■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.
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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