■ SINGAPORE
Convicted killer loses bid
A man who killed his two-year-old stepdaughter by dunking her in a pail of water lost his final court bid to escape the gallows, news reports said yesterday. Mohammed Ali Johari, convicted in September of murdering the toddler known as Nonoi, had his appeal dismissed by the nation’s highest court. Ali’s lawyer, RS Bajwa, argued that his 31-year-old client had no intention of causing the child bodily injuries, meaning only to temporarily deprive her of air, the Straits Times said of Monday’s proceedings. Nonoi, or Nur Asyura Mohamed Fauzi, was first thought to have gone missing from the flat belonging to Ali’s parents on March 1, 2006. Three days later, Ali confessed to killing the child but claimed her death was accidental.
■ JAPAN
Hello Kitty gets makeover
She may be cute, but the latest top model to make her debut in Vogue is also podgy with short legs and whiskers. Hello Kitty, a popular cat character in Asia, is set for a designer makeover in the June issue of Japanese Vogue, which goes on sale on Saturday. The fashion spread will show Kitty modeling the latest autumn and winter designs by John Galliano for the Dior brand, posing with the designer and enjoying a shopping spree in Paris. “Of course this is the first time the historic fashion house of Dior has had a cartoon character model their entire collection,” said an official at Conde Nast Japan, publishers of Vogue Nippon.
■ JAPAN
Teen sentenced to death
A court yesterday sentenced a man to hang for killing a young mother and her baby girl when he was a minor, in a high-profile ruling hailed by the bereaved husband. The Hiroshima High Court ordered capital punishment for the man who was 18 years old when he broke into an apartment where he strangled Yayoi Motomura, 23, and her 11-month-old daughter Yuka in 1999. The defendant, who cannot be named because of his age at the time of the crime, was also convicted of raping Yayoi after her death. Calling the crime “cruel and unhuman,” judge Yasuhide Narazaki said that the man lacked regret.
■ BANGLADESH
Workers killed in explosion
Two workers were killed and two other injured in a gas explosion on a ship-breaking yard near the port city of Chittagong in the southeastern part of the country, officials said yesterday. Police said the overnight explosion originated from a cylinder of oxyacetylene gas being used on the Sitakundu ship-breaking yard. Witnesses said the blast killed two workers who were using a cutting torch on decommissioned ship. The owners of the yard said two other workers suffered from minor injuries.
■ PHILIPPINES
Farmers enter ‘no rally zone’
About 20 farmers slipped past tight security around the presidential palace yesterday and briefly picketed one of the gates of the sprawling compound. The farmers were able to enter the “no-rally zone” around the Malacanang palace in Manila by taking public transportation. They gathered outside the New Executive Building, just a few meters away from where President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and her Cabinet members were scheduled to hold a meeting. The farmers unfurled anti-government banners and took off their shirts to demand Arroyo make good on her promise to place her family’s 157-hectare sugar plantation under agrarian reform.
■ IRAN
Four drug traffickers hanged
Four people convicted of drug trafficking in the southeast have been hanged, a news agency said on Monday, a week after Amnesty International listed the Islamic state as the world’s second most prolific executioner last year. The semi-official Fars news agency said they were put to death in a prison in the city of Kerman. Murder, adultery, rape, armed robbery, apostasy and drug trafficking are all punishable by death under the country’s Shariah law, practiced since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
■ GHANA
Poverty efforts falling behind
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Monday the world must do more to eradicate poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, where not a single country is on track to meet all the goals of a global anti-poverty campaign launched in 2000. Speaking at a UN conference in Accra, Ban said that though many nations were falling behind, there had been progress. “Senegal is making great strides toward meeting the water target. ... Niger, Togo and Zambia have made impressive progress in malaria control,” Ban said. “These success stories need to be replicated and scaled-up across Africa with effective support from the international community.”
■ FRANCE
Parachutist aims for records
A 64-year-old retired French army parachutist said on Monday he hopes to smash through the sound barrier with a record-breaking 40,000m freefall jump over Canada next month. Michel Fournier hopes to set four new world records at once: for highest freefall parachute speed, at 1,500kph, along with fastest and highest jump and highest air balloon flight. He will take off on May 25 from Saskatchewan Province in a pressurised capsule, harnessed to a 161m helium-powered balloon, rising to almost four times the height of an airline flight before jumping.
■ IRELAND
Ahern to visit Kenya
Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern is traveling to Kenya to meet the leaders of its new coalition government and visit camps for people displaced by ethnic violence. Ahern said he would visit two camps today and meet with Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and new Prime Minister Raila Odinga tomorrow. The two feuding politicians came together in February in a power-sharing deal brokered by former UN chief Kofi Annan. The pact followed weeks of ethnic violence that left more than 1,000 dead and forced 300,000 from their homes. Ahern said: “While Kenya may be out of the headlines, it is important that the international community continues to focus on both rebuilding the damaged communities and helping build the economy.”
