Islam se-Malaysia (PAS) President Hadi Awang was reported to be in stable condition and could be discharged in the next few days, PAS secretary-general Kamarudin Jaffar said in a statement. “He is able to talk,” Hadi’s spokesman Roslan Shahir said. Hadi, a Muslim cleric who led PAS since 2002, won a parliamentary and a state seat in his home state of Terengganu.
■NEW ZEALAND
Cops may hire in Singapore
Chinese-speaking police officers may be hired from Singapore to meet the needs of the fast-growing Asian population, a newspaper reported yesterday. A spokesman for Police Minister Annette King told the New Zealand Herald that a final decision had yet to be made. “If that happened, we’d be recruiting very experienced police who could speak Chinese,” the spokesman said. The paper said that police commissioners of the two countries had reached an agreement in principle. “Singapore has a similar-size force serving the same population, and also their policing ethos is remarkably similar to ours,” said Inspector John Mitchell, police development manager for Auckland.
■SPAIN
Muslim writer cancels visit
A former Muslim author and journalist who made headlines when he was baptized by the pope last month canceled a visit over concerns for his safety, his Spanish publisher said on Wednesday. Magdi Allam, an Egyptian-born Italian citizen, had been scheduled to present the Spanish edition of his book Conquering Fear: My Life Against Islamic Terrorism and the Unconsciousness of the West at a Madrid university on Wednesday. Allam, a critic of religious extremism who defends Israel’s right to exist, has for years received death threats from Islamic radicals, the statement said.
■BENIN
Priests pray for Betancourt
Voodoo priests cried out in tongues and made sacrificial offerings on Wednesday, imploring God and the ancestors to help free French-Colombian hostage Ingrid Betancourt from the hands of Colombian rebels. The ritual by initiates in the West African home of the ancient religion was part of a three-day program of fasting and prayer decreed by President Thomas Yayi Boni for Betancourt, who has been held hostage since 2002. Sarkozy says Betancourt is ill and close to death and has made it a priority to secure her release. The 46-year-old French-Colombian citizen was kidnapped while campaigning for the Colombian presidency.
■BRAZIL
Underpants draw bidders
He is accused of being one of the world’s most powerful cocaine traffickers, a Colombian kingpin allegedly responsible for more than 300 murders. But when Juan Carlos Ramirez Abadia’s belongings went on sale on Tuesday in Sao Paulo, the best-selling items were not the plasma screen televisions or his designer sunglasses. They were his underpants. Pnina Spett, a volunteer saleswoman, told Globo television that Abadia’s pants had become “folklore” after he was arrested half-naked last year by federal police at his Sao Paulo hideout. The shoppers “came straight for the Y-fronts,” she said. This month he was sentenced to 30 years in prison on drug charges.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Diggers make breakthrough
Archaeologists conducting a major excavation at Stonehenge said they had made a key breakthrough that may help explain why the site was built, the BBC said on Wednesday. The team has reached a series of sockets that once held bluestones, smaller stones, most of which are now missing, that made up Stonehenge’s original structure. The bluestones were transported from Wales and the researchers think they were brought to Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire because ancient people believed they had healing properties. The team must now extract material from the holes left by the bluestones to better date when they first arrived.
■RUSSIA
Poisoner faces life sentence
A man is facing life in jail for killing at least six people, including his wife and daughter, by adding poison to their food and watching their agonizing deaths, the Vesti news program reported on Wednesday. Vyacheslav Solovyov started inventing poisons to test on humans some six years ago, it said. Solovyov has been charged with six murders and four attempted poisonings. The poisonings have shocked the central town of Yaroslavl and Solovyov has asked for his trial to be held behind closed doors. “He has pleaded guilty to a majority of the killings, but his motives remain unclear,” the report said. Two previous examinations found him to be criminally sane.
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
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
TIT-FOR-TAT: The arrest of Filipinos that Manila said were in China as part of a scholarship program follows the Philippines’ detention of at least a dozen Chinese The Philippines yesterday expressed alarm over the arrest of three Filipinos in China on suspicion of espionage, saying they were ordinary citizens and the arrests could be retaliation for Manila’s crackdown against alleged Chinese spies. Chinese authorities arrested the Filipinos and accused them of working for the Philippine National Security Council to gather classified information on its military, the state-run China Daily reported earlier this week, citing state security officials. It said the three had confessed to the crime. The National Security Council disputed Beijing’s accusations, saying the three were former recipients of a government scholarship program created under an agreement between the
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate
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