■INDONESIA
Man killed by dragons
Police and witnesses said two Komodo dragons killed a man picking fruit in the eastern part of the country — the latest in a string of attacks on humans. Police Sergeant Kosmas Jalang said yesterday the mauling on Komodo, one of three islands where the world’s largest lizard is found in the wild, occurred minutes after 31-year-old Muhamad Anwar fell out of a sugar-apple tree. The man’s neighbor, Theresia Tawa, said he was bleeding badly from bites to his hands, body, legs and neck by two lizards on Monday and died at a clinic on the neighboring island of Flores.
■PHILIPPINES
Government slams report
Manila criticized yesterday a report from a New York-based media watchdog listing the Southeast Asian country as among the world’s most dangerous places for journalists because of many unresolved murders since 1998. About 24 killings of Philippine journalists have remained unresolved since 1998, said the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), calling on the government to prosecute and punish those behind the murders. In its latest Impunity Index report, the CPJ ranked the Philippines as No. 6 in a list of 14 countries across the globe with high numbers of unresolved killings of journalists against the size of the population. The government denied it has ignored the killings.
■CHINA
Thousands ill with HFMD
Thousands of children in eastern and central parts of the country have been sickened with hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD), a highly contagious illness that is sometimes fatal, the government and state press said yesterday. Two children died of the disease, also known as enterovirus, over the weekend in Heze, Shandong Province, the provincial medical department said on its Web site. The Beijing News paper said tests on the causes of another four recent infant deaths in and around Heze were still being confirmed by doctors.
■THAILAND
‘Spider-Man’ saves child
A fireman turned superhero when he dressed up as comic-book character Spider-Man to coax a frightened eight-year-old from a balcony, police said yesterday. Teachers at a special needs school in Bangkok alerted authorities on Monday when an autistic pupil, scared of attending his first day at school, sat out on the third-floor ledge and refused to come inside, a police sergeant said. Despite teachers’ efforts to beckon the boy inside, he refused to budge until his mother mentioned her son’s love of superheroes, prompting fireman Sonchai Yoosabai to take a novel approach to the problem. The rescuer dashed back to his fire station and made a quick change into a Spider-Man costume before returning to the boy. The young boy immediately stood up and walked into his rescuer’s arms, police said.
■JAPAN
Opposition chief could resign
An aide to opposition leader Ichiro Ozawa was charged yesterday with violating a political funds law, setting the stage for Ozawa to decide whether to resign ahead of an election this year. Chief Cabinet Secretary Takeo Kawamura confirmed media reports of the indictment at a news conference. Before the scandal broke, voters’ frustrations with unpopular Prime Minister Taro Aso had boosted the chances Ozawa would lead his Democratic Party to victory in an election that must be held by October. An opposition victory would end more than 50 years of nearly unbroken rule by the Liberal Democratic Party.
■FRANCE
Nuke test victims awarded
The government will pay out at least 10 million euros (US$13.62 million) to people with health problems as a result of nuclear tests carried out in the Algerian Sahara and in Polynesia, Defense Minister Herve Morin was quoted as saying yesterday. Between 1960 and 1966, the government carried out more than 200 atmospheric nuclear tests, 17 of them in the Algerian Sahara and 193 in French Polynesia. The individual cases will be examined by an independent commission comprised of physicians and headed by a magistrate, Morin said. Contrary to past decision, those demanding compensation will no longer have to prove a causal link between the radiation and their illness.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Two teens charged with plot
Two teens have been charged with plotting to bomb a school on the 10th anniversary of the Columbine High School killings in Colorado, prosecutors said on Monday. A 16-year-old and a 17-year-old had a plan to strike on April 20, the Crown Prosecution Service said. The date marks 10 years since students Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, opened fire at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, killing 13 people before committing suicide in the school’s library.
■RUSSIA
Critic doused with ammonia
Police were investigating claims on Monday after a Kremlin critic running for mayor of the city hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics said he was doused with ammonia in an attack he blamed on the government. Boris Nemtsov told Ekho Moskvy radio he suspected Kremlin-backed activists carried out the attack on Monday in response to his criticism of Russia’s plans for the Winter Games in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi. A Kremlin spokesman declined to comment on the allegation. The incident coincided with the publication of an open letter to President Dmitry Medvedev in which Nemtsov said preparations for the Olympics would strain Sochi to the breaking point and suggested many events be held elsewhere in Russia.
