■NEW ZEALAND
Thief faces Maori curse
An Asian thief faces the threat of a Maori curse after stealing a precious carving from an earthquake conference in China, a cultural expert warned yesterday. The Maori carving Te Taonga O Ruaumoko was taken to Beijing by a delegation to the 14th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering. It was stolen from the nation’s table during a banquet on Friday, while in the care of delegates from Canterbury University’s engineering department. Security camera footage showed an Asian man stealing the carving, a delegate who declined to be named told The Press newspaper.
■HONG KONG
Yoga teacher found guilty
A yoga teacher was found guilty of sexually molesting four of his students, ages 15 to 24, a media report said yesterday. Man Fung (文鋒), 64, who was convicted on Monday of 10 counts of indecent assault, was remanded into custody by Deputy District Court Judge Anthony Kwok pending sentencing on Nov. 3, the South China Morning Post said. Kwok said the gravity of the offenses, which took place from July 2006 to May last year at a yoga school Man founded, called for a lengthy jail term. “This case involves students’ trust and expectations of their teacher,” Kwok said.
■AUSTRALIA
Detainees may get redress
The government may compensate as many as 191 people for wrongfully holding them in immigration detention centers, a parliamentary hearing was told yesterday. A government ombudsman last year reported that 247 Australian citizens, permanent residents and legal visa holders were incorrectly detained by the Immigration Department between 1993 and last year. The inquiry was sparked by the illegal detention of mentally ill Australian resident Cornelia Rau for more than 10 months in 2004 and 2005 and the wrongful deportation of Australian citizen Vivian Solon to the Philippines. The chief lawyer for the department, Robyn Bicket, said yesterday the department had now reviewed all the cases.
■HONG KONG
Abattoir investigated
Police have launched an investigation into an suspected illegal abattoir that is believed to have been used to kill dogs whose meat was sold at a local market, a media report said yesterday. Police, government workers and representatives from an animal charity scoured the site of the alleged slaughterhouse found in a shabby, single-storey house by an animal welfare group, the South China Morning Post said. The Animal Life Guard Action Group said it found choppers, meat knives, air pistol pellets, animal traps, hooks, a wok and bones when it visited the house on Sunday.
■NEPAL
Yeti ‘footprints’ found
Japanese climbers returning from a mountain in the western part of the country said on Tuesday they found footprints they think belonged to the abominable snowman, or Yeti. “We saw three footprints which looked like that of human beings,” Kuniaki Yagihara, a member of the Yeti Project Japan, said in Kathmandu, after returning from the mountain with photographs of the footprints. The climbers, equipped with long-lens cameras, video cameras and telescopes, said, however that they did not see or take any photographs of the creature. The Yeti is said to live in the Himalayan regions of Nepal and is largely regarded by the scientific community as a mythical creature.
■LUXEMBOURG
EU ready to talk climate
Italy kept up the pressure to dilute EU climate proposals on Monday, but most other EU nations reaffirmed the goals and stressed they would approach global talks this year in “full negotiating mode.” Italian Environment Minister Stefania Prestigiacomo told reporters on Monday that she wanted proposals to include a clause allowing the package to be revised once its costs have been fully assessed. The European Commission estimates the costs for Italy would not exceed 13 billion euros (US$17.48 billion), while Italy’s employers lobby Confindustria has cited costs of up to 27 billion euros.
■FRANCE
Sister Emmanuelle dies
Sister Emmanuelle, a nun who lived for years among scavengers in Cairo’s slums and who has been compared to Mother Teresa for her fight to defend the rights of the poor, died on Monday at age 99. A spokeswoman for her association, Sandrine de Carlo, said the Belgium-born nun died in her sleep at a retirement home in Callian. Sister Emmanuelle spent more than two decades working with Cairo’s zabbaleen, or garbage collectors, who eke out a living through scavenging. She helped create a network of clinics, schools and gardens to serve the children of the slums, and an association she founded now operates in eight countries, from Lebanon to Burkina Faso. De Carlo said the funeral would be a strictly private affair but a public Mass in her memory will be held in Paris next month.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Government battles phonies
Traffic wardens will be able to seize disabled parking permits from drivers misusing them under a revamp of the Blue Badge scheme. The badges have become increasingly prized as councils have expanded parking restrictions across the country, leading to permits illegally changing hands for as much as £1,500 (US$2,550) each, the government says. At present only police can seize permits and it is hard for enforcement officers in one part of the country to check whether a badge issued elsewhere is legitimate.
