■JAPAN
Emperor’s stomach bleeding
Emperor Akihito is suffering from bleeding in the stomach because of physical and mental stress but no longer has an irregular heartbeat, Kyodo News reported yesterday, quoting the palace. The Imperial Household Agency said it was unable to confirm the report immediately. The emperor, who will turn 75 later this month, canceled his official duties for several days last week because of an irregular pulse. Akihito had surgery for prostate cancer in January 2003 and started hormone treatment as partial therapy for the disease the following year. Japan’s emperor enjoys wide respect among the general public, although the post-World War II Constitution bars him from holding any political role.
■KOREAS
North producing narcotics?
South Korean activists and North Korean defectors have shown what they say is the first video clip of a huge military controlled poppy farm in the North. The clip released on Monday proves the North has been involved in state-sponsored narcotics production, said the Citizens Coalition for Human Rights of Abductees and North Korean Refugees. The 20-minute footage shows a hillside covered with poppies in a military-controlled district in Taehung County, 130km northeast of Pyongyang. It also shows a purported drug factory in the northeastern city of Chongjin, where the North allegedly produces heroin. The group said it received the clip from a spy in the North’s military in November last year. Group leader Do Hee-yoon told reporters the shaky video was filmed a month before that. The South’s unification ministry said it could not confirm the claim.
■INDIA
Fire breaks out in Taj hotel
A fire broke out yesterday in the Taj Hotel, one of the sites of the terrorist attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai last month, officials said. The blaze on the 20th floor of the hotel was put out by firefighters and no one was injured as the wing was empty, a Taj spokesman said. There was no additional damage to the hotel. The fire, possibly caused by a short-circuit, started near an unused kitchen and was detected by the maintenance staff who alerted the fire department. The 105-year-old Taj, one of India’s most famous hotels, was heavily damaged last month during a 59-hour stand-off between terrorists and elite commando forces. At least 170 people were killed and over 300 injured in the spate of terrorist attacks in Mumbai between Nov. 26 and Nov. 29.
■GERMANY
Lebanese gets life for plot
A court in the western city of Duesseldorf yesterday handed a Lebanese man a life sentence for trying to set off bombs on trains two years ago. The court convicted Youssef al-Haj Deeb of attempted murder of an undefined number of people. Prosecutors said the planned attacks could have caused up to 75 casualties. Prosecutors said Haj Deeb and an accomplice boarded two trains in Cologne, one headed for Koblenz, one for Dortmund, in July 2006 with suitcases containing tanks of propane gas and crude detonators. Both men were filmed by video cameras at the station. The bombs failed to go off because of a technical fault.
■FRANCE
Police arrest ETA suspect
French anti-terrorism police on Monday arrested the suspected military chief of the Basque separatist group ETA, just weeks after capturing his alleged predecessor “Txeroki,” the interior ministry said. The suspect was picked up on a street in the village of Gerde in southwest France around 6pm together with two other ETA suspects. They were carrying revolvers and fake documents. French police moved in on the three men after receiving a tip-off from domestic intelligence services. Spanish police later detained three people in connection with the arrests in the country, Spanish media said.
■TURKEY
Official opposes visits
The justice minister on Monday said he was against moves to allow prison inmates conjugal visits, the Anadolu news agency reported. “We treat with respect all requests but at the moment the Justice Ministry has no plans or thoughts to change the way it is at the moment,” Mehmet Ali Sahin told reporters. Sahin’s statements came after the head of a parliamentary human rights commission said he had received many letters from prisoners seeking the right to have sex with their partners. The suggested changes have received support from a number of members of parliament. “The aim of the criminal justice is not to punish but to rehabilitate,” lawmaker Canan Aritman was quoted as saying.
■ETHIOPIA
Elephants opened to tourists
Officials began inviting tourists to visit its dwindling elephant herd on Monday as part of efforts to boost income from tourism. The Babile wildlife sanctuary near Harar, 560km east of Addis Ababa, is the first in Ethiopia to offer visits specifically aimed at seeing elephants, whose numbers have been ravaged by poaching and decades of neglect. There are around 300 in Babile, which is also home to a national symbol: the rare black-mane lion, depicted on Ethiopia’s currency. The government has invested heavily this year in hotels, airports and other infrastructure, hoping to boost tourism earnings by 15 percent.
