■CHINA
Bus crash kills 13 people
Thirteen people were killed and 41 injured after a bus plummeted off a mountain road in north China, Xinhua news agency reported yesterday. The bus, carrying 54 passengers, was traveling to Taiyuan in Shanxi Province when the accident occurred, it said. Ten people were killed instantly, and three others died on way to the hospital, it said. The bus had been rented from a tourism agency and was carrying customers of the Taiyuan-based Jinwanxia healthcare products company. A traffic policeman at the scene reportedly said it had been raining and the road was slick.
■CHINA
Ban on US pork removed
China has agreed to end its ban on US pork products, which has been in place since the swine flu outbreak began earlier this year, US officials said on Thursday. The WHO has said the A(H1N1) influenza, cannot be contracted by eating meat. But China was one of a number of countries that restricted pork imports from the US and Mexico, where the swine flu epidemic originated in the spring. “China’s intent to remove its H1N1-related ban on US pork marks an important step forward in cooperation between the countries on agriculture issues,” said US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who was in China this week along with other top US trade officials.
■HONG KONG
Bottom attacker jailed
A Vietnamese worker began a three-month jail sentence on Friday for pricking two women on the bottom in Hong Kong, claiming he did so because he could not resist their “big buttocks.” Pham Van Diep, 43, used a toothpick and a piece of wire to prick the buttocks of two women, aged 20 and 38, in September and last month. The attacks raised fears of random syringe attacks similar to the incidents reported in Xinjiang in September. Pham appeared in court on Thursday for sentencing after earlier pleading guilty to two counts of assault occasioning actual bodily harm. Psychological reports presented to the court said Pham did not have a “big buttock” fetish and he had changed his story saying he had attacked the first victim because she was blocking his way.
■MALAYSIA
Lawmakers told to marry
Legislators in the poor conservative Muslim northeastern state of Kelantan should marry single mothers to help care for their children, a state representative suggested. The state’s family and health committee chairwoman Wan Ubaidah Omar said that legislators should be awarded prizes for increasing their “quota” of wives. “What I mean by quota is adding to the number of wives,” Wan Ubaidah, a female legislator said, according to Thursday’s Star newspaper. Polygamy is legal in Malaysia for Muslims, who account for 55 percent of the 28 million population.
■JAPAN
PM hates whale meat
Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has revealed he dislikes whale meat, the Sankei Shimbun reported yesterday, in an unusual confession for the chief of a country that defies Western criticism of whaling. “I hate whale meat,” Hatoyama said during a meeting with his visiting Dutch counterpart, Jan Peter Balkenende, on Monday at his office, the report said. The Netherlands is one of several anti-whaling countries that allows the radical environmental group Sea Shepherd Conservation Society to register a vessel in the country. The group’s activists have repeatedly harassed Japanese whaling vessels in Antarctic waters.
■KENYA
Government to survey gays
Kenya is to launch a nationwide survey to establish the number of gay men in the country, despite homosexuality being against the law. In a move described as a first for Africa, the National AIDS/STD Control Programme (NASCOP) said it would begin the six-month research next month in an effort to help stop the spread of HIV. Under the country’s penal code, a relic of British colonial rule, homosexual acts are punishable by up to 14 years in jail. Gay and lesbian organizations have long complained that the law and widespread homophobia makes access to HIV treatment and prevention services difficult.
■BULGARIA
‘Road roulette’ investigated
Prosecutors are investigating a new gambling game in which drivers defy death by speeding through red lights for bets of up to 5,000 euros (US$7,400), the chief prosecutor’s office said on Thursday. Known as “Russian road roulette,” the driver must jump red lights at busy intersections at high speed and not crash into any other cars or pedestrians, local media reported. Onlookers also gamble on the result. Prosecutors launched their investigation after media reported the new game had been held at night at busy crossroads in Sofia since the summer. In June, two people died after a motorcyclist crashed into an onlooker at a similar rally on Sofia’s ring road. Since the deaths in June, police have monitored roads where such races are typically held.
■GERMANY
Artist sparks ‘gold rush’
Gold seekers descended on Thursday on a vacant lot near Cologne after being told that a conceptual artist, Michael Sailstorfer, had buried 28 gold bars there. Sailstorfer said the bars, weighing either 10g or 20g, were worth 10,000 euros (US$15,000) in total and were buried up to 1m deep. Angelika Schallenberg, the municipal art chief of the suburban town of Pulheim, said what happened next was part of the performance. At least 10 people including an entire family joined the gold rush and were digging up the site.
■DENMARK
Parcel causes scare
A newspaper cartoonist who was a central figure in the Prophet Mohammed cartoon controversy was on Friday whisked from his home after a suspicious parcel was found on the doorstep. Bomb experts were dispatched to Kurt Westergaard’s home in Arhus, eastern Jutland. Several nearby houses were also evacuated as a precaution, police said. Westergaard’s controversial cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his turban was one of 12 images published in September 2005 by the Jyllands-Posten newspaper.
■BELGIUM
Raging inmate shot dead
An Iranian inmate stabbed two guards and three fellow prisoners with scissors in a prison before being shot dead by police early on Friday. The 35-year-old man flew into a rage after learning he would be punished for an earlier transgression at the jail in Leuven, which is about 25km east of Brussels. He stabbed a female guard and a fellow prisoner who sought to intervene, both of whom were critically injured in the attack that began around 7pm on Thursday, Leuven prosecutors said. Another guard and prisoner were also attacked before the man and an accomplice took another prisoner hostage in a cell. Police special forces stormed the cell after midnight and shot the man dead. The hostage, whom he had just started to stab, was seriously injured.
