■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.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
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