■ CHINA
Snow beats Bud Light
Chinese beer Snow leapt ahead of Bud Light to become the world’s biggest selling beer as the country stretches its lead as the largest beer market in the world, provisional data from researcher Plato Logic showed. Snow, which is brewed by SABMiller and its partner China Resources Enterprises Ltd, saw its sales volume jump 19.1 percent last year, putting it well ahead of Bud Light and sister brew Budweiser.
■ INDONESIA
Quake strikes off Sumatra
An undersea earthquake registering 6.1 on the Richter scale struck the west coast of Sumatra yesterday, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage, the National Meteorology and Geophysics Agency said. The quake struck at 1:29pm and was centered in the Indian Ocean, 227km southwest of Bintuhan in Bengkulu Province. It occurred 30km beneath the seabed, but the statement did not say if the quake was a tsunami threat. Earlier yesterday a 6.3-magnitude quake was recorded about 30km off the north coast of Papua New Guinea, the US Geological Survey said.
■ CHINA
Freedom House pans PRC
Beijing’s “sophisticated and multi-layered” efforts to censor and control the Internet earned the country a “not free” rating by a US rights group in a report released yesterday. Freedom House, which examined Web freedom issues in 15 countries, listed Cuba, Iran and Tunisia as three others it considered “not free” because of government control of online activity. Freedom House said China has “the world’s most highly-developed censorship apparatus.” The report cited a “sophisticated and multi-layered system” used to censor, monitor and control Internet and mobile telephone activities. It also mentioned the “hundreds of thousands” of people authorities and private providers employ to “monitor, censor and manipulate online content.”
■ NEW ZEALAND
Hiker survives ordeal
A seriously injured hiker spent two days dragging himself 3km down a New Zealand glacier with a suspected broken ankle and wrist after falling down a cliff in the Southern Alps, news reports said yesterday. Matthews Briggs, 33, had lain injured for a week hoping that friends would raise the alarm and searchers would find him. But he eventually set off for a mountaineers’ hut, thinking: “If I don’t get out of here, I’m going to die here,” the Dominion Post reported. In the isolated hut, Briggs found two hunters, who then walked for 13 hours to raise the alarm, and a rescue helicopter lifted him to hospital on Tuesday. In addition to his suspected fractures, Briggs had bone-deep cuts to his leg, back and buttocks.
■ AUSTRALIA
Wild camels tap into water
Wild camels are entering communities in the outback and turning on taps in search of water, officials said yesterday. “In a number of our communities it’s quite common for camels to enter the community, and if there are any taps adjacent to houses they’re quite capable of either turning the taps on or knocking the taps off so they get water,” said Wayne Wright, head of the Macdonnell Shire Council. The problem was so severe, Wright said, that the council had applied to the government for a A$4.5 million (US$3.1 million) grant to build fences and grids to keep the camels out. The camels are also destroying revegetation projects in desert communities.
■ RUSSIA
Lenin statue vandalized
Vandals set off an explosion yesterday that damaged one of the last Soviet-era monuments to Communist leader Vladimir Lenin in Russia’s former imperial capital, an official said. Nobody was hurt in the night-time explosion outside the Finland train station in Saint Petersburg, the hotbed of the Bolshevik Revolution. The explosion took place at 4:30am and left an 80cm crater in the monument, an emergency services spokesman said, adding that some nearby light fixtures were also damaged in the blast. The Finland Station was where Lenin returned from exile in April 1917 before leading his Bolshevik party to power in a revolution that ushered in more than seven decades of Soviet communism.
■ NORWAY
Baptism by cola
A church used lemon-flavored cola instead of water in a baptism ceremony after its taps were temporarily turned off because of freezing temperatures, daily Vaart Land said on Tuesday. Priest Paal Dale from the town of Stord, about 240km west of Oslo, improvised during a recent cold-spell by dabbing the lemon fizzy water on a baby during a baptism ceremony, it said. “It had gone flat,” Dale was quoted as saying by the newspaper. “Only the lemon smell made this unusual.” Dale said the child’s family were informed about the switch only after the ceremony because the priest “had a need to inform” them about the lingering lemon scent on their baby.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Mail sale stalls
The government has failed to make a case for a 30 percent sale of Royal Mail as there is no clarity around how the proceeds would be used, a parliamentary committee said yesterday. The government says it needs private sector investment to modernize the state-owned postal operator, which is laboring under the weight of a US$11.5 billion pension deficit, but parliament’s business committee said there was a “worrying lack of transparency” around the plan. Prime Minister Gordon Brown faces his biggest rebellion since becoming leader over the issue. More than 130 Labour parliamentarians are expected to vote against the plan.
■ POLAND
Lawmaker blames apples
A lawmaker who failed a drink-driving test said he had eaten too many apples, the daily Gazeta Wyborcza Web site said on Monday. Asked why a traffic police check on Sunday showed he had 0.7 units of alcohol in his blood, Marek Latas denied having drunk alcohol that day. “I am diabetic, I ate a few apples before driving … I was confident there was no chance I had alcohol in my blood,” said Latas, a member of parliament for the conservative opposition Law and Justice Party.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Arsonist escapes, returns
A convicted arsonist who escaped from London’s Pentonville prison by clinging to the underside of a security van was back in custody on Tuesday after handing himself in to police. Julien Chautard, 39, had given prison officers the slip shortly after he was counted off the van that had brought him from Snaresbrook Crown Court. His disappearance on Friday evening was not noticed before the van was cleared to drive out of the jail. Scrutiny of CCTV footage seven hours later revealed a shadow under the outgoing van that had not been there as it came into the prison. Scotland Yard said Chautard had phoned police at the encouragement of his family in France and Britain after officers had contacted them.
