■AUSTRALIA
Fake war hero unmasked
A celebrated war hero who rose to become head of the Prisoner of War Association of Australia was unmasked yesterday as an impostor who didn’t serve in World War II and never saw the inside of a Japanese prison camp. Rex Crane, 83, is now the subject of a police investigation after admitting to the Age newspaper that he spent the war in Adelaide. Crane told the paper he had never enlisted, never worn a uniform and that what he knew about fighting in the jungles of Malaya or the brutality of the Japanese guards at Singapore’s Outram Road Jail he had gleaned from books. “It looks like the past has caught up, doesn’t it?” he said.
■AUSTRALIA
Indonesians repatriated
A group of 62 Indonesians who sailed to the country have been repatriated after being declared economic migrants rather than genuine refugees, news reports said yesterday. “Someone who is seeking better economic opportunities doesn’t meet the criteria for a protection visa,” Immigration Minister Chris Evans said. The men were flown home on Friday from Christmas Island, where they had been detained since their boat was intercepted off the west coast two weeks ago. Evans said the men had “requested removal” when told they did not qualify for protection.
■CHINA
Bus accident kills 17
Brake failure and overcrowding were blamed for a bus accident that killed 17 people and injured 54 in the south, state media said yesterday. The 30-seat bus was carrying 71 people and flipped while descending a hill on Friday morning in Hunan Province’s Qiyang County, an official from the county’s propaganda office said yesterday. Nine people, including the driver, were declared dead at the scene and eight died after being taken to a local hospital, the official said. An initial investigation indicated brake failure and overcrowding caused the bus to overturn, the Xinhua news agency said.
■SINGAPORE
Thief jailed for nine years
A man who pulled off one of the city-state’s largest thefts in recent memory was sentenced on Friday to nine years in jail, local newspapers reported. Jerry Ee, 36, had admitted stealing valuables worth S$8.16 million (US$5.76 million), including 392 designer watches, from his former employer Cortina Watch in the Christmas Day heist last year, the Straits Times said. A stiff punishment was needed as the theft was one of the “most blatant and audacious acts of criminal breach of trust ever committed by an employee,” sentencing judge Chia Wee Kiat was quoted by the newspaper as saying. “The need to curb this proclivity for criminal activities means that the imposition of a deterrent sentence is all the more necessary,” the judge said.
■FRANCE
Life’s a bitch for pets
In a dog-loving country, every president knows the value of man’s best friend. Former president Francois Mitterrand prized his black labrador and President Nicolas Sarkozy once had a chihuahua named Big. But for ex-presidential pets, life after the Elysee can be a bitch. Former president Jacques Chirac’s miniature white maltese, Sumo, has been banished by the former president after becoming so depressed about leaving the presidential palace that he began routinely savaging his master. Although the Chiracs now live in a vast Paris apartment, Sumo has been on antidepressants to deal with the loss of the presidential garden, where he once roamed freely with a golden retriever named Scott.
■UNITED STATES
Man suffers rough week
An 80-year-old Ohio man is recovering from a week in which he was beaten during a home invasion and then shot while trying to learn about guns. Ralph Needs was tied up and pistol-whipped when at least three intruders broke into his Columbus-area home, the Columbus Dispatch reported. His nose was broken and his pickup truck, a computer and credit cards were stolen. Four days later, Needs was shot in the hand during a self-defense lesson when a 9mm pistol went off as one of his sons was loading it.
■SPAIN
Love letters cost US$1.7m
For Cristian Garcia, 22, the split with his girlfriend was devastating. Her love letters to him were proof of a passion that had since died, so he took them to a skip near her home in Valencia, set them on fire and drove off. Three years later Garcia has lost a lot more than his girlfriend. A court this week handed Garcia a suspended prison sentence of 18 months and ordered him to pay 1.2 million euros (US$1.7 million) in damages for the forest fire that he inadvertently started when he burnt the love letters. With winds gusting at 65kph, within hours thousands of hectares were burning forcing evacuations, stopped traffic and a port closure. The fire raged for three days.
■UNITED STATES
Climate pact unlikely to pass
The US president’s top aide on climate change acknowledged that legislation requiring major reductions in global-warming emissions is unlikely to pass Congress before December’s Copenhagen summit on climate change. Carol Browner, director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, said on Friday that completion of the legislative process before the summit “is not going to happen,” the New York Times reported yesterday on its Web site. Drafts proposed in the Senate would cut emissions by between 17 percent and 20 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, and by more than 80 percent by 2050.
■UNITED STATES
Lonely llama captured
A lone llama wandering near the summit of Pikes Peak for a month has been captured and is heading to a new home. Tracy Ducharme and Mike Shealy of Black Forest, Colorado, trekked up the 4,300m mountain on Friday to find the little white beast of burden. They took two llamas with them. The wandering llama’s herd instincts lured him to them and Ducharme slipped a rope around his neck. “I dubbed him Homer because of his little odyssey,” she said.
■MEXICO
Raids net meth chemicals
Two raids by security forces netted the largest seizures of methamphetamine precursor chemicals in the country’s history, federal officials announced on Friday. Agents seized 20 tonnes of chemicals used to produce methamphetamine at Manzanillo port in Colima and 17 tonnes in Nuevo Laredo, the Attorney General’s Office said. Meanwhile, in Ciudad Juarez, police said at least 11 people, including two police officers and a child, were killed in less than 24 hours. Gunmen killed eight on Friday in five separate attacks, including a policewoman who was shot in the head in broad daylight in a residential area, a state prosecutor’s spokesman said. Gunmen opened fire on a pickup truck late on Thursday, killing a 22-year-old woman and a 10-year-old girl playing in a city park. Earlier, a city police officer was killed as she rode on a bus, he said. Also on Friday, a Mexican Air force plane crashed for unknown reasons in Michoacan, killing three soldiers.
A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It might sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this point, it’s: ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
CHEER ON: Students were greeted by citizens who honked their car horns or offered them food and drinks, while taxi drivers said they would give marchers a lift home Hundreds of students protesting graft they blame for 15 deaths in a building collapse on Friday marched through Serbia to the northern city of Novi Sad, where they plan to block three Danube River bridges this weekend. They received a hero’s welcome from fellow students and thousands of local residents in Novi Said after arriving on foot in their two-day, 80km journey from Belgrade. A small red carpet was placed on one of the bridges across the Danube that the students crossed as they entered the city. The bridge blockade planned for yesterday is to mark three months since a huge concrete construction
DIVERSIFY: While Japan already has plentiful access to LNG, a pipeline from Alaska would help it move away from riskier sources such as Russia and the Middle East Japan is considering offering support for a US$44 billion gas pipeline in Alaska as it seeks to court US President Donald Trump and forestall potential trade friction, three officials familiar with the matter said. Officials in Tokyo said Trump might raise the project, which he has said is key for US prosperity and security, when he meets Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba for the first time in Washington as soon as next week, the sources said. Japan has doubts about the viability of the proposed 1,287km pipeline — intended to link fields in Alaska’s north to a port in the south, where
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