■ JAPAN
Police arrest larvae fiend
A man was arrested for releasing hundreds of beetle larvae inside a moving express train, police said on Tuesday. “I wanted to see women get scared and shake their legs,” police quoted 35-year-old Manabu Mizuta as saying. He was arrested on the spot by a patrolling police officer after releasing the creatures on the Keihan line in Osaka prefecture. “He would go close to women on the train, any woman, and pour out the worms from containers,” a police spokesman said. Local police had been on alert after 18 similar cases of released worms had been reported this month by the same train operator. “When the arrest was made, the man had nearly emptied a container, which is believed to have held 200 worms,” he said. “You cannot count them because there are so many.”
■ CHINA
Laid-off workers riot
Hundreds of laid-off workers rioted amid a dispute over severance pay, smashing offices of the Kaida Toy Factory and clashing with police, state press said yesterday. The riot occurred on Tuesday night in Dongguan, one of Guangdong Province’s major export hubs, after as many as 2,000 workers gathered to protest over their severance pay, the Guangzhou Daily reported. “[Rioters] smashed one police vehicle and four police patrol cars ... fought with security guards ... and entered factory offices breaking windows and destroying equipment,” the paper said. There were no reports of arrests.
■ CHINA
Cop killer executed
A man who was convicted of killing six policemen in a stabbing spree but drew public sympathy with allegations that he lashed out to avenge torture in police custody was executed yesterday. Yang Jia (楊佳) was executed in Shanghai after the country’s highest court upheld his death sentence, despite foreign and domestic late appeals for the government to re-examine his case. “Yang is dead, and justice is dead too,” said Beijing lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan (劉曉原), who represents Yang’s mother. Yang, a 28-year-old Beijing man, forced his way into a Shanghai police station on July 1 and stabbed six officers to death. Support for Yang swelled after media reported that he said the attack was revenge for torture he allegedly suffered while being questioned about a stolen bicycle.
■ AUSTRALIA
German doctor to stay
A German doctor, refused permission to live in Australia because his son has Down Syndrome, will now be able to stay, the immigration minister said, promising to change national laws to avoid a repeat. Bernhard Moeller arrived two years ago with his wife and three children to work at the Wimmera Base Hospital in rural Victoria State. He was told last month he could not stay because his youngest son Lukas, 13, failed migrant health tests. Immigration officials this week rejected an appeal from the Moellers because their son was likely to be a permanent drain on taxpayer funding because of his condition.
■ PHILIPPINES
Cargo ship capsizes
A cargo ship capsized in bad weather, leaving 11 crew members missing, the coast guard said yesterday. The Mark Jason 1 was on its way to the Batanes Islands in the northernmost tip of the country late on Tuesday when it was struck by large waves. It was carrying 20 crewmen. The coast guard said passing vessels were able to rescue nine crewmen and search and rescue teams had been dispatched to search for the 11 missing crew.
■ RUSSIA
Katyn appeal rejected
A Moscow court on Tuesday rejected an appeal by relatives of Polish army officers killed by Soviet secret police seeking to overturn a refusal to re-open an inquiry into the 1940 Katyn massacre. An estimated 22,000 Polish army officers were executed in 1940 by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s secret police. For decades, Moscow claimed the massacre in the Katyn forest was carried out by Nazi troops. The relatives want an investigation, started in the final months of the Soviet Union in 1990, restarted. The inquiry was ended and its contents declared secret under President Vladimir Putin in 2004. A lawyer for the relatives said they would take the course to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Indian given life for murder
An Indian man was jailed for a minimum of 24 years on Tuesday for kidnapping, raping and strangling a teenage girl. Former sandwich delivery driver Maninder Pal Singh Kohli, 41, was given a life sentence after being unanimously convicted by a jury at Winchester Crown Court of the murder of 17-year-old Hannah Foster in 2003. Her parents made four trips to India to appeal for public help in tracking down Kohli after he fled to his native country. Their efforts led to him being identified by five people in a town in West Bengal. Kohli was arrested after 16 months on the run, and after a three-year legal battle he became the first Indian national to be extradited to stand trial in Britain. Speaking outside court, Foster’s family said they were appalled by the possibility that Kohli would probably be released after serving his sentence.
■ GERMANY
Conductor sacked
Conductor Jin Wang, 48, has been sacked from his post in Wuerzburg, after an allegation that he sexually harassed a young woman musician. Chinese-born Wang, who was director of music at the Mainfranken Theater and conducted the Wuerzburg Philharmonic Orchestra, had resisted pressure to resign after the city suspended him on full pay. A municipal spokesman said he was sacked last Friday after fruitless efforts for a negotiated solution. The city said that regardless of whether the harassment claim was true or not, it had an obligation as employer to act in the interests of the other 240 staff of the theatre. Most of the orchestra had reportedly asked that Wang’s contract not be extended. Wang’s Wuerzburg contract ran until 2010. One of his supporters said she would start a petition for him to be reinstated.
■ RUSSIA
Pilot error blamed for crash
Pilot error caused the crash of an Atlasjet plane last year that killed 57 people, an official report said. Transportation Minister Binali Yildirim said on Tuesday the report blames the pilots of the Atlasjet MD-83 plane for taking a wrong course in approaching the airport at Isparta on a flight from Istanbul on Nov. 30, killing 50 passengers and seven crew members.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Kidnapped crew ‘doing OK’
Two British crewmembers of a Saudi supertanker seized by Somali pirates 10 days ago said they were being well treated by their captors. “Everything is OK, we’ve got no mistreatment or anything, we’re being treated quite well,” Peter French, the chief engineer on the Sirius Star, told ITV News TV by telephone on Tuesday. He said the pirates were “no problem whatsoever.” Second officer James Grady said their captors were heavily armed, but appeared “quite relaxed” and had not hurt the hostages.
