AUSTRALIAN AUTHOR BRYCE COURTENAY DIES
SYDNEY: One of Australia’s best-selling and most popular authors, Bryce Courtenay, who shot to prominence with his first book The Power Of One, has died at the age of 79, his family said on Friday. The South African-born Courtenay, who moved to Australia in the 1950s and sold more than 20 million books, had been suffering from stomach cancer and died at his Canberra home on Thursday. Courtenay’s biggest success was The Power of One, about a young English boy raised during the apartheid era in South Africa. It was made into a successful film starring Stephen Dorff, John Gielgud and Morgan Freeman, with James Bond star Daniel Craig appearing in his first major screen role.

12-YEAR-OLD MARRIED IN MALAYSIA
KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysian activists on Friday slammed the wedding of a 12-year-old to her 19-year-old boyfriend, renewing their calls for the government to outlaw child marriages. Nur Fazira Saad and Fahmi Alias married last week in northern Kedah state after the girl’s father agreed to the union and an Islamic court granted permission, The Star daily reported. “It is better for them to get married rather than doing something improper,” Saad Mustafa, the girl’s father, was quoted as saying. But Ratna Osman, executive director of activist group Sisters in Islam, described the young couple’s marriage as “shocking”. Child marriages are not uncommon in the conservative Southeast Asian country, where 60 percent of the population of 29 million people are Muslim. Two years ago, the marriage of a 14-year-old Muslim girl to a 23-year-old schoolteacher triggered similar calls for reform. Girls below the age of 16 must obtain the permission of Islamic courts, which regulate civil matters for Muslims. But activists said that such permission is too readily granted.

JAPANESE POLICE RESCUE BANK HOSTAGES
TOKYO: Japanese police rescued four hostages from a bank on Friday and arrested the knife-wielding man who had held them captive for more than 12 hours while demanding the prime minister resign, officials said. In a televised news conference, a police spokesman said the hostage-taker, identified as Koji Nagakubo, was arrested on suspicion of taking a total of five people captive, including one person whom he had released earlier. Nagakubo began the siege on Thursday at the Zoshi branch of the Toyokawa Shinkin Bank in the otherwise quiet residential area of Toyokawa city in central Aichi prefecture. Wielding a survival knife, he took four employees and a female customer captive and demanded the cabinet of Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda step down, local media said. Noda last week called an election for December 16, which he is expected to lose. All the hostages were safe and in protective custody following the pre-dawn police raid, but a female bank employee was slightly injured.

BRITISH MPS UNDER FIRE OVER TRIPS ABROAD
LONDON: British lawmakers were under fire on Friday for racking up £1.5 million ($2.4 million, 1.9 million euros) worth of visits to foreign countries in the last two years paid for by governments, firms and pressure groups. Some 242 members of parliament have declared “fact-finding missions” and visits worth £6,500 on average, The Independent newspaper said.