Friday, February 28, 2014
KUALA LUMPUR - Malaysia said Friday it
will expand water rationing in and around its capital, in a move
affecting millions as drought continues to scorch a tropical country
usually synonymous with torrential rain.
The national water commission said in a statement over 300,000
households in Kuala Lumpur and nearby Selangor, Malaysia's most populous
state, will experience cuts for the whole of March, after a two-month
dry spell depleted reservoirs.
Some 60,000 households in Selangor - a central state which is the
nation's economic hub - have already been hit by rationing since
Tuesday.
According to the commission, another 50,000 premises in the southern
state of Johor have also undergone rationing last week as much of
Malaysia suffers under bone-dry conditions and high temperatures.
"The hot weather and lack of rain in catchment areas have caused all
reservoirs in Selangor to recede," said the commission's chairman Ismail
Kasim.
Kuala Lumpur shares its water supply with Selangor, where the reserve level of dams have dipped below 50 per cent.
- A spokeswoman from the state's private water company also told AFP about 2.2 million people would be affected.
- Malaysia tends to experience dry weather early in the year, but the
current spell has been unusually long, sparking bushfires and protests
from communities whose taps have run dry.
- The Malaysian Meteorological Department said in a statement to AFP
Wednesday that 11 out of 40 weather stations have in the past two months
experienced their longest-ever recorded dry spells and warned that the
dry patch could last another month.
The state of Negeri Sembilan, adjacent to Selangor, last week
declared a water crisis, mobilising to supply treated water to thousands
of households.
The Malaysian economy remains reliant on agriculture - it is the
world's second-largest producer of palm oil and a major exporter of
rubber - although no alarm has been raised yet on the potential impact
of the drought on upcoming harvests.
The hot spell has also contributed to more cases of dengue fever, as
it speeds up the life cycle of the aedes mosquito that carries the virus
and enhances replication of the pathogen, experts say.
Deaths from the flu-like illness have risen to 29 this year, nearly
triple the same period in the last year, according to reports citing the
Health Ministry.
Source: AFP
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Thursday, February 27, 2014
MANILA, Philippines - Millions of people were left without
electricity in the southern Philippines on Thursday after a massive
power breakdown, officials said, as repair crews worked to determine the
cause of the outage.
The power cuts began before
dawn and affected heavily populated areas in Mindanao, home to a quarter
of the country’s nearly 100 million population.
“Reports indicate that the
Mindanao grid experienced a disturbance at 3.53 am... (We are) still
determining the cause and extent of the disturbance,” the National Grid
Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) said in a statement.
Mindanao, the nation’s main
southern island which relies mostly on hydroelectricity, has been
grappling with chronic power shortages for years.
- The NGCP said at least 12 of Mindanao’s key
cities and provinces - including major trading hubs - were affected,
although limited power was restored in some parts a few hours later.
- Philippine Energy Secretary
Jericho Petilla said repair crews were working to trace the cause of the
interruption, stressing that he was confident power would return to all
areas within the day.
- “So far,
there are no reports of damaged power plants,” Petilla told DZBB radio
in Manila. “They are ready to come back online to the grid, we just have
to turn them (on) one by one.”
- “We are trying to figure out
where” the source of the interruption was, he said, adding the outage
was likely caused by a tripped transmission line.
- An electricity shortage last
year forced the NGCP to ration off supply in Mindanao, resulting in up
to 12 hour daily blackouts which damaged the local economy as factories
slowed production.
The power cuts on Thursday hit islanders just as they were getting ready for work.
“I had to keep using my
lighter because the shops were still closed and we didn’t have candles,”
said market vendor and mother-of-two Mary Villasenor from the southern
Davao City.
“The kids had to go to school with wrinkled clothes because we couldn’t plug in the flat iron,” she said.
Source: Agencies
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Wednesday, February 26, 2014
The Catholic Church has once again reiterated that its weekly
newspaper, Herald, is a "controlled" publication, meant only for
distribution in Catholic churches, dismissing Putrajaya's allegation
that it is widely circulated.
