■ CHINA
Man jailed for ditching mom
A man was jailed for abandoning his elderly mother — who later died alone — on a public square after taking about US$40,000 from her, state media and a local court said yesterday. Wang Kouma, 54, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for leaving his 83-year-old mother, Teng Jindi, on a Shanghai square in October last year, said a judge at a city district court involved in the case, who refused to be named. Wang had earlier taken 270,000 yuan (US$39,500) that had been given to Teng by the government as relocation expenses, the China Daily said. Such money is generally given to people whose homes have been appropriated so they can find a new place to live.
■CHINA
Court rules on ‘witch hunt’
A court has ordered an Internet user and a Web site to compensate a man who became the victim of an online witch hunt after his wife killed herself over his alleged infidelity. It was the first online harassment case in the country. Beijing’s Chaoyang District People’s Court ordered Zhang Leyi, a college friend of the wife, and the owners of the news and entertainment Web site Daqi.com, to pay compensation to Wang Fei, said a notice seen yesterday on an official Web site for court news, chinacourt.org. The defendants tarnished Wang’s reputation and Zhang invaded his privacy by causing his personal information to be displayed online and knowingly sparking harassment of the man over his alleged affair and his wife’s suicide, the notice said.
■HONG KONG
Smugglers use drains
A gang smuggled hundreds of thousands of dollars of electrical goods to China through underground drains crossing the border, officials said yesterday. Gang members lifted a manhole cover on the Special Administrative Region (SAR) side of the border fence and sent cartons of goods by night along a 10m stretch of underground drain using ropes at either end, customs investigators said. Other members of the gang collected the goods at the Shenzhen side of the border fence, carried them across a shallow river dividing the territory from China and sneaked them into Shenzhen through the SAR’s underground drainage system, the officials said.
■AUSTRALIA
Immigrant center opens
A spate of refugee boats prompted the government yesterday to open a much-criticized new immigration detention center on a tiny island in the Indian Ocean. Immigration officials confirmed they would open the new A$400 million (US$276 million) detention center on Christmas Island, which has been criticized by human rights groups as harsh and prison-like. The center-left Labor government wanted to keep the detention center in mothballs after criticizing the former conservative government for building it, but a new influx of refugee boats has forced a change of a policy. “The government’s policy is to open the new facility when numbers and separation arrangements required it,” the Immigration Department said in a statement. Authorities have intercepted six boats trying to make it to the country, with 135 suspected asylum seekers on board, in the past three months.
■AUSTRALIA
Facebook helps courts
Lawyers expect the Internet social network site Facebook to become a new way of tracking down defendants after a landmark court ruling. The Supreme Court in Canberra has ruled that Facebook is a sufficient way of serving legal documents to defendants who cannot be found.
■SPAIN
Franco statue taken down
Crews using jackhammers and blowtorches took down one of the last statues of the late General Francisco Franco on Thursday, eliminating a symbol of decades of right-wing dictatorship. Workers in the northern city of Santander spent five hours drilling at a concrete base under a 44-year-old copper statue of Franco riding a horse and waving a baton in his right hand, then cut metal pins that anchored the statue to its foundation. Later, the statue was hoisted with heavy-duty harnesses onto a flatbed truck and hauled off to a city warehouse.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Police sentence terrorist
A Muslim was convicted on Thursday of being a member of al-Qaeda and directing a militant organization, the first conviction of its kind in the country, police said. Rangzieb Ahmed, 33, was found guilty by a jury at Manchester Crown Court of belonging to the group led by Osama bin Laden and of leading a three-man cell engaged in the plotting of an attack, possibly overseas. His co-defendant Habib Ahmed, 29, who is not related, was also found guilty of belonging to al-Qaeda. The two were to be sentenced yesterday.
■ITALY
Super-Berlusconi unveiled
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said he had surprised his grandchildren with an early Christmas present: a Superman-like doll with facial features resembling his own. “My grandchildren now really feel like the descendants of a super-hero,” Berlusconi was quoted as saying on Thursday by the online site Tgcom. The 72-year-old Berlusconi, a twice married father of five and grandfather of four, made the revelation during a Christmas party held for employees of Palazzo Chigi, the Rome-based office of prime ministers. Each “Super-Berlusconi” doll is attached to a model helicopter which forms part of the gift, Tgcom said. The online site forms part of the billionaire-turned-politician’s media empire. Presents are traditionally unwrapped on Christmas Day, but in the Mediterranean country, this is sometimes delayed until Jan. 7, the Catholic Church’s Feast of the Epiphany, when the Magi are believed to have brought their gifts to baby Jesus.