■SWITZERLAND
Nation tops rail travel list
The Swiss seem to enjoy trains more than other nations, with the average resident traveling around 2,103km annually, the Information Service for Public Transport said, putting the confederation at the top of the global list. The Japanese came second with residents averaging 1,976km by train last year, though they did make the most trips with 70 a year, compared with 47 for the Swiss. In Europe, the Swiss are seconded by residents in Luxembourg with 35 annual trips per inhabitant, followed by Denmark, Austria and Germany, where the average citizen traveled 22 times by train. The Greeks, however, appeared to enjoy staying home or traveling by other means.
■UNITED STATES
Suspicious letters received
Suspicious letters containing powdery substances addressed to governors were intercepted in least six US states on Monday, but no injuries were immediately reported. The letters were reported in Alabama, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana and Rhode Island. They disrupted state governments in a few of the states, forcing some evacuations and testing for workers who might have been exposed. Tests showed the powders sent to Alabama, Mississippi, Montana and Rhode Island were not harmful, while the Michigan results were not in yet and the Missouri letter never made it to state offices.
■UNITED STATES
Auction offers wild gift idea
Purdue University has some ideas for a novel holiday gift — it is auctioning the naming rights to seven newly discovered bats and two turtles. Winning bidders will be able to link a relative, friend or themselves to an animal’s scientific name for the ages. The first of the nine auctions began on Monday, when the school put up for grabs the naming rights to a tiny gold and black insect-munching bat found in Central America. The winning bidder will be announced just before Christmas, said John Bickham, a Purdue professor of forestry and natural resources who discovered or co-discovered the nine species.
■UNITED STATES
Teen shackled in fireplace
Three people appeared in San Joaquin County Superior Court in Stockton, California, on Monday on charges of kidnapping and torturing a 16-year-old boy who an investigator said had been kept chained in a fireplace, choked with a belt and denied food for days at a time during more than a year in captivity. The emaciated boy fled a home in Tracy last week with a chain around his ankle and sought help at a local gym. Michael Schumacher, 34, his wife, Kelly Layne Lau, 30, and the teen’s one-time guardian, Caren Ramirez, 43, face torture, kidnapping and multiple child abuse charges. All three have yet to enter pleas and are due back in court on Jan. 5. Each is being held in lieu of more than US$2.2 million bail at San Joaquin County Jail.
■UNITED STATES
Hate crime suspected
Four attackers may have mistaken two Ecuadorean brothers walking arm in arm as gay before using an aluminum baseball bat, a bottle and their feet to beat one of them into critical condition, New York City police said. One of the attackers used an anti-gay slur when first confronting the brothers before dawn on Sunday. The assailants also used anti-Hispanic insults, city officials said at a news conference on Monday. “We believe all of this happened simply because of who these individuals are and who these perpetrators perceived them to be,” said City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. “For some reason [they] didn’t like the two men they believed were gay ... and felt so emboldened in their hatred that they acted it out in violence.” No one has been arrested. The 31-year-old victim remained hospitalized Monday in critical condition, said police, who did not release his name.
■CUBA
Appeal to Obama made
The 15-member Caribbean bloc Caricom on Monday urged US president-elect Barack Obama to end the embargo the US has imposed for more than four decades on Cuba. Obama has promised to ease restrictions on sending money to the island and on Cuban Americans traveling there, but says he wants to keep the embargo to press for changes in the country.
WAKE-UP CALL: Firms in the private sector were not taking basic precautions, despite the cyberthreats from China and Russia, a US cybersecurity official said A ninth US telecom firm has been confirmed to have been hacked as part of a sprawling Chinese espionage campaign that gave officials in Beijing access to private texts and telephone conversations of an unknown number of Americans, a top White House official said on Friday. Officials from the administration of US President Joe Biden this month said that at least eight telecommunications companies, as well as dozens of nations, had been affected by the Chinese hacking blitz known as Salt Typhoon. US Deputy National Security Adviser for Cyber and Emerging Technologies Anne Neuberger on Friday told reporters that a ninth victim
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
MISSING: Prosecutors urged the company to move workers out of poor living conditions to hotels, but residents said many workers had already left the town Brazil has stopped issuing temporary work visas for BYD, the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Friday, in the wake of accusations that some workers at a site owned by the Chinese electric vehicle producer had been victims of human trafficking. The announcement came days after labor authorities said they found 163 Chinese workers who had been brought to Brazil irregularly in “slavery-like” conditions at the BYD factory construction site in the northeastern state of Bahia. The workers were employed by contractor Jinjiang Group, which has denied any wrongdoing. Later, the authorities also said the workers were victims of human trafficking,
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