Herald editor Reverend Father Lawrence Andrew(photo) brushed aside Minister in
the Prime Minister's Department Datuk Seri Idris Jala's claims that the
newspaper's "potentially wide circulation" could make it a tool of
Christian propagation.
"This is not true at all. Our circulation is controlled. It is sent
only to Catholic churches for distribution among our members.
"If anyone wants to challenge this, they can and should provide evidence if they claim otherwise," he added.
In his latest column in the Star, Idris, referring to the court case
involving the Herald, said the Home Minister had exercised his
discretion to prohibit the use of the word "Allah" on grounds of public
order and security although Putrajaya's 10-point solution allows the
Malay-language Bible containing the word.
The Court of Appeal, he added, had ruled that the use of the word
"Allah" in the Alkitab (pic, left), the Malay-language Bible, is
different from its use in the Herald, which has a wider distribution and
readership.
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Monday, February 24, 2014
Thailand's political crisis has become increasingly violent since mass protests began in November.
On Sunday, an apparent grenade blast near an anti-government protest site killed a woman and a four-year-old boy.
Doctors said on Monday that the little boy's sister died later of brain injuries.
Twenty-two people were hurt in Sunday's blast, including a nine-year-old boy who is in intensive care.
- Sunday's attack came hours after gunmen opened fire on an
anti-government rally in eastern Thailand, killing a five-year-old girl.
- Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra has condemned the attacks, describing them as "terrorist acts for political gain".
- UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon has also spoken out, calling for violence "from any quarter" to end immediately.
There has been continued speculation that the military might step in
after three months of protests in Bangkok, the BBC's Jonathan Head in
Bangkok reports.
However, on Monday, army chief Prayuth Chan-ocha said that
the military would not intervene with force. Instead, it would deploy
troops to provide protection to people.
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Thursday, February 20, 2014
More than 850,000 people in Somalia are in desperate need of food and
are living "in crisis and emergency conditions", the director of UN
humanitarian operations has said.
John Ging, who just returned from a three-day visit to Somalia, said
on Wednesday that another two million Somalis out of a total population
of 10 million were considered to be "food insecure".
- "These figures are very, very large," he told a news conference at
the UN headquarters in New York. "They tell us a simple message which is
that the situation in Somalia for Somalis on the humanitarian side is
very grave. It's also very fragile."
- Ging said the UN World Food Programme's Food Security and Nutrition
Analysis Unit reported this month that 857,000 Somalis were in acute
crisis conditions and required urgent humanitarian assistance.
- This is "a modest improvement" from the previous six months when 870,000 Somalis desperately needed food, he said.
- In recent years Somalia has made some strides in security and
governance, particularly since August 2011, when al-Shabab fighters were
forced out of the capital, Mogadishu.
- But the rebels have not been defeated and the government controls
only small parts of the country and is struggling to keep a grip on
security and battle corruption.
The food security unit said a majority of needy people have been
displaced from their homes, largely as a result of fighting, insecurity
and lack of food.
The UN appealed for $933m for the humanitarian crisis in Somalia this year, but Ging said so far it had received only $36m.
In 2011, the UN appeal for Somalia was 86 percent funded, but in 2013 it was just 50 percent funded, he said.
Source: AP. Al Jazeera
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Wednesday, February 19, 2014
MANILA - Philippine government agents have
raided an alleged Internet child porn operation based in a school and
arrested its president and eight other people.
Cybercrime investigation head
Ronald Aguto says the suspects used a room at the Mountaintop Christian
Academy in Metropolitan Manila to post images and video on the Internet
for foreign consumption.
Aguto said on Tuesday more than 40 computers were seized as evidence.
- Aguto said the school had
2,000 elementary and high school students. He says authorities were still investigating, but it didn’t appear that children at the school were being abused.
- Its licence was revoked in
2006 for unknown reasons but it had remained open.
Source: Agency
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Wednesday, February 19, 2014
KIEV, Ukraine: Ukraine’s festering political
crisis has turned deadly, with at least nine people reported killed and
scores injured in violent clashes between anti-government demonstrators
and police in Kiev.
