■JAPAN
Online threat not funny
Police arrested a 31-year-old man yesterday on suspicion of posting a hoax message on an Internet message board threatening to kill Crown Prince Naruhito, new reports said. Takeshi Yamamoto, an unemployed man in Gifu, was charged with disturbing the work of police after guards boosted security at the crown prince’s residence in light of the apparent threat, Jiji Press and Kyodo News said, quoting police officials. The man allegedly put the message on an Internet message board on Aug. 13, reportedly under the name “Masako,” wife of the crown prince, saying: “I will kill the crown prince.” Yamamoto, who is also suspected of threatening to kill a company president and attack a company with a bomb, admitted the latest charge, saying he was “dissatisfied with society.”
■JAPAN
Dumpling report rebutted
The Foreign Ministry denied media reports yesterday that Beijing had admitted that pesticide-laced dumplings had probably been contaminated in China. Media, including NHK television, said China had told Tokyo that a worker at the factory that produced the poisoned dumplings was probably to blame for food poisoning. Poisoned dumplings caused 10 Japanese to become sick in December and January. “The Japanese government has not received such information,” the ministry said in a faxed statement. Foreign Ministry officials could not be reached for comment.
■INDONESIA
Canadian held after deaths
A Canadian citizen has been detained over the death of five workers after a maintenance platform plunged 50m from a television tower, a report said yesterday. Wesley Ernest Stabner, 57, was declared a suspect over the Thursday incident in Jakarta and has been detained awaiting trial, the local daily Kompas said. Stabner could face negligence charges after allegedly advising the workers that the platform could safely hold five people, police said. The Canadian, who works for US-based Rohn Products, is reportedly in a state of shock.
■JAPAN
Heavy rains continue
Rescue workers searched for a missing person yesterday after fierce rains left one woman dead and vast stretches of rural and residential areas inundated. In Okazaki, residents were ordered to evacuate on Friday, but authorities later lifted the order. The storm traveled northeast yesterday, bringing more heavy rains. Two men reported missing in Okazaki on Friday were located. Police said their disappearances were unrelated to the flooding. The storm has flooded 1,300 households.
■YEMEN
Police clash with militants
Three policemen were wounded in a gun battle with suspected Islamic militants in the south late on Friday, officials said. The fighting took place in Ja’ar city, southern Abyan Province, where jihadist fighters have a strong presence. Officials said the militants were believed to be members of a group affiliated to al-Qaeda. Ja’ar is 600km south of the capital Sana’a and is close to the Hatat mountains where armed Islamic groups often take shelter. Security sources said 40 militants were arrested in a clampdown in Hatat over the past two weeks.
■BELGIUM
Iodine leak raises fears
A recent leak of radioactive iodine at a medical laboratory had residents in the southern town of Fleurus on edge on Friday as authorities warned of contamination risks. After authorities at first said early in the week that the leak represented no danger to people or the environment, they have since decided that precautionary measures are needed. But the change of tune has fuelled local residents’ fears that they were warned too late about contamination risks. “We’ve been abandoned,” complained 70-year-old Leopold Gravy, a retired school director in Fleurus, where the leak last weekend caused the most serious nuclear incident ever in the country.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Stolen metal recovered
Britain’s largest ever haul of stolen metal has been found by detectives at a scrapyard in Staffordshire. More than 350 tonnes of stolen rail track, other rail equipment, metal beer kegs, cabling and fencing were seized by officers from British Transport Police (BTP) and Staffordshire Police. The material is estimated to amount to more than 317,500kg. “With the high price of metals on world commodity markets, metal and cable theft has become a significant problem for the rail industry, utilities and telecommunications providers,” BTP Detective Sergeant Tony Nugent said. Officers raided the yard in Cheadle on Wednesday and arrested a 43-year-old local man.