■UNITED STATES
Recession cuts divorce rate
Financial woes often drive couples apart, but the current recession seems to be having the opposite effect, with less couples able to afford the cost of a divorce. The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers (AAML) said more than half of the respondents to its latest survey among its 1,600 members had cited a drop in divorce filings during the current recession which has cut jobs, salaries and house prices. In total, 57 percent of the attorneys noted fewer divorce filings since the last quarter of last year. Only 14 percent noted an increase in filings during these difficult times. “The current economic climate is proving to be far more unforgiving than estranged couples seeking a divorce,” AAML president Gary Nickelson said.
■CANADA
Folk singer killed by coyotes
An up-and-coming folk singer has died after being attacked by coyotes in a national park in eastern Canada. Taylor Mitchell, a 19-year-old from Toronto, was hiking alone in the Breton Highlands national park, Nova Scotia, on Tuesday when the attack occurred. Brigdit Leger, a Royal Canadian mounted police spokeswoman, said other hikers heard Mitchell’s screams and called for help. “The coyotes were extremely aggressive,” Leger told the Toronto Star. Officers shot one of the animals, but Mitchell had suffered multiple bites. She was airlifted to a Halifax hospital in a critical condition and died on Wednesday.
■UNITED STATES
Iraqi attacks own daughter
Police in a Phoenix suburb say an Iraqi immigrant has been arrested in Georgia for allegedly running his daughter over with his car because she was becoming “too Westernized.” Police in Peoria are releasing few details, but say 48-year-old Faleh Almaleki is in custody. They aren’t saying where he is being held. Twenty-year-old Noor Faleh Almaleki is hospitalized in serious condition. Police say the Almalekis moved to the suburb of Glendale from Iraq during the mid-1990s.
■MEXICO
Gunmen kill 15 on ranch
Gunmen killed 15 people on an isolated ranch in northern Mexico, including a prominent farmworker leader, in the latest grisly attack in an area overrun by drug gangs, local police said on Friday. Margarito Montes, a well-known organizer of agricultural laborers, was among the bodies found riddled with bullets in trucks in the town of Hornos in southern Sonora, a state bordering the US, a police spokesman said. The cause of the crime was unknown, but the killings had many of the hallmarks of hits by drug cartels, who often use automatic weapons to murder people in groups to send a message to rivals.
■CANADA
Canada, Greenland ink pact
Canada and Greenland agreed on Friday on a series of measures aimed at protecting shared populations of polar bears that roam between the Nunavut territory and the huge Arctic island, officials said. Canadian Environment Minister Jim Prentice made the announcement during a conference call from Kangerluusuaq, Greenland, where he signed a memorandum of understanding with Greenlander Minister of Fisheries, Hunting and Agriculture Ane Hansen. The deal proposes the creation of a joint committee that would recommend a total allowable — and sustainable — annual polar bear harvest and a fair division of the harvest. Hunting polar bears has been banned since 1973, but indigenous peoples are exempt out of respect for their ancestral traditions.
ANGER: A video shared online showed residents in a neighborhood confronting the national security minister, attempting to drag her toward floodwaters Argentina’s port city of Bahia Blanca has been “destroyed” after being pummeled by a year’s worth of rain in a matter of hours, killing 13 and driving hundreds from their homes, authorities said on Saturday. Two young girls — reportedly aged four and one — were missing after possibly being swept away by floodwaters in the wake of Friday’s storm. The deluge left hospital rooms underwater, turned neighborhoods into islands and cut electricity to swaths of the city. Argentine Minister of National Security Patricia Bullrich said Bahia Blanca was “destroyed.” The death toll rose to 13 on Saturday, up from 10 on Friday, authorities
Two daughters of an Argentine mountaineer who died on an icy peak 40 years ago have retrieved his backpack from the spot — finding camera film inside that allowed them a glimpse of some of his final experiences. Guillermo Vieiro was 44 when he died in 1985 — as did his climbing partner — while descending Argentina’s Tupungato lava dome, one of the highest peaks in the Americas. Last year, his backpack was spotted on a slope by mountaineer Gabriela Cavallaro, who examined it and contacted Vieiro’s daughters Guadalupe, 40, and Azul, 44. Last month, the three set out with four other guides
Local officials from Russia’s ruling party have caused controversy by presenting mothers of soldiers killed in Ukraine with gifts of meat grinders, an appliance widely used to describe Russia’s brutal tactics on the front line. The United Russia party in the northern Murmansk region posted photographs on social media showing officials smiling as they visited bereaved mothers with gifts of flowers and boxed meat grinders for International Women’s Day on Saturday, which is widely celebrated in Russia. The post included a message thanking the “dear moms” for their “strength of spirit and the love you put into bringing up your sons.” It
DISASTROUS VISIT: The talks in Saudi Arabia come after an altercation at the White House that led to the Ukrainian president leaving without signing a minerals deal Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was due to arrive in Saudi Arabia yesterday, a day ahead of crucial talks between Ukrainian and US officials on ending the war with Russia. Highly anticipated negotiations today on resolving the three-year conflict would see US and Ukrainian officials meet for the first time since Zelenskiy’s disastrous White House visit last month. Zelenskiy yesterday said that he would meet Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the nation’s de facto leader, after which his team “will stay for a meeting on Tuesday with the American team.” At the talks in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah, US
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