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TAIPEI: Taiwanese went to the polls Saturday to select the
113 members of “legislative Yuan” (the island’s
“parliament”). Nearly 300 candidates are competing for the
parliamentary seats in more than 70 districts across the island.
Voters will cast two ballots, one for a specific candidate in their
district and another for the party of their choice. Taiwan’s
“legislative Yuan” has been streamlined from 225 seats to 113 in
an effort to improve efficiency. According to the rules, voters are
prohibited from taking cell phones or cameras with them in the
polling stations or they will be fined from 30,000 to 300,000 Taiwan
dollars (about 938 to 9,375 U.S. dollars).
-- Xinhua
TOKYO: A 55-year-old lone Japanese climber lost
in the mountains for 12 days survived by eating snow, salt and cold
pills, police and news reports said Saturday. Masayuki Nakamura
finally found his way to a ski resort on the Azuma mountain range,
250 kilometers (155 miles) north of Tokyo, a local police spokesman
said. He was sent to hospital, but “his life is not threatened as
he is only suffering from minor frostbite,” the spokesman said,
adding that he would be discharged shortly.
-- AFP
JAKARTA: Indonesian President Susilo Bamabang
Yudhoyono ended his Malaysian visit and already arrived home as
Indonesian former president Soeharto in critical condition, Antara
news agency reported here on Saturday. “The president got a report
that Soeharto’s health worsened,” said State Spokesman Dino
Patti Djalal. On Saturday morning, doctors said that the health of
86-year- old Soeharto was slightly improved. President Soesilo
arrived in Indonesia on Saturday morning after a three-day visit to
Malaysia.
-- Xinhua
HONG KONG: Shaken and injured passengers arrived
back in Hong Kong Saturday a day after two high-speed ferries
collided in thick fog off the gambling haven of Macau, leaving 133
people injured, officials said. About 19 people suffered serious
injuries, including head wounds and bone fractures, the Macau
government said. No one was killed in the accident. The two ferries,
one bound for Hong Kong from Macau and the other travelling in the
opposite direction crashed into each other on Friday night.
-- AFP
WUHAN: Central China’s Wuhan City has decided
to build another bridge over the Yangtze River, the world’s third
longest, said local sources. The new bridge will span the river by
linking up Nianyutao in the city’s Wuchang area and Maying Road in
Hanyang. It will share the heavy traffic flow on the
half-century-old Wuhan Yangtze River Highway-Railway Bridge. Ferry
service used to be the sole means of transport for local people to
travel across the river before October 1957 when the Wuhan
highway-railway bridge was put into operation. However, the bridge
is overburdened to carry about 100,000 motor vehicles and 300 trains
each day.
-- Xinhua
PARIS: Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf
has ruled out a United Nations probe of the assassination of former
premier Benazir Bhutto, in an interview with a French newspaper
published Saturday. Musharraf told Le Figaro that UN involvement was
out of the question, and that the investigation into Bhutto’s
murder would be handled internally with the help of British police
from Scotland Yard.
-- AFP
BANGKOK: Suspected insurgents killed a
government official during a driving-by shooting on Saturday morning
in Thailand’s violent south, local media reported. Abdultoroh
Rehniya, the chief of governmental department Samakhee Tambon
Administration Organization, was gunned down on a motorcycle in
Narathiwat Province’s Rueso district while he returns from sending
his daughter off to a Children’s Day event in the district.
-- Xinhua
BOGOTA: Hostages of Colombian guerrillas move
around jungle camps with chains around their necks that are wrapped
around a log at night when they sleep, always fearing execution at
the first sign of a rescue attempt, a former captive said.
“Soldiers and police live in chains all day long. They have one
around their neck for anything they do. The rest of the chain they
keep in a sack slung over their shoulder,” Consuelo Gonzalez, 57,
told Bogota’s Radio Caracol on Friday. “And at night, their
chains are tied and locked around a log near each and every bed
where they sleep,” she said a day after being released. Gonzalez,
a former Colombian lawmaker, and Clara Rojas, 44, a political aide
to French-Colombian hostage Ingrid Betancourt, were freed by
Colombia’s FARC rebel group on Thursday after six and five years
of captivity respectively.
-- AFP
WASHINGTON: The US presidential race gathered
steam Saturday as candidates promised fresh initiatives to bolster
the lackluster economy ahead of a new round of primaries in the
blue-collar state of Michigan. The Midwestern state, home to major
US automakers, holds its primaries on Tuesday. The focus on the
economy comes amid rising concern among voters not only in Michigan,
home to a troubled car industry and an unemployment rate of 7.4
percent, but the rest of the country amid a housing crisis and
rising gasoline prices.
-- AFP
WASHINGTON: Rival accounts and videos of an
incident between Iranian and US military boats have sowed confusion
over the gravity of the confrontation and exactly what happened in
the Gulf’s Strait of Hormuz. The January 6 incident took place
before President George W. Bush left on a Middle East tour, raising
already high tensions between Washington and Tehran as the US
government lodged a formal protest on Thursday.
-- AFP
CAMP ARIFJAN, Kuwait: US President George W.
Bush called Saturday on Syria to cut the “flow of terrorists”
into Iraq and on Iran to stop supporting militias that attack US
forces and Iraqis. Syria “needs to further reduce the flow
of terrorists” and “Iran must stop supporting militias,” he
told reporters after meeting his top political and military
commanders in Iraq at a US base in Kuwait.
-- AFP
n MOSCOW: The orbit of the International Space
Station has been successfully corrected in preparation for the
planned docking of three spacecraft next month, the Interfax news
agency reported citing the Russian space control center. “The
correction of the orbit was successful,” Interfax quoted a Russian
space control center official as saying.
-- AFP
PRAGUE: The bizarre case of a 33-year old Czech
woman who fooled authorities across Europe by taking on the
identities of 13-year-old boys and girls has gripped her homeland.
Victim or guilty party, astounding actress or mentality disturbed
woman, prison psychiatrists were trying and get some answers from
baby-faced Barbora Skrlova after she was detained on identity theft
charges following her repartriation from Norway on Wednesday.
-- AFP
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