■SOUTH AFRICA
Zuma to sue cartoonist
Ruling party leader Jacob Zuma told a radio station on Thursday he was suing a cartoonist for portraying him about to rape the country’s justice system. The cartoonist, Jonathan Shapiro, known as “Zapiro,” has defended the drawing and accused Zuma of trying to undermine the independence of the judiciary to get graft charges dropped. Zuma has made a remarkable political comeback despite a rape trial in which he was acquitted in 2006 and persistent corruption allegations. The cartoon in the Sunday Times showed Zuma apparently about to rape a woman representing the justice system, held down by his political allies.
■REUNION
Bag maker fined over nudes
A French court has ordered a clothing firm to pay 40,000 euros (US$56,200) in damages for distributing bags bearing a nude image of first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. The photo dates from Bruni-Sarkozy’s modeling days. She was seeking 125,000 euros in damages from clothing vendor Pardon, which distributed the bags to its clients. Pardon said it would appeal Thursday’s ruling, handed down by a court on the French Indian Ocean island, where the company is based. The firm is also promising to destroy the 5,500 Bruni bags it has left.
■IRAQ
Shoe-thrower seeks pardon
Journalist Muntadhar al-Zeidi has appealed for a pardon for what he called “an ugly act” of hurling his shoes at US President George W. Bush, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s spokesman Yassin Majid said on Thursday. The journalist’s brother, however, questioned whether the statement was genuine. Majid said the letter appeals for a pardon and asks al-Maliki to recall the kindness the future prime minister showed him during a 2005 interview when he invited the journalist to his home. Meanwhile, the investigating judge said yesterday that al-Zeidi shows signs of being beaten. He said the reporter had bruises on his face and around his eyes.
■VENEZUELA
Referendum wins backing
The National Assembly on Thursday gave preliminary approval for a referendum on abolishing term limits, which could let President Hugo Chavez run for re-election indefinitely. The predominantly pro-government National Assembly is expected to give the vote the final go-ahead after a second debate next month. Election officials say the referendum could be held in March. Congressman Carlos Escarra called lawmakers who supported the referendum “the voice of the people,” as Chavez backers held a flag-waving rally outside and turned in boxes of petitions calling for the vote. Government officials said 4.7 million signatures had been collected, although critics say the signatures won’t be independently verified.
■UNITED STATES
Law student faces charges
A Michigan law student and the professor who paid to have sex with her face up to a year in jail after the student told police she was a prostitute, officials in Ann Arbor, Michigan, said on Thursday. The student went to police to press charges against the professor for slapping her during sex. She ended up confessing to having as many as nine other clients who paid up to US$500 for sex. She told police she needed the money to pay tuition. The woman is not a student of the professor. She told police she reluctantly agreed to let the professor whip her with a belt but got angry when he slapped her twice in the face. Prosecutors determined there was not enough evidence to charge the professor with assault but used the woman’s description of the encounter to launch prostitution charges.
■UNITED STATES
Christmas act turns deadly
An actor in a Christmas pageant who was suspended 7.6m in the air by an overhead rope fell headfirst onto a concrete church floor and died, Cincinnati, Ohio, authorities said on Thursday. Keri Shryock, 23, and two other actors were playing wise men on their way to Bethlehem in Wednesday night’s opening performance at Crossroads Community Church. The three actors were approaching a star when Shryock fell into an aisle in the audience portion of the theater, witnesses told the Cincinnati Enquirer. Shryock was taken to University Hospital, where she died Thursday morning.
■UNITED STATES
Woman pierces kittens
A woman marketed “gothic kittens” with ear, neck and tail piercings over the Internet, Pennsylvanian officials said on Thursday. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals removed three kittens and a cat Wednesday from a home outside Wilkes-Barre after receiving a tip-off. “It’s unbelievable anybody would do this to kittens,” Officer Carol Morrison told the Times Leader newspaper. She said the woman would likely face charges.
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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