Sun, Dec 07, 2008 page7

• World News Quick Take

  • AGENCIES
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  ■JAPAN

  Anti-whalers to be arrested

  Anti-whaling activists will be arrested if they forcibly interrupt whale hunting in the Antarctic Ocean, a report said yesterday. The fisheries agency and justice ministry made the decision as a boat belonging to the US-based Sea Shepherd Conservation Society set sail from Australia in a bid to disrupt the whaling fleet, the Sankei Shimbun said. Crewmembers from the fleet would capture activists and hand them over to the Coastguard if they board the whalers, the report in the daily said. If arrested by the coastguard, they would be charged with forcible obstruction of business. During the last Antarctic hunt, the government alleged that Sea Shepherd activists tracked down and hurled bottles of chemicals at the fleet to disrupt operations, leading the country to label them “terrorists.”

  ■MALAYSIA

  Wet towels yield cocaine

  A woman was arrested at the main airport after her luggage was found to contain 10 towels soaked with liquid cocaine, reports said yesterday. The woman, a foreigner whose nationality was not released, transported the towels from Brazil and was intending to take them to Thailand but the closure of Bangkok’s airport forced her to re-route to Kuala Lumpur. She was detained on Thursday after behaving suspiciously at the airport, the Star newspaper quoted police as saying. “A policeman asked her to open her bags and found seven large wet towels in one and three wet towels in the other,” Selangor state narcotics chief Nordin Kadir said. He said that the woman denied any knowledge of the drugs, worth 2.5 million ringgit (US$688,000) and said that friends had asked her to take them to Thailand.

  ■AUSTRALIA

  Third gender proposed

  The official human rights watchdog wants a third gender called “intersex” to be created for use on official documents like passports and driving licenses, a newspaper report said yesterday. The new gender would be another legally recognized option alongside male and female, the Daily Telegraph reported. The proposal from the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission was contained in a discussion paper issued to transgender and transsexual advocates, the paper said. The commission is a statutory body that advises the Australian government. Commission officials could not be reached immediately for comment on the Daily Telegraph’s report.

  ■HONG KONG

  Junkie robber jailed

  A serial robber has been jailed for seven-and-a-half years for 16 robberies committed to fuel his heroin addiction, a media report said yesterday. Ray Lee Wai-yip, 37, targeted women in the thefts that netted US$11,150. Five of the victims were over 70 and two were aged more than 80, the South China Morning Post said. Sentencing Lee, deputy judge Peter Longley said he had been jailed twice in the past 10 years for robbery offences.

  ■JAPAN

  Quake shakes Honshu

  A moderate 5.5-magnitude earthquake struck near the country’s largest island yesterday, but there was no risk of a tsunami, the Japan Meteorological Agency said, and no immediate reports of damage. The tremor struck at 5:03am, with the epicenter 161km east-northeast of Sendai, on Honshu, the US Geological Survey said. It was 35km below sea level. The quake was initially recorded at 5 magnitude before this was revised up. Japan is hit by 20 percent of the world’s powerful earthquakes.

  ■IRELAND

  Welfare office hiring

  Lost your job? There’s at least one place in town looking for more worker — the welfare office. The government said it was hiring another 115 people to handle the overflow of welfare applications as recession ravages the employment market. Social and Family Affairs Minister Mary Hanafin said the extra staff members were needed because the existing 2,000 welfare workers cannot keep up with the volume. The country was long the fastest-growing economy in western Europe, but that rapidly changed this year. Unemployment has risen 60 percent to a decade high of 7.8 percent. The announcement came a day after economists forecast joblessness could top 10 percent next year and reach 12 percent in 2010.

  ■UNITED KINGDOM

  Teddy bears space-bound

  Four teddy bears, fully decked out in custom-made spacesuits, were launched to the edge of space this week as part of a British university experiment. Blasting off from Cambridge University’s (CU) Churchill College on Monday, they were attached to a helium balloon and fitted with multiple cameras, a global positioning system receiver, flight computer and radio for the two-hour nine-minute flight, which saw them rise 30km above sea level. The spacesuits were designed by local schoolchildren, as part of a project to engage youths in science and engineering, organized by the Cambridge University Spaceflight student club. CU Spaceflight said the aim of the experiment was to find out which of the four spacesuits, each designed by a different group of students, best insulated the cuddly toys from the -53˚C temperatures.

