■RUSSIAN
Stalin voted one of the best
Television viewers have voted Soviet dictator Josef Stalin — who sent millions to their deaths in the Great Purge of the 1930s — the nation’s third-greatest historical figure. Rights activists say authorities are trying to gloss over Stalin’s atrocities and glorify his tyranny. The project, called “The Name of Russia,” culminated with the announcement on Sunday night that medieval leader Alexander Nevsky had been voted the greatest Russian, with more than 524,000 Internet and SMS votes. Nevsky defeated various European invaders during his 13th-century reign and was subsequently canonized. In second place was Pyotr Stolypin, a prime minister early in the 20th century under Czar Nicholas II.
■IRAN
Premarital sex on the rise
Rising numbers of people are spurning marriage and having sex illegally outside wedlock, Iran’s state-run body for youth affairs has said. A survey by the national youth organization found that more than one in four men aged 19 to 29 had experienced sex before marriage. About 13 percent of such cases resulted in unwanted pregnancies that led to abortions. Sex outside marriage and abortion are outlawed under Iran’s Islamic legal code. The survey also revealed that the average marrying age had risen to 40 for men and 35 for women, a blow to the government’s goal of promoting marriage to shore up society’s Islamic foundations.
■GREECE
Unionists blockade shops
Labor union activists blockaded some shops in central Athens that were trying to open on Sunday to make up revenue lost in three weeks of rioting that badly damaged the capital’s retail district. The shopkeepers’ association had asked to keep their businesses open for a second consecutive on Sunday — one more than the customary Christmas exemption to the usual opening hours. They wanted to try to recoup some of their losses from the economic slowdown that has begun to affect the country, and from the riots that followed the police killing of a 15-year-old boy. Outraged unionists said the shopowners wanted an excuse to extend Sunday shopping throughout the year.
■UNITED STATES
Extra second added to 2008
Those eager to put this year behind them will have to hold their good-byes for just a moment this New Year’s Eve. The world’s official timekeepers have added a “leap second” to the last day of the year on Wednesday, to help match clocks to the Earth’s slowing spin on its axis, which takes place at ever-changing rates affected by tides and other factors. The US Naval Observatory, keeper of the Pentagon’s master clock, said it would add the extra second on Wednesday in coordination with the world’s atomic clocks at 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC.
■UNITED STATES
Man goes unnoticed in attic
A family did not realize they had an unexpected Christmas guest until a man who had been in their attic for days emerged wearing their clothes, police said. Stanley Carter surrendered on Friday after police took a dog to search the home in Plains Township, a suburb of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, about 160km north of Philadelphia. He was charged with several counts of burglary, theft, receiving stolen property and criminal trespass.
■BELGIUM
King designates new PM
King Albert on Sunday asked Herman Van Rompuy, a Dutch-speaking Christian Democrat, to take the reins of the Belgian government that quit on Dec. 19 after a scandal over the botched bailout of the Fortis bank. Van Rompuy, 61, is expected to replace Leterme at the head of a quarrelsome alliance of Christian Democrats, Liberals and Socialists in a matter of days. He is currently parliament president. The king named him prime minister-designate at the suggestion of former prime minister Wilfried Martens, who spent six days sounding out political leaders on how to quickly form a new government.
■ROMANIA
World’s heaviest cake
Bucharest set a new record on Sunday for the world’s heaviest cake, weighing in at 281kg, after two other bids this week for the longest sausage and biggest Christmas give-away. The cake, which was covered with fruit and whipped cream and decorated with the Romanian and EU flags along with the words “Happy New Year 2009,” was commissioned by the city for the annual winter festivities. After weighing the large pastry, a representative of the Guiness Book of World Records handed Mayor Sorin Oprescu a document certifying the record. The cake was then distributed to some of the hundreds of Bucharest residents, including many children, who had come to feast their eyes on the delicious torte.
■SWEDEN
Man survives moose attack
A 76-year-old man said he was “lucky” to have survived a kick from a moose cow in the northern town of Gallivare, reports said on Sunday. “It was pure luck that the hoof just grazed my chest, it had impacted fully I would have been crushed to death,” Mauritz Henriksson told the Expressen newspaper. The seasoned moose hunter said he had been walking his four elk hounds on Saturday evening when they started to bark furiously. Two of the dogs pulled free and raced off, after apparently picking up the scent of a moose in a neighbor’s yard. The moose charged suddenly and kicked out at Henriksson who sustained a cut above one eyebrow but was otherwise unharmed.
■ITALY
Mafia hitman caught
Police on Sunday arrested one of the country’s top wanted criminals and alleged Calabrian ’Ndrangheta mafia member, Pietro Criaco, news reports said. “A hit-man who according to mafia turncoats would wash his hands in the blood of his victims,” the top anti-mafia prosecutor, Pietro Grasso, said in commenting the arrest. The 37-year-old Criaco was found in a house belonging to relatives in Africo near the southern city of Reggio Calabria, ANSA news agency said. On the run since 1997, Criaco, whose name appears on the country’s list of 30 most-wanted criminals, is accused of murder and membership of a mafia organization.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Queen gags staff
Queen Elizabeth II has banned staff from revealing details of their work in a bid to prevent further embarrassing leaks of the goings on in the royal household, reports said on Sunday. More than 200 butlers, cooks and general and cleaning staff are to sign confidentiality contracts by which they could lose their jobs for discussing any aspect of the royal household even with their own families, the News of the World reported. Employees would also be required to return any royal souvenirs, letters, gifts and their personal diaries once they leave the monarch’s service.
■CHINA
‘Running Fan’ pays price
Community protests pushed a Beijing school to postpone hiring a teacher who abandoned his students during the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan, state media reported on Sunday. The behavior of Fan Meizhong, better known as “Running Fan” after he admitted to fleeing his classroom, prompted the government to write new ethics rules for teachers. Last week a private institution in Beijing announced it had signed a two-year contract with Fan. However, the school said on Sunday it had decided to “indefinitely delay hiring Fan.”
■PHILIPPINES
Cabinet member in hot water
A member of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s Cabinet was in hot water yesterday after a businessman accused him and his two sons of beating him and his son in a brawl at a golf course. Delfin Dela Paz alleged that Agrarian Reform Secretary Nasser Pangandaman, his two sons and their bodyguards attacked him and his 14-year-old son at a golf course in Antipolo City on Friday. Pangandaman apologized yesterday for the incident which he said was caused by a “misunderstanding.” Dela Paz said the incident erupted when the Pangandamans overtook them at one of the holes at the golf course, triggering the brawl.
■CHINA
Suicide leap kills two
A cyclist in the city of Shenzhen died after he was hit by an apparently suicidal man who jumped from a nearby building, state media said on Sunday. The cyclist was making deliveries from his fast-food restaurant when the jumper landed on him on Thursday, the China Daily said. The man leaped from the balcony of an apartment after standing there for 12 hours, it said.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
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