■CHINA
Ex-officers seek benefits
About 60 demobilized army officers made a rare public appeal to the top military body on Tuesday for pensions, medical insurance and other benefits they said were withdrawn during the country’s campaign to downsize the army. Demobilized officers are supposed to receive benefits including cash subsidies, food, housing and cold-weather clothing under a 2001 government policy. But about 20,000 military officers around the country who retired in the 1990s are ineligible, and they are struggling to get by, said Hao Zhongmin, one of the former officers.
■PAKISTAN
Train hits school bus
A passenger train hit a school bus at an ungated railroad crossing in the east amid dense fog yesterday, killing at least eight children and the bus driver, police said. Twelve children also were injured in the collision near the Punjab Province town of Mian Channu, and some were in serious condition, police official Mohammed Farooq said. There were no known casualties on the passenger train. Parts of the country are under the grip of heavy fog which has caused several road accidents. Low visibility also has forced authorities to occasionally suspend traffic on the country’s main highway linking the capital, Islamabad, with the eastern city of Lahore and other towns.
■NORTH KOREA
Pyongyang warns Seoul
Pyongyang said yesterday that South Korea would face unspecified retaliation if it did not stop activists from launching propaganda leaflets across their divided border. The two Koreas agreed in 2004 to end decades of propaganda warfare across the Demilitarized Zone dividing the neighbors. However, the South Korean government said it cannot stop activists from sending the leaflets, citing freedom of speech, though it has urged to stop so that they don’t damage ties between the two Koreas. The North’s military said it “will never tolerate even the slightest acts’” of undermining “our leadership’s absolute authority.”
■NORTH KOREA
US visitors welcome
Pyongyang appears ready to welcome visitors from the US year-round, increasing the trickle of tourists from its sworn enemy who provide the reclusive state with hard cash. The country, which had restricted US tourists to visits that coincided with its mass games that usually run from August to October, will institute the change this year, Koryo Tours, a major group based in China that organizes visits to the isolated country said yesterday. The country has lost out on tens of millions of dollars a year it used to earn through tourism with South Korea because of political wrangling with its rival over Pyongyang’s military threats to the region and nuclear weapons program.
■JAPAN
Man kills three, self
A middle-aged man killed himself after fatally shooting his mother-in-law and two other people with a shotgun on Tuesday in a bar in the western part of the country, police and reports said. The shooting occurred at about 8pm in Hibikino City, outside Osaka, an Osaka prefectural police spokesman said. “The suspect fired the shotgun inside the bar and then shot himself on a street outside,” the official said by telephone. The gunman was later identified as an Osaka city government employee, Yasuhisa Sugiura, 49, Kyodo news agency reported. The three victims included his mother-in-law and a bar employee. The bar owner was critically wounded in the attack and died later, Kyodo said.
■FRANCE
Minister’s niece convicted
A British government minister’s niece was convicted of murder on Tuesday and sentenced to 15 years in jail for drunkenly stabbing a Frenchman she picked up in a bar. The court convicted Jessica Davies, 30, of killing 24-year-old Olivier Mugnier in November 2007 in her apartment in the chic Paris suburb of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. The niece of the multi-millionaire Junior Defense Minister Quentin Davies admitted killing her victim, but said she had a blackout and only remembered coming round to find him bleeding to death on her bed. She was sentenced to 15 years in jail and 10 years of probation and psychological monitoring. The judge and jury in the Versailles court heard Davies had suffered from psychological problems since her English father and French mother divorced acrimoniously when she was 14.
■PORTUGAL
McCanns face accuser
The parents of missing British girl Madeleine McCann faced a former Portuguese police officer in a libel court on Tuesday over his claims that she is dead and that they were involved in her disappearance. Goncalo Amaral, who led the initial stages of the investigation into Madeleine’s disappearance in Portugal in May 2007, made the allegations in his July 2008 book Maddie: The Truth Of The Lie. Arriving at the court in Lisbon, Kate and Gerry McCann, who are claiming 1.2 million euros (US$1.7 million) for defamation, said they were “confident,” while Amaral said he hoped “justice would be done.”