■FINLAND
Teen paid to have mom killed
A court on Friday sentenced a teenage girl to five years in custody for hiring a hitman to kill her mother. Elina Mikkola was 16 when she ordered the hit, which her mother survived, earlier this year. The court heard that she offered 30,000 euros (US$44,000) to Teddy Kaksonen, 19, to carry out the crime. She also drew a map of her mother’s home and provided a key to the flat. The Helsinki district court convicted Mikkola of attempted murder. On Jan. 16, Kaksonen and two accomplices entered the flat, where one of them shot the girl’s mother with a crossbow. However, the woman was able to escape to the balcony of her flat and call for help.
■ALGERIA
Islamic militants killed
The official news agency said the army had killed four armed Islamic militants over two days in a sweep against insurgents east of the capital. The APS agency quoted unidentified security officials as saying that three militants were killed in an army-led ambush on Thursday in the Lakhdaria hills in the Bouira region, about 100km east of Algiers. APS reported on Friday that another militant was killed in the regional town of Bouderbala during a gunfight with security forces. A four-year-old girl was killed and her grandmother badly injured in the exchange of fire on Wednesday.
■UNITED STATES
Aircraft avert catastrophe
Two commercial aircraft, one Russian and the other US, were one minute away from a mid-air, head-on collision near Puerto Rico, but maneuvered in time to avert catastrophe, a US official said on Friday. A Delta Boeing B737-800 and a Transaero Boeing B747-400, registered in Russia, were traveling toward one another on Thursday at the same altitude of 10,058m (333,000 feet), Peter Knudson of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said. The two aircraft “came within zero feet vertical and one minute lateral separation at an altitude of 33,000 feet,” Knudson said. “The Transaero 747 descended 60m to 90m after receiving an alert from its Traffic Collision Avoidance System,” he said.
■UNITED STATES
Storm gathers strength
Hurricane Gustav strengthened into a Category 2 storm yesterday as it churned across warm Caribbean waters toward western Cuba, the US National Hurricane Center said. Around 2:15am, forecasters at the Miami-based center said Gustav’s top winds had reached near 155kph as it passed about 85km northeast of Grand Cayman Island. The storm, which killed up to 77 people in the Caribbean, was plowing toward superheated waters south of Cuba where it could absorb enough energy to strengthen into a major hurricane before ripping through the heavy concentration of US oil and natural gas platforms off Louisiana.
■UNITED STATES
Church to pay abused men
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence, Rhode Island, will pay US$1.3 million to four men who said they were abused by priests, lawyers announced on Friday. The settlements were reached in June and will go to the victims or their estates, said attorney James Murphy, who represented the church. “There is no amount of money that is going to make it right,” Carl DeLuca, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, told the Providence Journal. “It is more an issue of validation. And in that sense they feel validated.” Three men sued the diocese starting in 2003 alleging that priests abused them as children.
■UNITED KINGDOM
World War I survivor dies
A 109-year-old woman believed to be the last surviving female veteran of World War I has died, Britain’s Ministry of Defense said. Gladys Powers, who lied about her age to join the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps when she was 15, died in British Columbia, Canada, on Aug. 14. Born in Lewisham in London, she emigrated to Canada at the end of the war after marrying a Canadian soldier. Powers’ death brings the total number of remaining World War I veterans to three.
■CANADA
Quebec sees new outbreak
One person has died and 87 have fallen ill from a salmonella outbreak in Quebec, health officials said on Friday, just days after authorities announced the deaths of 15 people linked to a separate food infection. The Food and Agriculture Ministry has issued recalls of three types of cheese that are a suspected source of the salmonella outbreak. Food and Agriculture spokesman Guy Auclair said the salmonella outbreak is not connected to the listeria outbreak linked to the 15 deaths or to a second, different strain of listeria found in cheese in Quebec. Horacio Arruda, a director with Quebec’s health department, said he suspects to see more cases. “The epidemic’s curve appears to show that we have not yet reached the end of the outbreak because ... there have still been recent cases,” he said.
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
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