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OSAKA: Chinese President Hu Jintao concluded a five-day historic
state visit to Japan, known as a “warm-spring” tour, and left
Osaka for home Saturday. During the visit, President Hu met with
Japan’s Emperor Akihito and held talks with Prime Minister Yasuo
Fukuda on China-Japan relations and other issues of common concern.
After their talks, Hu and Fukuda signed a joint statement on
all-round promotion of strategic and mutually beneficial relations
between China and Japan. The two sides agreed that the Sino-Japanese
relationship is one of the most important bilateral ties for both
countries, and China and Japan have great influence and shoulder
solemn responsibilities for peace, stability and development in the
Asia-Pacific region and the world at large.
-- Xinhua
CANBERRA: Australian police said on Saturday
they had smashed a drug syndicate operating in Sydney and Lake
Macquarie, seizing a $1.88-million haul of “Ecstasy,” ice,
cocaine, heroin, and cannabis. Six people have been charged after
police Friday night swooped on their homes in Balmain, western
Sydney, and Belmont, south of Newcastle. Officers found additional
$45,000 cash on the property.
-- Xinhua
TOKYO: A dead swan tested positive for the
virulent H5N1 strain of bird flu in northern Japan, local
authorities said Saturday, the third confirmed case in the past
month in the country. The H5N1 type of avian influenza was detected
in a swan found dead on May 5 near Lake Saroma, northeastern
Hokkaido, a Hokkaido prefectural government official said. The
Hokkaido government was inspecting chicken farms within a
30-kilometer (19-mile) radius of where the bird was found, the
official said.
-- AFP
GAZA CITY: Egypt began allowing hundreds of
Palestinians to cross from the besieged Gaza Strip on Saturday for
advanced medical treatment, a senior Palestinian medical official
said. “We began to transport patients requiring treatment abroad
into Egypt via the Rafah crossing after our Egyptian brothers opened
the crossing,” said the director of Gaza emergency services, Dr.
Muawiya Hassanein. The patients include 200 people wounded in
Israeli military operations and 70 children under the age of 16, he
said.
-- AFP
BELGRADE: Serbia’s general elections on Sunday
give two parties that are poles apart—the Socialists of late
president Slobodan Milosevic and the Liberals whose leader
negotiated his arrest—a likely key role in forming the next
government. While the bulk of the votes will be split between
pro-European forces of President Boris Tadic and the pro-Russian
Radical Party, surveys show neither will be able to assemble a
government without the support of at least one smaller party.
-- AFP
BEIJING: China announced Saturday that three
Chinese construction workers kidnapped in Nigeria’s southern Cross
River state have been released safely. The workers, seized by
unidentified people on Tuesday in Calabar, the capital city of
Nigeria’s southern Cross River State, were released on Friday
thanks to the efforts exerted by China with relevant parties to
rescue them, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said.
-- Xinhua
LOS ANGELES: Alcohol dependence has increased
substantially among American women, particularly white and Hispanic
women born since 1945, a new study shows. Alcohol use and dependence
appear to have remained stable for men, while young Americans report
having more lifetime alcohol problems than older Americans, despite
having had less time to develop issues with drinking, according to
the study published in the May issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and
Experimental Research.
-- Xinhua
HARARE: Zimbabwe’s opposition leader Morgan
Tsvangirai was to announce Saturday whether he would contest a
run-off election in his violence-wracked country amid suggestions he
has lost momentum against veteran Robert Mugabe. The opposition
Movement for Democratic Change won control of parliament in March 29
polls and Tsvangirai beat Mugabe in first-round presidential
elections, but the aftermath has been marked by violence.
-- AFP
HONG KONG: A strong earthquake measuring 6.7 on
the Richter scale jolted Mariana Islands at 5:57 a.m. local time
(2157 GMT) Saturday, the Hong Kong Observatory said in a bulletin.
The epicenter was initially determined to be south of Mariana
Islands, 12.2 north longitude, 143.3 east latitude, about 220
kilometers southwest of Guam Pacific Islands.
-- Xinhua
BAGHDAD: Up to 13 people were killed and more
than 70 others injured when US and Iraqi security forces fought
Shiite militants overnight in Baghdad’s militia stronghold of Sadr
City, a medical source said on Saturday. “We have received 13
bodies of men and treated more than 70 people, including women and
children,” the source from the Sadr Hospital told Xinhua on
condition of anonymity.
-- Xinhua
MOSCOW: NATO planes regularly undertake
“dangerous” practice attacks against Russian bombers patrolling
the Arctic Ocean, the head of the Russian air force was quoted as
saying Saturday. “Regularly as our flights are fulfilling combat
patrols, we are tracked by planes from the patrol forces of both
NATO and other countries,” General Alexander Zelin was quoted as
saying by Interfax news agency. He said Russia would continue to
send strategic bombers on long-range flights well beyond its
borders, a Cold War practice reinstated by then Russian president
Vladimir Putin in August 2007. The flights, which Moscow has said do
not carry live nuclear weapons, will continue over the Arctic,
Pacific and Atlantic oceans as well as over the Mediterranean and
the Black Sea, Zelin was quoted as saying.
-- AFP
SEOUL: A US envoy on Saturday returned from
North Korea, bringing back documents about the communist state’s
nuclear activities in what Washington described as an important
first step for verification. Sung Kim, director of the State
Department’s Korea office who led a delegation to the North Korean
capital Pyongyang on Thursday, returned to the South by land through
a joint security area known as Panmunjom, an Agence France-Presse
photographer on the scene said. He and three others were carrying a
total of seven cardboard boxes which contained some 18,000 pages of
documents related to North Korea’s plutonium program.
-- AFP
BEIRUT: The death toll in Beirut riots rose to
18 as relative calm prevails across Lebanon on Saturday. Street
gunbattles between government supporters and opponents, which began
on Wednesday, killed at least 18 people and wounded over 50 others,
according to security sources. Lebanese army deployed in most areas
in Beirut following Shiite militant group Hezbollah took control of
key parts in the capital on Friday, local As Safir daily quoted the
sources as saying.
-- Xinhua
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