■ UNITED STATES
Protect jaguars, judge says
A federal judge on Tuesday ordered federal wildlife officials to reconsider how to help endangered jaguars survive, saying the decision to not protect habitat for them was based on bad criteria and inconsistent with the US Endangered Species Act. The largest cats native to the Western hemisphere live primarily in Mexico, Central and South America. But they’re known to roam in southern Arizona and New Mexico, and one was captured for the first time southeast of Tucson, Arizona, last month. The Interior Department abandoned a recovery plan for the endangered species last year after concluding too few of the cats had been spotted to warrant it. The US Fish and Wildlife Service said US land represents less than 1 percent of the species’ range, so its survival depends on other nations. US District Judge John Roll said in his ruling that Fish and Wildlife did not use the best scientific evidence available in not establishing critical habitat for the species. “Denying the jaguar protection because it is overly endangered is an oxymoron,” said Michael Robinson, a spokesman for the Center for Biological Diversity, a plaintiff in the lawsuit. “That was the essence of the government’s plan, that there are so few jaguars that they don’t need a recovery plan. And the judge saw right through that.”
■ UNITED STATES
No behavior classes for trio
A federal judge in Pennsylvania said that three teenage girls who posed semi-nude for pictures distributed via cellular phone could not be forced to attend behavior classes as a prosecutor demanded. The temporary restraining order filed on Monday by Judge James Munley stops District Attorney George Skumanick from filing child pornography charges against the girls, who were 13 when the pictures were taken. Munley said the pictures were not illegal and that there was no reason to prosecute. Teachers at the girls’ high school alerted the authorities in October after discovering a waist-up image of two girls wearing bras, and another image of a girl topless on the portable telephones of several students. Skumanik called for the girls to undergo five weeks of behavior courses and take a drug test or face prosecution and having to register as sex offenders.
■ UNITED STATES
Man crashes barstool
Falling off a barstool can hurt one’s pride, if not more, but a Newark, Ohio, man got into trouble with the law for crashing his motorized version. Kile Wygle, 28, hurt his head in the March 4 mishap with a motorized barstool and was charged with drunken driving and driving on a suspended license, police said on Tuesday. While being treated by paramedics, Wygle told an officer he consumed “a lot” of beers — at least 15 —- before crashing the barstool at 32kph, a police account showed. Wygle later told a local TV station he got drunk after, not before, the crash. “I drank quite a bit after I wrecked because my head hurt so bad. I went in and drank a half a bottle of whiskey,” he said. The barstool was towed away.
■ UNITED STATES
‘Simpsons’ getting stamped
The Simpsons, the bumbling, dysfunctional cartoon family, will soon be on postage stamps, the Postal Service said. It plans five US$0.44 stamps, featuring Homer, Marge and their children Bart, Lisa and Maggie. Artwork for the stamps was done by Simpson’s creator Matt Groening and will preview next Thursday.
BLOODSHED: North Koreans take extreme measures to avoid being taken prisoner and sometimes execute their own forces, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Saturday said that Russian and North Korean forces sustained heavy losses in fighting in Russia’s southern Kursk region. Ukrainian and Western assessments say that about 11,000 North Korean troops are deployed in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces occupy swathes of territory after staging a mass cross-border incursion in August last year. In his nightly video address, Zelenskiy quoted a report from Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi as saying that the battles had taken place near the village of Makhnovka, not far from the Ukrainian border. “In battles yesterday and today near just one village, Makhnovka,
HOLLYWOOD IN TURMOIL: Mandy Moore, Paris Hilton and Cary Elwes lost properties to the flames, while awards events planned for this week have been delayed Fires burning in and around Los Angeles have claimed the homes of numerous celebrities, including Billy Crystal, Mandy Moore and Paris Hilton, and led to sweeping disruptions of entertainment events, while at least five people have died. Three awards ceremonies planned for this weekend have been postponed. Next week’s Oscar nominations have been delayed, while tens of thousands of city residents had been displaced and were awaiting word on whether their homes survived the flames — some of them the city’s most famous denizens. More than 1,900 structures had been destroyed and the number was expected to increase. More than 130,000 people
Some things might go without saying, but just in case... Belgium’s food agency issued a public health warning as the festive season wrapped up on Tuesday: Do not eat your Christmas tree. The unusual message came after the city of Ghent, an environmentalist stronghold in the country’s East Flanders region, raised eyebrows by posting tips for recycling the conifers on the dinner table. Pointing with enthusiasm to examples from Scandinavia, the town Web site suggested needles could be stripped, blanched and dried — for use in making flavored butter, for instance. Asked what they thought of the idea, the reply
US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen on Monday met virtually with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (何立峰) and raised concerns about “malicious cyber activity” carried out by Chinese state-sponsored actors, the US Department of the Treasury said in a statement. The department last month reported that an unspecified number of its computers had been compromised by Chinese hackers in what it called a “major incident” following a breach at contractor BeyondTrust, which provides cybersecurity services. US Congressional aides said no date had been set yet for a requested briefing on the breach, the latest in a serious of cyberattacks
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