Daily News Channel
One week after its stormy birth, the infant nation of Malaysia was hoping for peace but preparing for war. Two Malayan infantry battalions packed their kit bags and prepared to embark for the steaming jungles of Sarawak and Sabah ; in Sarawak, orders were issued to raise a native infantry battalion.
The man who, dressed as Santa Claus, killed nine people at a Christmas Eve party planned to flee to Canada the next day, but California police believe he decided to kill himself instead because of severe burn injuries. During a news conference on Friday, Covina Police Chief Kim Raney said Bruce Jeffrey Pardo had purchased a ticket for an early Christmas Day flight from Los Angeles to Canada
As expected, Japan’s parliament elected Yukio Hatoyama as the country’s new prime minister on Wednesday. The vote by the lower house of the parliament was virtually assured.
Hundreds of gay men have been tortured and killed in Iraq in recent months, some by the nation’s security forces, Human Rights Watch said Monday.
Rescue planes were dispatched on Monday to look for an aircraft with 15 people on board that disappeared shortly after takeoff in eastern Indonesia.
A human rights group urged Burundi to reverse a law that makes homosexuality illegal, saying it risks worsening the harsh treatment of gays in the eastern Africa nation. The new law makes “sexual relations with persons of the same sex” illegal and punishable by up to two years in prison, Human Rights Watch said in a recently released report. It was enacted just as the gay, lesbian and transgender community had started to mobilize and call for equal treatment, according to the organization.
Speculation in South Korean media that Kim Jong-Il may have cancer is the latest development in a busy month for North Korea watchers. The U.S. Navy tailed a North Korean ship that was believed to have been carrying weapons bound for Myanmar
A long-hidden message has been discovered inside Abraham Lincoln’s pocket watch, the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History announced Tuesday. Watchmaker Jonathan Dillon was repairing Lincoln’s watch in April 1861 when he heard about the attack on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and wrote a short message on the metal inside the watch, the Smithsonian said. There it remained, unseen for almost 150 years, it said