■INDIA
Nuclear workers poisoned
Workers at a nuclear power plant in Karnataka state were treated for poisoning after drinking water was deliberately spiked with radiation, senior government officials said yesterday. Routine tests showed 55 employees from the plant had increased levels of the radioactive element tritium. A member of the National Disaster Management Authority said someone had inserted contaminated water into a water cooler, the Press Trust of India reported. The employees had not suffered any ill effects and were back at work, plant officials said.
■MALAYSIA
Graft allegations probed
The Sarawak state government was probing investigators’ claims that up to 60 percent of infrastructure funds possibly amounting to billions of dollars have been siphoned off, the Star newspaper reported yesterday. Sarawak’s deputy chief minister said his government would look into the allegation made by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC). The Sarawak MACC found that between 2002 and last year, “only about 40 percent of the allocations were spent while the remaining 60 percent is bocor [leaked out],” the Borneo Post quoted MACC Deputy Chief Commissioner Zakaria Jaffar as saying.
■INDONESIA
Effort to save whales halted
Two young whales stranded on Bali will die on the beach because they are too weak to survive even if returned to the water and attempts to rescue them have been abandoned, a Fisheries and Marines Department officer said yesterday. The pair were among four short-finned pilot whales that washed ashore on Saturday. Dozens of locals hauled the four into the shallow water and fishing boats led two back to sea but waves washed the other two back to shore.
■NORTH KOREA
Kims take trip together
Leader Kim Jong-il took his youngest son Kim Jong-un on a “field guidance” trip as he continued to groom him as his chosen successor, a Japanese newspaper reported yesterday. The Mainichi Shumbun said it had obtained an official North Korean “internal document” that described a visit by the father and son to a provincial agricultural university earlier this year. Kim Jong-il and his late father, Kim Il-sung, used “field guidance” trips to military units, factories, farms and other places to demonstrate their absolute leadership in the communist state.
■INDONESIA
Protesters want Shariah
Several hundred protesters staged rallies yesterday urging the government to prevent the spread of HIV by implementing Islamic law. Ahead of World AIDS Day tomorrow, members of the Hizbut Tahrir group took to the streets in several cities including Jakarta, Solo, Yogyakarta and Makassar. “We urge everybody to support the application of sharia in an Islamic caliphate so that, God willing, all of us will be free from the HIV/AIDS threat,” Hizbut spokeswoman Febrianti Abassuni said in a statement.
■CHINA
Dogs catch swine flu
Two dogs in Beijing have tested positive for swine flu in the county’s second case of animals catching the disease after pigs in the northeast tested positive, local media said yesterday. The A(H1N1) virus detected in the dogs was 99 percent identical to the one circulating in humans, the state-run Beijing Times reported, citing agricultural officials. The news comes 10 days after four pigs in Heilongjiang Province were diagnosed with the virus, which specialists said might have been caught from humans, the report said.
■ITALY
One of first K2 climbers dies
Lino Lacedelli, one of the first two climbers to reach the summit of K2, the world’s second-highest peak and among the most treacherous, died on Nov. 20 in the house he had lived in since his birth in Cortina d’Ampezzo. He was 83. His family said that he died of unspecified causes after a heart operation, newspapers and broadcasters reported. Lacedelli and Achille Compagnoni reached the summit on July 31, 1954, and neither would say who was first. Compagnoni died in May at 94. Reinhold Messner, a renowned mountain climber, told the news agency ANSA that Lacedelli, conqueror of a peak regarded as more difficult than Everest by many climbers, was one of history’s “greatest climbers.” The name K2 was a designation given to the peak in the Karakoram range on the border between Pakistan and China by 19th-century surveyors. The height of Everest, 1,287km to the southeast, is more than 8,839m. K2 is about 8,610m.
■BRAZIL
Witness in ranch trial shot
The official news agency said a key witness in a case related to the 2005 death of US nun and Amazon defender Dorothy Stang is in critical condition after being shot just hours after being summoned to testify. Agencia Brasil is reporting that Roniery Lopes was to testify against Regivaldo Galvao in a case involving accusations the rancher tried to use falsified documents to obtain the same plot of land Stang died trying to defend. Agencia Brasil said on Saturday it was notified of the attempted murder by a nun from Stang’s congregation. Authorities did not immediately confirm the report.
■DR CONGO
Ninety die in boat sinking
UN radio said at least 90 people were confirmed dead after a logging boat sank on a lake in the northeast. A survivor, Ewiya Mukana, told Radio Okapi on Saturday that dozens of corpses were spread on the sand along the shores of Lake Maindome, 400km northeast of the capital, Kinshasa. Radio Okapi quoted a local authority as saying it did not receive a manifest because the timber-carrying vessel was not allowed to carry passengers.
■SAUDI ARABIA
Floods kill 103
Emergency services said the death toll from floods that tore through the port city of Jeddah this week had risen to 103, with another 1,400 rescued, the state news agency reported yesterday. Torrents of water inundated the Red Sea port on Wednesday after Saudi Arabia saw some of the heaviest rainfall in years. Many of the victims were drowned or were killed by collapsing bridges and in car crashes. Civil defense planes flew over the affected areas searching for missing people, the Jeddah authorities said in a statement to the Saudi Press Agency. No pilgrims attending the annual Muslim haj pilgrimage 80km away in Mecca were among the dead, officials have said.
■ITALY
PM wants writers ‘strangled’
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi would like to “strangle” people who write books or make films about the mafia, he told young supporters of his Forza Italia party on Saturday. “If I find out who is the maker of the nine seasons of The Octopus and who has written books on the mafia, which give such a bad image to Italy across the world, I swear that I will strangle them,” he said. The Octopus — in Italian, La Piovra — was a mafia-themed TV series aired on RAI public TV from 1984 through 2001.
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.
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
PROBE: Last week, Romanian prosecutors launched a criminal investigation against presidential candidate Calin Georgescu accusing him of supporting fascist groups Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in Romania’s capital on Saturday in the latest anti-government demonstration by far-right groups after a top court canceled a presidential election in the EU country last year. Protesters converged in front of the government building in Bucharest, waving Romania’s tricolor flags and chanting slogans such as “down with the government” and “thieves.” Many expressed support for Calin Georgescu, who emerged as the frontrunner in December’s canceled election, and demanded they be resumed from the second round. George Simion, the leader of the far-right Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR), which organized the protest,
ECONOMIC DISTORTION? The US commerce secretary’s remarks echoed Elon Musk’s arguments that spending by the government does not create value for the economy US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on Sunday said that government spending could be separated from GDP reports, in response to questions about whether the spending cuts pushed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency could possibly cause an economic downturn. “You know that governments historically have messed with GDP,” Lutnick said on Fox News Channel’s Sunday Morning Futures. “They count government spending as part of GDP. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.” Doing so could potentially complicate or distort a fundamental measure of the US economy’s health. Government spending is traditionally included in the GDP because
RSS