■LAOS
Vientiane to host forum
The Lao capital, Vientiane, will host the 17th annual Asia-Pacific Parliamentary Forum from Sunday to next Thursday, officials confirmed yesterday. “We are expecting over 300 delegates from 17 countries,” Lao Foreign Ministry spokesman Yong Chanthalangsy said. Laos, a communist country since 1975, is under a one-party system. The next general election will be next year, in conjunction with the Ninth Party Congress of the Lao Communist Party. The Asia Pacific Parliamentary Forum seeks to provide opportunities for national parliamentarians to discuss matters of common concern and promote cooperation in “peace, freedom, democracy and prosperity,” its policy statement said.
■PHILIPPINES
Rebels torch homes
Muslim separatist rebels attacked a southern village, torching at least 30 homes of Christian families, an army spokesman said yesterday. No one was hurt in the raid on Sanga village in Kalamansig town in Sultan Kudarat Province, 930km south of Manila, on Wednesday, Lieutenant Colonel Julieto Ando said. Ando said about 150 Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) rebels occupied the farming village, forcing some 500 families to flee their homes. On Wednesday, government security forces launched air and ground assaults on the rebels, who torched the homes in a bid to slow down the troops. MILF spokesman Eid Kabalu denied the rebels torched the homes. He also denied Ando’s report that 10 MILF rebels were killed in the airstrikes.
■PHILIPPINES
UN collects Ebola samples
UN experts yesterday began collecting samples from two pig farms closed by an outbreak of Ebola-Reston virus. The 22-person team aimed to collect blood and tissue samples from dozens of pigs to determine how they contracted the disease, said team leader Caroline Benigno of the Food and Agriculture Organization. Ebola-Reston, which is only found in the Philippines, had been confined to monkeys and the latest outbreak is the first time it has jumped species. Last month nearly 6,000 pigs at a farm and in the town of Talavera tested positive for the virus, which is not known to be harmful to humans but could have a devastating impact on the pig industry. Ebola-Reston is also different from the ebola sub-types found in Africa that cause deadly fever in humans.
■VIETNAM
Two convicted for fraud
A court has jailed two Malaysian men for seven years each for using fake credit cards on shopping sprees at luxury boutiques in Hanoi, state media reported yesterday. A court in the capital on Wednesday sentenced the two — identified as Tan Wei Hong, 26, and Cham Tack Choi, 23 — after they were arrested in Hanoi in December 2007, the state-run Vietnam News Agency said. They had tried to use fake credit cards to pay for suitcases and bags worth thousands of dollars in a Louis Vuitton shop, but were caught when a staff member recognized them after earlier fraudulent purchases, the report said. Hong later admitted using fake credit cards to pay for US$17,000 in goods, while Choi admitted to purchasing US$16,000 in goods, VNA said.
■JAPAN
Nye may be ambassador
Joseph Nye, a professor at Harvard University, will likely be nominated for the post of US ambassador to Japan, the Asahi Shimbun said yesterday, without citing sources.
■FRANCE
Minister gives birth
Justice Minister Rachida Dati returned to work on Wednesday, attending the first Cabinet meeting of the year just five days after giving birth to a baby girl. Smiling in a black suit and high heels, the 43-year-old minister arrived on foot with fellow ministers for the meeting at the Elysee palace. French media said Dati checked out on Wednesday morning from the Paris maternity clinic where her first child, named Zohra, was born on Friday two weeks premature. The minister, who is single, has kept the father’s identity under wraps, telling reporters she had “a complicated private life” and sparking an intense guessing game in the gossip press.
■EUROPEAN UNION
Satellites track illegals
A satellite system linking two continents became the latest weapon in Europe’s armory against illegal immigration yesterday, as police forces in countries as far apart as Spain, Senegal and Mauritania were hooked up to a single high-speed communications and data network. The Sea Horse system helps relocate the effort to prevent illegal immigration back to the coast of Africa, with stations opened in ports cities such as Dakar, in Senegal, Praia, in Cape Verde, and Nouadhibou, in Mauritania. The system should allow police in all the countries involved to track immigrant vessels in real time, as they are spotted travelling up the Atlantic coast of Africa.
■HUNGARY
Teacher, principal killed
Police say a masked gunman has shot to death the principal and a teacher at a school in the Budapest neighborhood of Csepel. Budapest police spokesman Endre Kormos said the unidentified gunman also shot a security guard in the hand in the attack on Wednesday evening. Kormos said the gunman fled the school after the shootings and there was no information yet on the motive for the attack. A reward of 5 million forints (US$25,300) has been offered for information leading to the capture of the assailant. The two male victims were shot in the head. Csepel is located on the northern tip of a large island in the Danube River and during the communist regime it was the hub of heavy industry.
■CZECH REPUBLIC
Activists fly EU flag
Greenpeace activists ion Wednesday briefly flew an EU flag at the president’s official Prague Castle residence, where current occupant President Vaclav Klaus has been refusing to do so. An activist partially climbed a flagpole and unfurled the flag for about 10 minutes shortly before Klaus, an outspoken EU critic, hosted the bloc’s executive, the European Commission. After the meeting Klaus, who opposes deeper European integration and the EU’s reform Lisbon Treaty, quipped to reporters that he hoped to “convert” commission President Jose Manuel Barroso on the pact.
■UNITED STATES
Army sorry for letters gaffe
The army apologized on Wednesday for mistakenly sending letters to 7,000 families of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan with the salutation “Dear John Doe.” The letter, which was mailed on Dec. 20, contained information about private organizations offering assistance to families who lost a soldier, but omitted specific names and addresses. “The salutation says ‘Dear John Doe,’ which was basically sort of a placeholder where the name of the individual or the recipient was supposed to be,” said Paul Boyce, an army spokesman. Boyce said the error was not caught when the 7,000 letters were printed, sorted and sent out to family members.
■UNITED STATES
Man wants cash for kidney
A New York doctor is demanding that his estranged wife pay him US$1.5 million to compensate him for the kidney he gave her while they were still on good terms. Dr Richard Batista spoke on Wednesday to reporters at his lawyer’s office in Garden City, Long Island. He said he gave his kidney to Dawnell Batista in June 2001. She filed for divorce in July 2005. The 49-year-old Batista works for Nassau University Medical Center. The couple have three children, ages, eight, 11 and 14.
■CANADA
Search goes on for diplomats
No ransom demand has been received for two diplomats missing in Niger since the middle of last month and the government is continuing to probe their mysterious disappearance, Canadian Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon said on Wednesday. “We’re very much concerned about it,” Cannon said of the Dec. 14 disappearance of UN envoy to Niger Robert Fowler and his assistant Louis Guay. The men, along with their driver, who is also missing, were returning from a visit the previous day to a gold mine operated by Canadian company Semafo, west of Niamey. A Tuareg rebel group initially said it had kidnapped the men, before retracting the claim the same day.
■UNITED STATES
No ‘ski bum’ jokes, thanks
A guy who dangled upside down from a ski lift with his bare bottom exposed probably doesn’t want to hear any “ski bum” jokes. Officials at Vail Resorts in Colorado say the 48-year-old man was trying to get on the Blue Ski basin lift on New Year’s Day. They haven’t said what went wrong. Workers stopped the lift, backed it up 3m and rescued the man after about seven minutes. Bystanders snapped photos and posted them on the Internet, showing a man who looks to be hanging by one ski boot, his ski pants and underwear apparently snagged in the chair and reaching no farther than his knees.
■BRAZIL
Papers give Lula ‘heartburn’
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva told a magazine he does not like reading newspapers because it gives him “heartburn,” but said he keeps abreast of things through briefings and video clips provided by aides. Lula, who has proposed a controversial new media law that would make publishing or leaking secret information a crime, said nevertheless that, as a former union leader who rose to hold the top office, he was “a direct product of freedom of the press.” In an interview with Piaui, Lula admitted he read no newspapers, magazines, blogs or Web sites, not because he didn’t have the time, but “because I have heartburn problems.” Lula said he believes that much of the wrong or unsubstantiated information printed by the press was the result of “marketing decisions.”
■UNITED STATES
Seal savors fishy treat
Life is a big buffet for a young seal with a talent for breaking and entering. A young harbor seal somehow broke into a fish hatchery on Tuesday and turned the place into an all-you-can-eat buffet. The female seal briefly had the run of the Sandwich Hatchery in Massachusetts, downing untold numbers of trout before Division of Fisheries and Wildlife employees found it, the Cape Cod Times reported. The seal, just under 1m long, was released on a beach by members of the Cape Cod Stranding Network, which rescues marine mammals that end up on land. The seal looked healthy and “pretty full,” network spokeswoman Katie Touhey said.
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
The US deployed a reconnaissance aircraft while Japan and the Philippines sent navy ships in a joint patrol in the disputed South China Sea yesterday, two days after the allied forces condemned actions by China Coast Guard vessels against Philippine patrol ships. The US Indo-Pacific Command said the joint patrol was conducted in the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone by allies and partners to “uphold the right to freedom of navigation and overflight “ and “other lawful uses of the sea and international airspace.” Those phrases are used by the US, Japan and the Philippines to oppose China’s increasingly aggressive actions in the
‘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,
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