■ JAMAICA
Death penalty upheld
Lawmakers voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to keep the death penalty on the law books, even though it has not been enforced for 20 years amid considerable domestic and international pressure. The ruling Labour Party had vowed to address the issue when it rose to power 15 months ago. The vote in the House of Representatives was 34-15 in favor of retaining capital punishment, with 10 abstentions. Nine inmates are currently on death row. After five years on death row, death sentences are commuted to life in prison. No vote is expected in the senate since it is already a law of the land.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Updike wins for bad sex
It’s not quite the Nobel Prize, but John Updike has a new literary accolade: laureate of bad sex. Updike, who has a long and graphic history of detailing coupling on the page, won a lifetime achievement award on Tuesday from judges of Britain’s Bad Sex in Fiction Prize, which celebrates crude, tasteless or ridiculous sexual passages in modern literature. The judges, editors of Literary Review magazine, said Updike had been shortlisted for the prize four times in its 16-year history. “Good sex or bad sex, he has kept us entertained for many years,” they said in a statement. The magazine said it was attempting to contact Updike to tell him the good news.
■ UNITED STATES
Fake penis sellers guilty
Two men who sold prosthetic penises enabling drug cheats to give fake urine samples have pleaded guilty to conspiracy, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported on Tuesday. Gerald Wills and Robert Catalano, president and vice president of Puck Technology, entered guilty pleas on Monday at a federal court in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They were charged last month with selling the Whizzinator penis -— a lifelike device used to emit clean, realistically warm urine instead of the user’s true urine.
■ UNITED STATES
Urine processor fixed: NASA
Astronauts at the International Space Station (ISS) have fixed a faulty urine processor unit after NASA extended the Endeavour shuttle mission by 24 hours to work on it, NASA said on Tuesday. Crew members ran three successful cycles on the unit, designed to process urine, perspiration and bath water into drinkable water. The US$250 million device, which will now remain on the ISS instead of being brought back to Earth, was an essential part of the shuttle mission to double the station’s accommodation capacity. Once up and running, the unit will be able to recycle the station’s 6.8 tonnes of waste water produced each year and make it no longer necessary to regularly ferry vast quantities of water to the ISS.
■ UNITED STATES
Workers foil bank robber
Three ATM technicians helped foil a robbery at a garment district bank on Tuesday morning, the police said, and passers-by helped gather the bills that scattered when the robber fled and returned them. All the stolen money was accounted for, the police said. The scene unfolded just before 10:45am, police said, when a man walked into the Sterling National Bank on Seventh Avenue and handed a teller a note demanding money. The teller handed over US$1,082 to the man, who did not have a weapon, said Paul Browne, the chief police spokesman. “As the man was leaving the bank, the teller shouted: ‘Stop him! He just robbed the bank!’” Browne said. The technicians, who were repairing the bank’s ATMs, heard the cry and gave chase, Browne said.
Russia and Ukraine have exchanged prisoners of war in the latest such swap that saw the release of hundreds of captives and was brokered with the help of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), officials said on Monday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that 189 Ukrainian prisoners, including military personnel, border guards and national guards — along with two civilians — were freed. He thanked the UAE for helping negotiate the exchange. The Russian Ministry of Defense said that 150 Russian troops were freed from captivity as part of the exchange in which each side released 150 people. The reason for the discrepancy in numbers
A shark attack off Egypt’s Red Sea coast killed a tourist and injured another, authorities said on Sunday, with an Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs source identifying both as Italian nationals. “Two foreigners were attacked by a shark in the northern Marsa Alam area, which led to the injury of one and the death of the other,” the Egyptian Ministry of Environment said in a statement. A source at the Italian foreign ministry said that the man killed was a 48-year-old resident of Rome. The injured man was 69 years old. They were both taken to hospital in Port Ghalib, about 50km north
‘MAGA CIVIL WAR’: Former Trump strategist Bannon said the H1-B program created ‘indentured servants,’ but Musk said that he was willing ‘to go to war on this issue’ US president-elect Donald Trump on Saturday weighed in on a bitter debate dividing his traditional supporters and tech barons such as Elon Musk, saying that he backs a special visa program that helps highly skilled workers enter the country. “I’ve always liked the [H1-B] visas, I have always been in favor of the visas, that’s why we have them” at Trump-owned facilities, he told the New York Post in his first public comments on the matter since it flared up this week. An angry back-and-forth, largely between Silicon Valley’s Musk and traditional anti-immigration Trump backers, has erupted in fiery fashion, with Musk
The foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland on Tuesday expressed concern about “the political crisis” in Georgia, two days after Mikheil Kavelashvili was formally inaugurated as president of the South Caucasus nation, cementing the ruling party’s grip in what the opposition calls a blow to the country’s EU aspirations and a victory for former imperial ruler Russia. “We strongly condemn last week’s violence against peaceful protesters, media and opposition leaders, and recall Georgian authorities’ responsibility to respect human rights and protect fundamental freedoms, including the freedom to assembly and media freedom,” the three ministers wrote in a joint statement. In reaction
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