■ RUSSIA
Media chastises Georgia
The pro-Kremlin media chastised Georgia yesterday over claims by Tbilisi that Russia had shot down a Georgian spy plane over one of Georgia’s separatist territories. “Georgia has again tried to shift the blame for its own internal headache onto the healthy,” said state newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta. On Monday tensions between the states rose as Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili alleged that a Russian jet had a day earlier shot down an unmanned Georgian spy plane over the breakaway territory of Abkhazia. Georgia’s military has used video footage and radar images to back its claims. The Izvestia newspaper said there were inconsistencies in Georgia’s account, principally an early Georgian denial that one of its drones had been flying over Abkhazia.
■ UNITED STATES
FDA missing facility checks
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is making progress in conducting more inspections of foreign drug manufacturers but still inspects relatively few facilities. The agency conducted 30 such inspections in the latest fiscal year and plans to conduct at least 50 this year, government auditors say. Concerns about the inspection program were recently highlighted, auditors said, when the agency learned that contaminated doses of the blood thinner heparin probably had come through a Chinese plant that the agency had never inspected.
■ UNITED STATES
Rings back from the dead
Walt Disney World seems to have worked its magic on a Massachusetts couple who accidentally threw away three platinum and diamond wedding rings. While tidying up their villa as they prepared to leave the park late last week, Paul Campanale dumped a cardboard bowl, not knowing the container inside it held his wife Karen’s engagement, wedding and five-year-anniversary rings. Executive housekeeper Drew Weaver realized that trash from the Campanales’ villa had not reached the industrial-size compactor. He and seven other volunteers donned protective clothing, emptied a parking lot bin and waded through bag after bag of rubbish to find the rings. And they did.
■ UNITED STATES
Two prisoners killed in riot
Two prisoners were killed and five wounded in a Colorado prison riot, officials said Monday, amid reports that white supremacists marking Adolf Hitler’s birthday may have sparked the unrest. The violence erupted in a courtyard of a federal penitentiary in Florence, some 160km south of Denver, Colorado, prison spokesman Leann LaRiva said. The penitentiary “was placed on lockdown status because of an inmate disturbance which occurred on the recreation yard yesterday afternoon at approximately 12:30pm,” he said.
■ ARGENTINA
Smoke crisis eases
Planes and helicopters on Monday dumped heavy loads of water on brush fires raging north of Buenos Aires as city residents enjoyed a second day of breathing easy. But smoke that shrouded the Argentine capital for nearly a week could return by today if the winds that swept away the haze shift again, forecasters said. The government claims the fires were intentionally set by farmers clearing scrub brush on the cheap for grazing cattle. Three people have already been arrested in an arson investigation. Police are searching for others responsible for the nearly 200 brush fires still ablaze that sent clouds of smoke across Buenos Aires last week.
■ UNITED STATES
Preaching in the bar
Another round and amen! Beer was on tap and a mechanical bull inspired the sermon as a new church held its inaugural service in a western Ohio bar. The Country Rock Church drew about 100 people to Sunday night’s meeting at the Pub Lounge in the town of Sidney. The barroom church is an offshoot of Sidney United First Methodist Church, whose head pastor says he has been looking for creative ways to reach people in unconventional places. The church’s Web site for its new branch advertises “Top regional bands, pizza, wings, rowdy fun & a short message.” The Reverend Chris Heckaman said people seemed to enjoy themselves so he expected the Country Rock Church would meet weekly. Heckaman’s sermon compared staying on the bar’s mechanical bull to learning to get along in life.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
A group of Uyghur men who were detained in Thailand more than one decade ago said that the Thai government is preparing to deport them to China, alarming activists and family members who say the men are at risk of abuse and torture if they are sent back. Forty-three Uyghur men held in Bangkok made a public appeal to halt what they called an imminent threat of deportation. “We could be imprisoned and we might even lose our lives,” the letter said. “We urgently appeal to all international organizations and countries concerned with human rights to intervene immediately to save us from
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
US president-elect Donald Trump is not typically known for his calm or reserve, but in a craftsman’s workshop in rural China he sits in divine contemplation. Cross-legged with his eyes half-closed in a pose evoking the Buddha, this porcelain version of the divisive US leader-in-waiting is the work of designer and sculptor Hong Jinshi (洪金世). The Zen-like figures — which Hong sells for between 999 and 20,000 yuan (US$136 to US$2,728) depending on their size — first went viral in 2021 on the e-commerce platform Taobao, attracting national headlines. Ahead of the real-estate magnate’s inauguration for a second term on Monday next week,
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