■MONGOLIA
Red Cross appeals for aid
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) launched an emergency appeal yesterday for nearly US$1 million to help thousands of herders who have lost their livestock to one of the worst winters in decades. The nation is grappling with a severe winter after a dry summer, a phenomenon known as a dzud that has led to extreme cold and food shortages for the livestock that many depend upon for survival. A total of 4.5 million livestock have died since December. The IFRC said the fund would provide families with emergency food and non-food relief, assistance with restoring and diversifying their livelihoods, and support to cope with depression and stress.
■MYANMAR
Bus company stops caning
A bus company has been told to stop caning drivers and conductors for letting too many passengers on buses, the Myanmar Times reported yesterday. The paper said Bandoola Transport brought in the punishment on two routes in Yangon last month as fining drivers and conductors was not improving discipline, but it was told last week to stop the caning, an order thought to have come from the Commander of Yangon Division. The firm will revert to issuing fines, the paper said.
■MALAYSIA
Migrants escape detention
Sixteen migrants were on the run yesterday after escaping a detention center at the main international airport, immigration officials said. The group, 12 Afghan and four Myanmar nationals, got through the gate of a facility at Kuala Lumpur airport, where officials said they were being held for their own protection from human trafficking syndicates. The migrants are believed to have cut through the wire mesh of the gate. The Afghans were part of a group of 18 rescued last October from a ship off the Malaysian coast as they were suffering from starvation, officials said.
■NEW ZEALAND
Wildlife smugglers jailed
Two foreigners were sentenced to prison yesterday for hunting and possessing protected native lizards. The men were sentenced to six months in jail, but District Court Judge Raoul Neave reduced their terms to 18 weeks because they entered guilty pleas. In his sentencing remarks, Neave said the men’s actions were no different from that of ivory hunters. Swiss Thomas Benjamin Price and Mexican Gustavo Eduardo Toledo-Albarran had arrived in the country last month and traveled to South Island. Price admitted possessing the lizards and Toledo-Albarran admitted illegally hunting them.
■GREECE
Bomb kills 15-year-old
A 15-year-old boy was killed and his mother and sister injured late on Sunday after a bomb exploded outside a building in central Athens, police said. Bomb attacks by militant leftist groups are frequent in the country and usually target police, public buildings or businesses. Sunday’s explosion was the first in years to kill someone. Urban violence increased in the country after the police shooting of a teenager in December 2008. Police later said the dead person was a 15-year-old teenager and that the injured women were his 44-year-old mother and 11-year-old sister. The bomb, which went off outside an association for business management, also damaged cars and adjacent buildings.
■UAE
Indians sentenced to death
A court in Dubai has sentenced 17 Indians to death over the killing of a Pakistani following a dispute involving illegal trade in alcohol, a newspaper reported yesterday. The Shariah court in Sharjah, one of the smaller of seven emirates, sentenced the men to death following DNA tests indicating involvement in the fatal stabbing, the Khaleej Times reported. The sentence is thought to be the largest single number of people sentenced to death at one time in the country, which is dominated by the oil-exporting emirate of Abu Dhabi and its flashy but deeply indebted neighbor Dubai. The newspaper reported three Pakistanis who survived the attack said that 50 people had assaulted them with knives.
■ITALY
Fraudsters sink to a new low
Fraudsters have sunk to a new low with a scam that threatened to break the hearts of thousands of children. Tax police in Latina, south of Rome, have seized 20,000 fake soccer stickers and are investigating eight people, among them a distributor and newsagents, suspected of preying on the passion for filling folders with soccer players’ faces and swapping doubles in the playground. The Italian firm Panini, which makes the original versions of the Italian Serie A stickers, said it had not seen such fine fakery in 50 years. The cards sell at EU$0.60 (US$0.80) for an envelope of six, and albums to stick them in for 2 euros. The newsagents, who allegedly purchased the cards at lower prices than the Panini cards, could face eight years in prison and fines.
■FRANCE
Sarkozy Sr writes memoir
President Nicolas Sarkozy’s father, a self-confessed bon vivant and womanizer, said he was setting the record on his life straight in an autobiography written above all for his children, and meant to counter claims he was a bad father. Pal Sarkozy wrote Tant de Vie (“So Much Life”) after his son advised him against filing lawsuits against his disparagers and instead to “answer later ... about all these unjust accusations,” the 81-year-old said in an interview on Sunday. So the book is above all a family affair, he said.
■GERMANY
Boy finds WWII bomb
A six-year-old boy found an unexploded World War II incendiary bomb while on a walk in a Berlin woods with his grandfather, police said. The boy spotted the roughly 60cm cylinder with a red head casing in a wooded area of Berlin’s Kopenick neighborhood, which his 62-year-old grandfather recognized as being a WWII-era bomb. After being contacted by the grandfather, police bomb specialists arrived, confirmed it to be a WWII incendiary bomb, and removed it. Berlin police plan to award the boy with a stuffed animal for his find, a spokesman said.
■MEXICO
Shootout kills five
Five people were killed in a shootout with soldiers near Monterrey, officials said, shortly after thousands held a protest march in the city against drug-related violence in their region. Nuevo Leon state security chief Luis Carlos Trevino said troops in Monterrey on Sunday were tipped off to the presence of gunmen in a hotel in nearby Santa Catarina. When they got there the troops were met with a hail of gunfire, Trevino said. The shootout occurred shortly after a peaceful demonstration attended by about 8,000 people in downtown Monterrey to protest against the violence in the city.
■UNITED STATES
Man held for bomb hoax
A Carnival cruise ship was held off the Florida coast for several hours on Sunday while authorities searched the vessel and arrested a drunk passenger on bomb hoax charges, the Coast Guard said. No explosives or hazardous materials were found and the ship, the Carnival Sensation, was allowed to dock at Port Canaveral on Sunday morning, Coast Guard petty Officer 1st Class Christopher Evanson said. The ship was carrying 3,470 passengers and crew and was headed back to Florida after a three-day cruise to the Bahamas when a passenger reported hearing another passenger make a bomb threat, the Coast Guard said. The man was quoted as saying: “We are jihad. Come to the top deck and watch the bomb. The bomb is going to blow.” Evanson said the man was “highly intoxicated.”
■UNITED STATES
Ground zero search to start
New York City officials are planning to search through material excavated from around the World Trade Center site for any remains of Sept. 11 victims. The three-month endeavor will start on Friday at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. The material being searched was taken from the area around ground zero in the last two years. The search is expected to cost US$1.4 million.
■ISRAEL
Country’s image a concern
A Passover eve poll says Israelis are increasingly concerned about their country’s international standing amid its most serious crisis with the US in decades. A poll published in the Maariv newspaper showed that only 14 percent of citizens defined the country’s standing as good, 36.8 percent called it reasonable and more than 48 percent called it bad. The survey questioned 500 people and had a margin of error of 4.4 percentage points.
■ITALY
Low voter turnout
Polls reopened yesterday for the second and final day of regional elections with the specter of a sharp drop in turnout haunting embattled Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The Interior Ministry said after the close of voting on Sunday that turnout reached 47.7 percent, nearly nine points off the figure at the same point in the 2005 regional polls. Turnout was down 12.5 percent in Rome’s Lazio region.
■IRELAND
Adams key to IRA: book
A new book on the Northern Ireland conflict published yesterday identifies Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams as a key Irish Republican Army (IRA) figure who directed some of the IRA’s most notorious killings and bombings. Sinn Fein has rejected the allegations in Voices From the Grave, a book based on interviews provided by Northern Ireland militants to Boston College researchers on condition that they not be published until the interviewees were dead.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS