■JAPAN
Ex-minister quits party
A former Cabinet member quit Prime Minister Taro Aso’s ruling party yesterday, a rare defection that reflects growing dissent in the party’s ranks as public support for Aso plummets. Lawmaker Yoshimi Watanabe said he quit the ruling Liberal Democratic Party because its policies were increasingly aimed at maintaining the status quo, not at solving problems. “Prime Minister Aso’s political judgment, which is only based on his desire to hold on to power, is the very problem that is delaying measures on crucial issues,” Watanabe said. “I fear that he might invite tragedy to the country and its people.” Watanabe said he had no plans to start a new party, but added that there were many within the ranks of the Liberal Democrats who share his views and said he expected they would cooperate with him.
■INDONESIA
Ministry trims search
The government yesterday scaled down the search for around 230 people still missing two days after a ferry capsized in heavy seas off Sulawesi, as investigators began probing the cause of the disaster. High winds and rough seas continued to pound the Makassar Strait,where the 700-tonne Teratai Prima capsized and sank with some 267 people on board early on Sunday. Smaller vessels were ordered to give up the search and only four navy warships and two patrol boats continued to look for survivors in the treacherous strait, known for strong currents and unpredictable seas. “We are facing very bad weather and rough seas. We don’t want to take any risks by sending small boats,” transport ministry maritime official Sunaryo said. He said 34 people had been rescued since the alert was raised late on Sunday and only one body had been found, leaving 232 people missing feared dead.
■VIETNAM
Bird flu virus found
Authorities have found the H5N1 bird flu virus in poultry illegally imported from China, said Hoang Van Nam, deputy director of the Department of Animal Health. Nam said the animal health department in Lang Son province had tested 16 samples of illegally imported chicken seized by police at the Chinese border. Eight tested positive for the H5N1 virus. The department asked Lang Son’s animal health officials to strengthen their inspections of imported poultry, Nam said. Five people in Vietnam died from avian influenza early last year, but no cases have been reported since March. On Jan. 2, an eight-year-old child in Thanh Hoa province was admitted to hospital and confirmed by health officials as the nation’s first human case of the H5N1 virus this year.
■THE NETHERLANDS
Court: Bemba used rape
War crimes prosecutors have accused former Congolese vice president Jean-Pierre Bemba of using systematic rape to intimidate civilians during a bloody power struggle in neighboring Central Africa Republic. Prosecutors are laying out their case against Bemba in a pretrial hearing in the Hague meant to assess whether there is enough evidence to put Bemba on trial. In an opening statement on Monday, deputy prosecutor Fatou Bensouda previewed the testimony of one man who said he was sodomized in front of his family, then watched his wife and children abused.
■ZIMBABWE
Mugabe rejects meeting
President Robert Mugabe won’t meet Movement for Democratic Change leader Morgan Tsvangirai because the request for the meeting was communicated through the wrong channels, a government official said. Tsvangirai, who asked for the meeting on Friday, should have submitted his request through former South African president Thabo Mbeki, said Patrick Chinamasa, an aide to Mugabe, by phone from Harare yesterday. Mbeki is the facilitator of Southern African Development Community-mandated talks aimed at resolving Zimbabwe’s political crisis. Mugabe would not meet Tsvangirai because the request for a meeting did not come through the facilitator, Chinamasa said.
■POLAND
Man arrested for dove killing
A 54-year old dove-keeper was arrested in northern Poland when he starved some 100 birds to death, Polish Radio reported on Monday. The man identified only as Zbigniew R, told police he lost the key to his loft and couldn’t feed the birds for a week. He faces up to a year in prison. Police were informed of the case by a neighbor, who had earlier forced the loft doors open in an attempt to rescue the doves.