■NETHERLANDS
Judges convict Hutu rebel
A Hutu man was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison on Monday for the slaying of two Tutsi mothers and at least four of their children during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The Hague District Court acquitted Joseph Mpambara of involvement in the massacre of hundreds of other Tutsis who had sought shelter in a church. He was also acquitted of raping four women and killing one of them in a separate incident. The judges said there was compelling evidence that Mpambara ordered the two Tutsi mothers and their children hauled out of an ambulance they were using to flee violence, and then killed. They were bludgeoned and hacked with clubs and machetes.
■ISRAEL
Parents visit protester son
The parents of an American man severely wounded by troops during a West Bank protest have asked police to launch an investigation, their lawyer said on Monday. Tristan Anderson, 38, from Oakland, California, was struck in the head by a tear gas canister fired by members of the paramilitary border police in the Palestinian village of Naalin on March 13. Anderson had joined a protest against Israel’s separation barrier, which cuts off Naalin from olive groves. In the past year, four Palestinians were killed in Naalin by Israeli troops quelling weekly stone-throwing protests against the barrier, according to Israeli human rights group B’tselem.
■CANADA
Minister defends seal hunt
Officials defended the start of the annual seal hunt on Monday as a financial necessity for isolated communities as sealers faced pressure from a possible EU ban. Animal rights groups say the hunt is cruel, difficult to monitor and ravages the seal population. But sealers and Canada’s Fisheries Department says the hunt is sustainable and humane, and earns money for isolated fishing communities in Atlantic Canada. “The picture that has been painted in people’s minds is that we have small white coat baby seals that are being clubbed over the head and skinned while they are alive. It’s just so not true,” Minister of Fisheries and Oceans Gail Shea said in a telephone interview.
■UNITED STATES
Plath’s son commits suicide
The son of the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes has committed suicide 46 years after his mother gassed herself, his sister and police said on Monday. Nicholas Hughes, 47, hanged himself at his home in Alaska, Frieda Hughes, who is also a poet, told Britain’s Times newspaper. Plath, an American famous for her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar and the poetry collection Ariel, has been at the center of a literary cult since she committed suicide in 1963 at the age of 30 while her children, one-year-old Nicholas and two-year-old Frieda, slept. Ted Hughes’ lover Assia Wevill also committed suicide in 1969, at the same time killing her young daughter from her relationship with the poet.
■UNITED STATES
Obama meets Gorbachev
The White House said on Monday that President Barack Obama met former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev last week as the US and Russia intensify efforts to “reset” strained relations. Gorbachev was at a White House meeting with Vice President Joe Biden on Friday when Obama informally dropped by, his spokesman Robert Gibbs said. The announcement comes just over a week before Obama meets Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in London. “The president tends to roam around the larger house and sometimes walks into meetings that weren’t previously on his schedule,” Gibbs said.
■UNITED STATES
Court debates ‘Hillary’ movie
Was Hillary: The Movie an anti-Hillary Clinton documentary or a 90-minute attack ad? The Supreme Court was trying to figure it out yesterday as it heard arguments over whether a political movie and its accompanying advertisements should be regulated the same way as political ads during election seasons. Citizens United, a conservative group, wanted to pay for Hillary — a documentary filled with negative criticism of the former New York senator — to be shown on home video-on-demand while she was competing against Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination. But federal judges said the movie was equivalent to a political ad.
■UNITED STATES
‘Jane Doe’ finally identified
A mute elderly woman known only as “Jane Doe” since she was found wandering in a mall in New Jersey 15 years ago has finally been identified. Lieutenant Eduardo Ojeda of the New Jersey Department of Human Services police discovered recently that the woman is Colombian-born Elba Leonor Diaz Soccarras, who turns 75 on March 28. She has Alzheimer’s disease and has been bedridden in a New Jersey psychiatric hospital for years. Her identity, partly obscured because she and her daughter had a falling out, was established thanks to tips from the public and Colombian officials.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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