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• TOKYO: Japan confirmed Saturday that its latest outbreak
of bird flu was caused by the H5N1 strain, which is potentially
deadly to humans. The case in the southern prefecture of Miyazaki is
in the same province as a previous outbreak of H5N1. The
agricultural ministry and local authorities are investigating if the
two cases are linked.--AFP
• SEOUL: North Korea
dismissed allegations as that it is providing Iran with nuclear
expertise, insisting that it continues to behave only as a
“responsible” nuclear-armed state. A foreign ministry spokesman
said that some Western media had spread rumors that the communist
state was cooperating with Iran in nuclear development “in a bid
to mislead public opinion.” The Daily Telegraph in London reported
on Wednesday that North Korea was helping Iran to prepare an
underground nuclear test similar to the one carried out by Pyongyang
last October.--AFP
•JAKARTA: The discovery
of “black box” flight recorders from a missing Indonesian plane
signals the end of the search and rescue mission. A US naval ocean
survey ship, the USNS Mary Sears, had found the black boxes and
large amounts of debris from the Adam Air Boeing 737-400, which
disappeared on New Year’s Day near Sulawesi Island. American and
Indonesian officials have been holding talks on retrieving the
flight recorders from the jet, which was carrying 102 people.--AFP
• JAKARTA: Indonesia is
to give individual names to each of the 9,500 islands in the country
that remain nameless. A national team has been formed to name the
islands by year-end. In total Indonesia consists of 17,540 islands,
which combine to cover 1.9 million square kilometers. The government
hopes to improve security and territorial claims through the naming
operation. --AFP
• BEIJING: Nine Chinese
oil workers are missing after an armed attack on their company in
Nigeria. Authorities said gunmen abducted the Chinese workers in the
southern Nigerian oil state of Bayelsa on Thursday. They were
identified as workers of the China National Petroleum Corp., but
Nigerian police said it was still unclear whether all nine were
abducted or whether some went into hiding. No party has so far
claimed responsibility for the attack. This is the second time this
month that Chinese working in Africa’s biggest oil-producing
country have been seized. AFP
• NEW DELHI, India:
Eleven girls were killed and 14 injured when a school in western
India collapsed, burying them under rubble. Nine bodies were
recovered late Friday from the building in a village in Gujarat
state, another two bodies during the night. The four-story building,
on the campus of a government-run residential school for tribal
children in Tichakpura village in southern Surat district, was in
need of repair, India’s NDTV news channel reported. --AFP
• VIENNA: The UN nuclear
chief called for a “timeout” in the showdown over Iran’s
nuclear ambitions. “Iran should stop enriching uranium and the
international community should take a timeout from implementing
sanctions,” Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the
International Atomic Energy Agency, said in Switzerland. Speaking at
the World Economic Forum in Davos, ElBaradei proposed a face-saving
solution in which the two steps take place simultaneously instead of
in sequence. He added that an escalation of the crisis, and possible
war, must be avoided, he said in an earlier interview in Vienna.--AFP
• BAGHDAD: The new
Democrat speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi,
made a surprise visit to Baghdad where she urged Iraqi leaders to
pursue political solutions to end spiraling sectarian violence. In
meetings with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and US officials
she advocated the Iraqis reaching political solutions rather than
relying on a surge in American troops to end sectarian violence.
Maliki assured Pelosi that Baghdad was determined “to assume
security missions currently handled by US-led forces in Iraq,” but
asked that the training and equipping of Iraqi forces with modern
weapons be speeded up. --AFP
• GAZA CITY: The
Islamist Hamas movement, which heads the Palestinian government,
suspended talks on Friday with Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party after
clashes between the two left 11 people dead in barely 24 hours.
Fatah and Hamas had on Tuesday begun a new round of negotiations on
forming a unity government acceptable to Western donors, just two
days after Abbas held talks in Syria with exiled Hamas leader Khaled
Meshaal. Tensions had flared between the rival factions after Abbas,
the head of the Palestinian Authority, had called on December 16,
2006, for early elections. --AFP
• TROMSOE, Norway: The
Arctic Ocean’s pack ice is expected to disappear entirely in the
coming decades and will bring unforeseeable changes to the region,
said experts meeting here this week said. “Climate change in the
Arctic is not coming. It is here,” said Canadian David Barber, a
researcher at the University of Manitoba. He predicts that between
2030 and 2050, the Arctic’s sea ice will have disappeared
completely during the summer months. Melting ice sheets—equivalent
to some 70,000 square kilometers a year—as well as sharp rises in
temperatures since the end of the 1990s and the failure of sea ice
to recover ground lost during the summer months all characterize
changes in the region. --AFP
• OTTAWA, Canada: The
premier here apologized and offered millions to a dual
Canadian-Syrian citizen wrongly accused of terror ties, to settle a
civil suit. Maher Arar, a 36-year-old software engineer, would
receive $8.9 million in compensation, plus legal fees, Prime
Minister Stephen Harper said. Arar was detained in New York while in
transit from Tunisia to his home in Canada in September 2002 and
deported to Syria, where he was jailed for nearly a year and
allegedly tortured. --AFP
• TORONTO: Deadbeat dads
and moms beware. Your photos may be posted on Ontario’s
controversial website for parents who skip their child support, the
officials announced. The Ontario provincial government plans to post
on line the photographs, names, ages, employers and addresses of
those who short-change their children. The names of more than 60,000
parents flagged by provincial social services are likely to be
posted. --AFP
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