■MOZAMBIQUE
Floods kill 25 people
Torrential rains have killed 25 people in the central part of the country in the last two weeks and flooding could devastate the region by March, authorities said on Monday. The victims, mostly children, drowned while trying to swim through raging waters, said Belarmino Chivambo, spokesman of the country’s National Institute of Disaster Management. “We expect the worst to come by March, which is the peak of the rainy season due to heavy downpours in both Mozambique and neighboring countries,” he said. Thousands of homes have been destroyed and authorities are setting up emergency shelters, said Chivambo. Roads, bridges and electricity pylons in four provinces have been damaged. The Zambezi River in central Mozambique, which stretches 500km through four provinces, is now above flood alert levels, swelled by rains in neighboring Malawi and Zambia.
■RUSSIA
Suspected gas blast hurts 17
Officials say a suspected gas blast badly damaged a government building in Russia’s violence-plagued Ingushetia Province and injured at least 17 people. A spokeswoman for the regional branch of Russia’s Investigative Committee said one of the injured was in a critical condition. Svetlana Gribakova said preliminary information pointed to a gas explosion and not terrorism at the bailiffs’ headquarters in Ingushetia’s main city, Nazran. Marat Prokopenkov of the Emergency Situations Ministry’s branch in southern Russia also said gas was suspected, but that other causes could not be ruled out. Attacks on law enforcement officials are common in Ingushetia.
■UNITED STATES
Writer accused of assault
At least four women have accused the Academy Award-winning songwriter of You Light Up My Life of luring them to his home and sexually assaulting them while they auditioned for movie roles, police said. Police were investigating whether director Joseph Brooks, who won an Oscar for Best Original Song for the 1977 Debby Boone ballad, advertised upcoming film roles on Internet postings as a ploy to assault women. When a woman responded to an audition call, Brooks would tell her she’d be playing a prostitute and would have her drink shots and perform sex acts on him, police said. Some women believe they might have been drugged, police said. At least four incidents are alleged to have happened in March and May last year, police spokesman John Sweeney said. One woman told authorities she had sex with Brooks after drinking wine with him, Sweeney said. Another woman, from Seattle, said she responded to an ad and Brooks demanded she have sex with him, Sweeney said. Another woman told police Brooks sodomized her, Sweeney said. Brooks, 70, hasn’t been charged, Sweeney said.
■UNITED STATES
Black Hawk crash kills one
An Army Black Hawk helicopter crashed into a field on the campus of Texas A&M University during a field training exercise on Monday, killing one person and injuring four others aboard. The Army UH-60 helicopter crashed near the Corps of Cadets field on the school’s College Station campus, about 160km northwest of Houston. No students were among the injured. A crew of four from the Army National Guard and an Army lieutenant assigned to the school’s ROTC unit were the only ones aboard the Black Hawk, Texas A&M spokesman Lane Stephenson said. Sheila Rinard with College Station Medical Center said two of the crash victims were in critical condition and a third was in stable condition.
■UNITED STATES
Peace Corps architect dies
Maurice Albertson, an architect of the Peace Corps and a Colorado State University (CSU) professor emeritus, died on Sunday. He was 90. Albertson died at Columbine Care Center West, said family friend Mims Harris. He fell ill following a trip to Indonesia in November and did not recover. Albertson and fellow CSU researchers Andrew Rice and Pauline Birky-Kreutzer responded to a request in 1960 from the federal government for a model to encourage young Americans to serve in Third World countries. The three wrote a book that set up the basic design of the Peace Corp. The program was officially launched in 1961 by former US president John F. Kennedy. It now has more than 190,000 volunteers serving in 139 developing countries.
■UNITED STATES
Victim calls for end of case
The victim in the Roman Polanski statutory rape case has urged prosecutors to drop the decades-old charges against the Hollywood director, court records revealed on Monday. “I was the 13-year-old girl Roman Polanski took advantage of on March 10, 1977,” wrote Samantha Geimer, now a 45-year old mother of three. “I have urged that this matter come to a formal legal end. I have urged that the district attorney and the court dismiss these charges. True as they may be, the continued publication of those details causes harm to me, my beloved husband, my three children and my mother. I have become a victim of the actions of the district attorney,” she wrote in a brief filed with the court. However, Judge Peter Espinoza ruled that there were “no legal grounds for disqualification.”
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
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
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
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
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