The government shut down
subway stations in the centre of the capital and threatened to restore
order, but an evening deadline passed Tuesday with no immediate police
action.
Source: Agency
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Tuesday, February 18, 2014
North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, has been warned that he could face
prosecution for crimes against humanity after a United Nations inquiry
accused him of some of the worst human rights abuses since the Second World
War.
In some of the harshest criticism ever unleashed by the international
community against the Pyongyang regime, a UN panel branded it “a shock to
the conscience of humanity”.
Michael Kirby, a retired Australian judge who has spent nearly a year taking
testimony from victims of the regime, said much of it reminded him of
atrocities perpetrated by Nazi Germany and Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
Yesterday his team published a 374-page report detailing allegations of
murder, torture, rape, abductions, enslavement, and starvation, describing
North Korea as a dictatorship “that does not have any parallel in the
contemporary world”.
In a bid to put pressure on Kim Jong-un, 31, Mr Kirby has taken the unusual
step of writing to the North Korean leader to warn him that both he and
hundreds of his henchmen could one day face prosecution.
Source:
The Telegraph
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Tuesday, February 18, 2014
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Monday, February 17, 2014
MIDDLESBRO, Kentucky, USA - Jamie Coots, a
snake-handling Kentucky pastor who appeared on the National Geographic
television reality show “Snake Salvation,” died on Saturday after being
bitten by a snake.
Coots was handling a
rattlesnake during a Saturday night service at his Full Gospel
Tabernacle in Jesus Name Church in Middlesboro when he was bitten,
another preacher, Cody Winn said.
“Jamie went across the floor.
He had one of the rattlers in his hand, he came over and he was
standing beside me. It was plain view, it just turned its head and bit
him in the back of the hand ... within a second,” Winn said.
When an ambulance arrived at
the church at 8.30pm, they were told Coots had gone home, the
Middlesboro Police Department said in a news release. Contacted at his
house, Coots refused medical treatment.
Emergency workers left about 9.10pm. When they returned about an hour
later, Coots was dead from a venomous snake bite, police said.
In January 2013, Coots was caught
transporting three rattlesnakes and two copperheads through Knoxville,
Tennessee. Wildlife officials confiscated the snakes, and Coots pleaded
guilty to illegal wildlife possession. He was given one year of
unsupervised probation.
Coots said
then he needed the snakes for religious reasons, citing a Bible passage
in the book of Mark that reads, in part: “And these signs shall follow
them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall
speak with new tongues.
They shall take up serpents; and if they drink
any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.
They shall lay hands on the
sick, and they shall recover.”
Source: Agency
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Monday, February 17, 2014
SEOUL - A South Korean court on Monday
sentenced an opposition legislator to 12 years in prison after a rare
treason trial saw him convicted of plotting an armed revolt in support
of North Korea.
Prosecutors had demanded 20 years for Lee Seok-Ki, 52, who was tried
along with six other members of his left-wing United Progressive Party.
Lee was the first member of the National Assembly to face treason
charges since the country's transformation from a military-backed
autocracy to a fully-fledged democracy in the 1980s.
As well as his prison term, the court ordered Lee deprived of his civil rights for 10 years following his eventual release.
After parliament voted to lift his immunity from arrest, Lee was
charged last September under the 65-year-old National Security Law,
which rights groups have accused past administrations of using to stifle
debate and silence political opposition.
The charges related to meetings Lee held with his supporters in May
last year, at a time of surging military tensions following the North's
third nuclear test.
The court was played tapes of Lee telling members of his group to
prepare attacks on South Korea's communication lines and railways in
case of a full-scale conflict breaking out with the North.
"We see sufficient evidence that (the defendant) plotted a revolt and
planned collective actions to carry it out," said the court ruling.
Lee steadfastly denied all the charges, saying he was the victim of a
"witch hunt" by South Korea's spy agency aimed at deflecting public
attention from a scandal involving a number of its agents meddling in
the 2012 presidential election.
Lee has been in trouble for his political views before. In 2002 he
was sentenced to two and a half years for anti-government activities. He
received a presidential pardon later the same year.
Source: AFP, Agencies
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Sunday, February 16, 2014
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