■UNITED STATES
2009 marked by nugget drop
For millions, New Year’s Eve is marked by the descent of the giant crystal ball in Times Square. For others, it’s a giant acorn or peach. But perhaps the most savory countdown is in McDonough, Georgia, where thousands gathered on Wednesday to watch a giant chicken nugget drop into a vat of dipping sauce. The 1.8m-tall, 363kg nugget is actually plaster and the vat is filled with syrup and food coloring meant to resemble honey mustard, “but it looks real,” said Liz Stavely, a manager at Truett’s Grill, which hosts the annual event. The crowd was entertained by a fire-eating magician, bungee jumping, a caricature artist and musicians. The restaurant, part of the Chick-fil-A chain, offered free chicken nuggets.
■UNITED STATES
‘Granny Robber’ stole for son
A defense lawyer says the Ohio woman dubbed “the Granny Robber” in several bank heists was trying to support a grown son who had fallen on hard times. Sixty-eight-year-old Barbara Joly has admitted she robbed a bank in March, and investigators suspect her in as many as three other holdups, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer. Police say the former bank teller from Middletown, Ohio, probably got away with less than US$10,000 in total. Attorney Chris Atkins said in court on Tuesday that his client wanted to send money to help her only child.
■UNITED STATES
Man steals US$625 in food
A suspected grocery thief still has a taste for finer cuisine, even in the struggling economy. Police in Racine, Wisconsin, say 43-year-old Brian Rubenstein tried to steal US$625 in groceries. The total included US$365 in lobster and US$213 in ribeye and beef roasts. Workers told police they saw Rubenstein fill his cart with lobster tails and beef cuts, as well as a smoked ham, apple pie and fruit platter. He was arrested on Dec. 23. Rubenstein was charged on Friday with misdemeanor retail theft, which carries a maximum penalty of nine months in prison and a US$10,000 fine.
■UNITED STATES
Packages force evacuations
Much of downtown Aspen, Colorado, was evacuated on Wednesday after suspicious packages were found at two banks. Police said a downtown Wells Fargo Bank discovered a package with a threatening note at about 2:30pm. A nearby Vectra Bank reported a similar package minutes later. Authorities ended up evacuating a 16-block area of mostly businesses and some homes. The packages were wrapped in Christmas paper and left on top of pizza boxes in black sleds. The notes indicated a “credible threat to the community,” the Aspen Police Department said in a statement.
■UNITED STATES
Eggs served cold on freeway
State troopers and road crews had to scramble when a tractor-trailer crashed and spilled its load of eggs on a freeway near Detroit, Michigan. Trooper Jim Smiley says eastbound Interstate 94 in Washtenaw County’s Ypsilanti Township reopened at 1am yesterday after being shut down for six hours. Smiley says the driver fell asleep and his rig hit a guardrail and a bridge support beam that tore the trailer open and spilled hundreds of cartons of eggs along a 100m stretch of I-94. Frigid temperatures made for a frozen mess that Smiley says was scraped up by front-end loaders and put in dump trucks. Road workers then spread sand and salt on all three lanes.
■ITALY
No nookie for firework fans
Men in Naples will have to make do without sex if they insisted on going out to play with fireworks this New Year’s Eve. That’s the tough love message from Se Spari, Niente Sesso (No Sex for Fireworks), a group that claims to have signed up hundreds of women supporters in recent days. “Setting off illegal fireworks isn’t celebrating — it’s dangerous,” founder Carolina Staiano, a Naples area housewife, was quoted as saying in the La Stampa newspaper. “If your man doesn’t understand, take action and make him sleep on the sofa ... [Refusing to make love] is an argument that men are particularly sensitive to.” Motivating Staiano was a family tragedy. “Before I was born, my father was partially paralyzed by handling unauthorized fireworks. For all his life, he suffered from epileptic fits.” Fireworks, often homemade, and gunfire were blamed for one death and 473 injuries on Dec. 31 last year — even after police seized 146 tonnes of illegal pyrotechnics in the weeks leading up to the holiday.
■UNITED STATES
Air-born over the Atlantic
Northwest Airlines Flight 59 picked up an extra passenger on Wednesday when it was en route from the Netherlands to the US. Phil Orlandella, a spokesman for Logan International Airport in Boston, said a woman went into labor and gave birth to an apparently healthy baby girl over the Atlantic Ocean on Wednesday during the eight-hour flight from Amsterdam. Orlandella said a doctor and a paramedic who were on the flight assisted in the birth. He said the plane landed without incident about 10:30am and the mother and baby were immediately taken to Massachusetts General Hospital. Orlandella said he did not know the nationality of the mother, but said for customs’ purposes the baby was considered a Canadian citizen because she was born over Canada’s airspace.
■GERMANY
Bin men lose their bottle
It’s been a tradition for people to remember the municipal employees who haul away their garbage at Christmas with a bottle of schnapps or other type of alcohol. But many municipalities no longer approve of their employees receiving gifts of alcohol, Germany’s etiquette council in Bonn said. On their daily rounds in the holiday season, it’s not unusual for the cab of the truck to become piled up with bottles. And many municipal administrations allow gifts of no more than 8 euros (US$11). The municipal administration in Munich this year barred citizens from giving bin men cash gifts, saying it was unfair that those who work in higher-income level neighborhoods received more than those who worked in working-class neighborhoods.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Pinter’s funeral held
Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter was buried at a London cemetery on Wednesday in a small private funeral attended by family and close friends. Poems and excerpts from his plays were read at the 15-minute ceremony, which followed his death on Christmas Eve after a long struggle with cancer.