  ■UNITED KINGDOM

  Diamond could net US$13m

  An unusually cut blue diamond with a royal history could fetch as much as £9 million (US$13 million) when it goes under the hammer at Christie’s in London on Wednesday. Blue diamonds are exceedingly rare and the 35.56 carat Wittelsbach Diamond has often had its color and clarity compared to the famed Hope Diamond, which is on display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Though somewhat smaller than the Hope Diamond, the Wittelsbach Diamond was a favorite of European rulers for centuries. King Philip IV of Spain purchased the stone in 1664 and made it part of the dowry for his teenage daughter, the Infanta Margarita Teresa. Though she died relatively young, the diamond remained with her husband, Leopold I of Austria, and passed through a succession of his heirs. The gem got the name after 1722 when Leopold’s granddaughter married Charles of Bavaria, a member of the Wittelsbach family.

  ■SPAIN

  Jewish in the blood

  From the 15th century on, Jews were mostly expelled or forced to convert, but today some 20 percent of Spanish men tested have Sephardic Jewish ancestry and 11 percent can be traced to North Africa, a study has found. “These values are surprisingly high,” the researchers wrote in their report, published in the American Journal of Human Genetics. They checked the Y chromosome, a stretch of DNA carried only by men and passed down with little change from father to son. Mutations in this gene can be used to trace ancestry, and some have been clearly linked to Sephardic Jewish and northern African populations. “The genetic composition of the current population is the legacy of our diverse cultural and religious past,” one of the report’s authors, Francesc Calafell, from the evolutionary biology faculty at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, said on Friday.

  ■UNITED STATES

  Fat dog survives in cold

  A dog weighing more than 55kg survived being frozen to a sidewalk overnight, probably because he was insulated by layers of fat, authorities said. The Sheboygan County Humane Society says the “morbidly obese” dog, an aging border collie mix named Jiffy, froze to the sidewalk when he was left out overnight on Wednesday. Shelter manager Carey Payne told the Sheboygan Press that few dogs could survive the single-digit temperatures, and it was probably the fat that made the difference. Jiffy’s 59-year-old owner was arrested on Thursday morning on suspicion of animal neglect, Sheboygan Police Lieutenant Tim Eirich said. She told police she tried to get the dog inside but couldn’t, and instead checked on him every few hours.

  ■UNITED STATES

  OJ gets nine years in prison

  OJ Simpson is headed to prison for at least nine years, but a prosecutor says the former football star could have spent less time behind bars if he had accepted a plea deal before he was convicted. Clark County District Attorney David Roger said Simpson was offered a deal for less prison time than the nine-to-33-year prison terms the graying former football star was sentenced to on Friday for kidnapping and assaulting two sports memorabilia dealers with a deadly weapon. “Mr. Simpson wanted something just short of a public apology,” Roger said. “We didn’t think that was appropriate.” “The judge denied that Simpson’s acquittal in Los Angeles in the 1994 slaying of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, had any effect on a sentence that will make him 70 before he is eligible for parole.

  ■UNITED STATES

  Bride-to-be swept away

  A romantic marriage proposal on the West Coast turned deadly for the bride-to-be when a wave swept her out to sea. Scott Napper had taken 22-year-old Leafil Alforque to Proposal Rock near Neskowin Beach to pop the question at a place that got its name from couples ready to marry. Napper and Alforque had been dating since they met on the Internet in 2005. But Alforque had arrived in Oregon on a visa from the Philippines just three days before the fateful trip to the coast, the Oregonian reported. Napper said the tide had receded around Proposal Rock yesterday when the couple began to walk to it. He planned to propose and give her the ring he carried in his pocket. About 3m from the rock, a wave about 1m high suddenly came toward them. By the time he turned to find Alforque, only 1.2m tall and 42kg, she had been caught by the receding waters. “She was about 9m away, getting swept away,” Napper said. “That’s the last I saw of her.”
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