■GUINEA
Elections postponed again
The first free legislative elections since the West African nation won independence in 1958 have been postponed to March at the earliest, the head of the electoral commission said on Monday. The vote, expected to have taken place in December, had to be postponed because of delays in its organization, Ben Sekou Sylla said. Initially to have taken place in June last year, the vote was postponed to give time to rebuild local administrations in the country’s regions after hostile demonstrations in January and February last year lead to 186 deaths and over 1,200 people injured.
■GREECE
Strike to halt services
All flights to and from the country were to be suspended for several hours yesterday during the latest nationwide strike, which would also shut down banks, schools, public transportation and enforce a news blackout to protest against drastic economic policies. Air traffic controllers were to stop work for four hours, as of noon, as part of the strike called by the country’s two largest unions, private sector federation GSEE and public sector ADEDY, representing more than half of the country’s 5 million workforce. They are protesting against next year’s budget, expected to go to parliament for debate this week, saying it fails to ensure workers protection from privatizations, pensions and tax collecting measures.
■CANADA
Opposition leader to quit
Opposition leader Stephane Dion said on Monday he would step aside after the Liberals’ worst election defeat in two decades last week. He will thus become one of few leaders in the party’s history not to go on to become prime minister, which he blamed on his Conservative rival’s negative campaign. Dion said at a press conference after nearly a week in seclusion that he would stay on as “leader until a new leader is chosen at a leadership convention that I have asked the party to begin to organize.” The next convention is scheduled for May next year, but could be moved forward under the new circumstances.
■UNITED STATES
Police rule out murder
A Japanese businessman who was found dead in prison shortly after arriving in Los Angeles to face trial for killing his wife committed suicide and was not murdered, police said on Monday. Los Angeles Police Department deputy chief Mark Perez said there was no evidence to suggest that 61-year-old Kazuyoshi Miura, who faced trial for the 1981 killing of his wife, had been murdered. Miura’s attorney, Mark Geragos, had questioned the cause of death and hired an independent pathologist to examine the body. The pathologist was quoted by several media outlets at the weekend as saying Miura suffered wounds consistent with a choking and beating.
■CANADA
HIV murder case starts
A court in Ontario started proceedings on Monday in the nation’s first-ever first-degree murder trial involving the alleged sexual transmission of the HIV virus. Lawyers told the court that Johnson Aziga, 52, first learned he was HIV positive in 1997, but continued to have unprotected sex without disclosing his condition to his partners. Aziga faces two counts of first-degree murder because two of his girlfriends died of what lawyers said were HIV-related cancers. Prosecutor Tim Power told the three-woman, nine-man jury in his opening statement that Aziga put his partners at risk of serious bodily harm without their knowing, even having sex with one woman on the morning of his arrest in August 2003.
■MEXICO
Prison riot kills 21
Twenty-one prisoners died on Monday in a fight between inmates at a prison across the border from McAllen, Texas, officials said. The Public Safety Department of Tamaulipas state, where the prison is located, said in a news release that the pre-dawn confrontation between two groups of inmates left 12 prisoners injured. The cause of the riot and the inmates’ deaths was under investigation. State authorities suspended the prison director and guards pending an investigation. State and federal police and army troops took control of the state prison, located in the rough border city of Reynosa. Authorities did not say what sparked the confrontation, saying only they had been taken to local hospitals for treatment.
■CANADA
Food linked to heart attack
Diets heavy in fried foods, salty snacks and meat account for about 35 percent of heart attacks globally, researchers reported on Monday. Their study of 52 countries showed that people who ate a “Western” diet based on meat, eggs and junk food were more likely to have heart attacks, while those who ate more fruit and vegetables had a lower risk. Salim Yusuf at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, and colleagues questioned more than 16,000 patients for the study.
Seven people sustained mostly minor injuries in an airplane fire in South Korea, authorities said yesterday, with local media suggesting the blaze might have been caused by a portable battery stored in the overhead bin. The Air Busan plane, an Airbus A321, was set to fly to Hong Kong from Gimhae International Airport in southeastern Busan, but caught fire in the rear section on Tuesday night, the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said. A total of 169 passengers and seven flight attendants and staff were evacuated down inflatable slides, it said. Authorities initially reported three injuries, but revised the number
A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It might sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this point, it’s: ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
CHEER ON: Students were greeted by citizens who honked their car horns or offered them food and drinks, while taxi drivers said they would give marchers a lift home Hundreds of students protesting graft they blame for 15 deaths in a building collapse on Friday marched through Serbia to the northern city of Novi Sad, where they plan to block three Danube River bridges this weekend. They received a hero’s welcome from fellow students and thousands of local residents in Novi Said after arriving on foot in their two-day, 80km journey from Belgrade. A small red carpet was placed on one of the bridges across the Danube that the students crossed as they entered the city. The bridge blockade planned for yesterday is to mark three months since a huge concrete construction
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