■SENEGAL
Peacekeeper dies of wounds
A Senegalese peacekeeper has died after succumbing to wounds suffered in an attack last week in Sudan’s war-wracked Darfur region. Unidentified gunmen ambushed a peacekeeping convoy last Friday night carrying the navy captain in El-Fasher, Senegal military spokesman Colonel Ousmane Sar said on Wednesday. The captain was shot and transferred to a medical facility in Khartoum, but he died on Monday of his wounds, he said.
■VIETNAM
Hanoi demarcates border
Hanoi and China have completed the demarcation of their long-disputed land border in what they hailed as an event of “great historic significance” 30 years after their brief but bloody border war, state media reported yesterday. The two countries signed a land border agreement in 1999, but it took them nine years to demarcate the 1,350km frontier. The two sides, represented by Vice Foreign Minister Vu Dung and his Chinese counterpart Wu Dawei (武大偉), pledged to build a border of “peace, friendship and long-term stability,” the central news agency said. China backed the communists during the Vietnam War, but sent troops to invade in early 1979 for ousting Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, which was backed by Beijing.
■NEPAL
Crew blamed for crash
Investigators probing a plane crash near Mount Everest have blamed the pilots for the accident that killed 18 people, a report said yesterday. The report said the two pilots misjudged deteriorating weather conditions and flew inside a patch of fog while trying to land at Lukla airport, which is carved into the side of the Himalayas at an altitude of 2,800m. The DeHavilland DHC-6 Twin Otter plane belonging to Yeti Airlines then hit a rock on the side of the runway and burst into flames on Oct. 8. The investigators interviewed several eyewitnesses and visited the accident site in the foothills of Everest. Of the 19 people on board the flight from Kathmandu, only the captain survived the crash. Twelve Germans, two Australians and four Nepalese were killed.
■BANGLADESH
Former PM accepts defeat
Former prime minister Khaleda Zia has accepted this week’s election results despite alleging the vote, which she lost heavily, was rigged, a spokesman for her party said yesterday. “We want to give the Awami League party the opportunity to run the country. We want to see them keep their promises to the people,” Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) spokesman Khondaker Delwar told reporters. Delwar said the BNP maintained that the vote, in which they won just 29 seats out of a possible 300, was rigged but that they would not challenge the outcome.
■PHILIPPINES
Girl freed after month
A gang of kidnappers has freed a nine-year-old girl after more than a month in captivity in the south, provincial officials said yesterday. Nicole Reveche was freed by her captors unharmed shortly before midnight on Wednesday in a remote village on troubled southern Basilan island, the officials said. Reveche was seized by the gang with suspected links to Islamic militants on Nov. 26. They had earlier demanded a ransom of 6 million pesos (US$127,000) from her parents, the officials said. On Tuesday, gunmen also freed a four-year-old girl, Andrea Diman, in Tuburan town, two days after she was snatched, also in Basilan.
■JAPAN
PM looks to past for hope
Prime Minister Taro Aso insisted in a New Year message yesterday that the country could survive the current harsh economic climate just as it rose from the ashes of World War II. In the online statement, he reiterated his resolve to be the first major nation to emerge from the global economic meltdown. Tokyo has much to worry about in the year ahead, with the economic crisis battering the economy and pushing household names such as Toyota and Sony to cut costs and slash jobs.
A string of rape and assault allegations against the son of Norway’s future queen have plunged the royal family into its “biggest scandal” ever, wrapping up an annus horribilis for the monarchy. The legal troubles surrounding Marius Borg Hoiby, the 27-year-old son born of a relationship before Norwegian Crown Princess Mette-Marit’s marriage to Norwegian Crown Prince Haakon, have dominated the Scandinavian country’s headlines since August. The tall strapping blond with a “bad boy” look — often photographed in tuxedos, slicked back hair, earrings and tattoos — was arrested in Oslo on Aug. 4 suspected of assaulting his girlfriend the previous night. A photograph
‘GOOD POLITICS’: He is a ‘pragmatic radical’ and has moderated his rhetoric since the height of his radicalism in 2014, a lecturer in contemporary Islam said Abu Mohammed al-Jolani is the leader of the Islamist alliance that spearheaded an offensive that rebels say brought down Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and ended five decades of Baath Party rule in Syria. Al-Jolani heads Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is rooted in Syria’s branch of al-Qaeda. He is a former extremist who adopted a more moderate posture in order to achieve his goals. Yesterday, as the rebels entered Damascus, he ordered all military forces in the capital not to approach public institutions. Last week, he said the objective of his offensive, which saw city after city fall from government control, was to
IVY LEAGUE GRADUATE: Suspect Luigi Nicholas Mangione, whose grandfather was a self-made real-estate developer and philanthropist, had a life of privilege The man charged with murder in the killing of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare made it clear he was not going to make things easy on authorities, shouting unintelligibly and writhing in the grip of sheriff’s deputies as he was led into court and then objecting to being brought to New York to face trial. The displays of resistance on Tuesday were not expected to significantly delay legal proceedings for Luigi Nicholas Mangione, who was charged in last week’s Manhattan killing of Brian Thompson, the leader of the US’ largest medical insurance company. Little new information has come out about motivation,
‘MONSTROUS CRIME’: The killings were overseen by a powerful gang leader who was convinced his son’s illness was caused by voodoo practitioners, a civil organization said Nearly 200 people in Haiti were killed in brutal weekend violence reportedly orchestrated against voodoo practitioners, with the government on Monday condemning a massacre of “unbearable cruelty.” The killings in the capital, Port-au-Prince, were overseen by a powerful gang leader convinced that his son’s illness was caused by followers of the religion, the civil organization the Committee for Peace and Development (CPD) said. It was the latest act of extreme violence by powerful gangs that control most of the capital in the impoverished Caribbean country mired for decades in political instability, natural disasters and other woes. “He decided to cruelly punish all
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