TOKYO: Japan scrambled fighter jets yesterday to head off a Chinese government plane flying towards disputed islands in the East China Sea, the defence ministry said. It said the Y-12 propeller plane did not enter airspace around the Tokyo-controlled islands known as the Senkakus, which Beijing claims as the Diaoyus. The aircraft headed back towards China after Japan’s military planes became airborne, defence officials said, declining to give further details. The incident came as three Chinese government ships sailed into territorial waters around the islands, Japan’s coastguard said. The marine surveillance ships entered the 12-nautical-mile territorial zone off Uotsuri island shortly after 7am (2200 GMT Wednesday), the coastguard said, adding they left the zone after just over two hours.
Appeal against rape victim’s flogging
MALE: The Maldivian government yesterday said it would seek to overturn a court decision to publicly flog a 15-year-old rape victim convicted of having premarital sex. The girl was charged after police investigating a complaint that she was raped by her step-father found that she had been having consensual sex with a man. A spokesman for President Mohamed Waheed said he was shocked by the sentence by a juvenile court, meaning the teenager would receive 100 lashes when she reaches 18. “The president has asked the attorney general to appeal against the decision,” the spokesman said. “The girl will also be provided with necessary legal counsel and we hope the case will be concluded in about a month.”
Boss orders staff to do kid’s homework
SHANGHAI: A Chinese boss ordered nine employees to do his 12-year-old daughter’s homework, a report said, as office tyranny meshed with a parent’s desire to see his child score well in the competitive school system. “The leader said, ‘Do some homework, it will be like practising’,” one of the suffering subordinates told the Qianjiang Evening News. The boss in the eastern city of Jinhua, regularly asked workers to do maths problems and build small models, typically requiring two people to work overtime to finish the assignments. But over the Chinese New Year holiday, an assignment to show changes in one’s home town required nine people to paint pictures, take photos, produce a video and write an essay. One of them, Wang, 35, said he put himself in the mind of the young girl to write the essay. “I forced myself into an imaginary state,” he said.
Agencies