■POLAND
Prostitute fined by tax office
The tax office has levied a fine of 2.3 million zlotys (US$820,000) on an unemployed woman for failing to pay tax on income worth at least 13.7 million zlotys she said she had earned as a prostitute. The woman told the tax office in the southern city of Katowice that she had very “generous” customers, the Web site gazeta.pl, which is linked to leading Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, reported on Tuesday. One of her clients paid the woman 5 million zlotys during the 1997 to 2002 period, she was quoted as saying.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Web campaign wants No. 1
The extramarital affair conducted by Iris Robinson, the wife of Northern Ireland’s First Minister, has inspired an Internet campaign to push Mrs Robinson, the song from the film The Graduate, to the top of the British pop charts. The drive began after Robinson, 60, said last week she tried to kill herself last year following an affair with a then 19-year-old man, a tale that resembles the plot of Mike Nichols’ Oscar-winning film. Peter Robinson temporarily stood down as first minister on Monday to face an inquiry over whether he should have told authorities of the £50,000 (US$80,000) his wife raised to help the 19-year-old man open a cafe in Belfast.
■UNITED KINGDOM
No sunbeds for under-18s
The health secretary for England and Wales, Andy Burnham, pledged his government’s support yesterday for a private member’s bill banning sunbeds for the under-18s, following evidence they can lead to skin cancer in later life. Campaigners, however, are dismayed the bill will not follow Scotland’s example with an outright ban on unstaffed, coin-operated tanning booths. Without staff there will be no one to police the ban and prevent under-18s from exposing themselves to doses of ultraviolet radiation that are sometimes greater than the midday sun in the Mediterranean.
RARE EVENT: While some cultures have a negative view of eclipses, others see them as a chance to show how people can work together, a scientist said Stargazers across a swathe of the world marveled at a dramatic red “Blood Moon” during a rare total lunar eclipse in the early hours of yesterday morning. The celestial spectacle was visible in the Americas and Pacific and Atlantic oceans, as well as in the westernmost parts of Europe and Africa. The phenomenon happens when the sun, Earth and moon line up, causing our planet to cast a giant shadow across its satellite. But as the Earth’s shadow crept across the moon, it did not entirely blot out its white glow — instead the moon glowed a reddish color. This is because the
DEBT BREAK: Friedrich Merz has vowed to do ‘whatever it takes’ to free up more money for defense and infrastructure at a time of growing geopolitical uncertainty Germany’s likely next leader Friedrich Merz was set yesterday to defend his unprecedented plans to massively ramp up defense and infrastructure spending in the Bundestag as lawmakers begin debating the proposals. Merz unveiled the plans last week, vowing his center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU)/Christian Social Union (CSU) bloc and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) — in talks to form a coalition after last month’s elections — would quickly push them through before the end of the current legislature. Fraying Europe-US ties under US President Donald Trump have fueled calls for Germany, long dependent on the US security umbrella, to quickly
Romania’s electoral commission on Saturday excluded a second far-right hopeful, Diana Sosoaca, from May’s presidential election, amid rising tension in the run-up to the May rerun of the poll. Earlier this month, Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau barred Calin Georgescu, an independent who was polling at about 40 percent ahead of the rerun election. Georgescu, a fierce EU and NATO critic, shot to prominence in November last year when he unexpectedly topped a first round of presidential voting. However, Romania’s constitutional court annulled the election after claims of Russian interference and a “massive” social media promotion in his favor. On Saturday, an electoral commission statement
Chinese authorities increased pressure on CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd over its plan to sell its Panama ports stake by sharing a second newspaper commentary attacking the deal. The Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office on Saturday reposted a commentary originally published in Ta Kung Pao, saying the planned sale of the ports by the Hong Kong company had triggered deep concerns among Chinese people and questioned whether the deal was harming China and aiding evil. “Why were so many important ports transferred to ill-intentioned US forces so easily? What kind of political calculations are hidden in the so-called commercial behavior on the
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