40 2GM Saturday January 1 2022 | the times
Wo r l d
Clumsy cats cause 100
house fires in two years
South Korea Cats have caused
more than 100 house fires over
the past two years by jumping on
the touch-sensitive buttons of
electric stoves, which then
overheat. The Seoul fire
department said that four people
had been injured in a total of 107
incidents between January 2019
and November 2021. Over half
the fires started when the owners
were out of the house.Rescue boat drops off
440 migrants in Italy
Italy A rescue ship carrying 440
migrants has been allowed to
disembark in Sicily, ending a year
in which more than 67,000
refugees arrived on Italian shores.
The latest were being carried by
Sea-Watch 3, which is run by a
German non-governmental
organisation. The total for last
year was far below the record set
in 2016 of more than 181,000
arriving by sea in Italy. (AFP)Champagne sales fall
by a fifth in flat year
Brussels The European Union has
recorded its first drop in sparkling
wine exports in a decade after
Covid-19 hit the global wine trade
last year, the latest year of data.
Champagne was hit hardest, with
sales down 20 per cent. This
contributed to a 6 per cent overall
drop in exports in 2020 compared
with the year before, Eurostat
data showed. Prosecco and cava
continued to sell well. (Reuters)Biden struggles to save
‘Build Back Better’ bill
United States President Biden and
Joe Manchin, the Democratic
senator for West Virginia, held
further talks yesterday, a day after
Manchin publicly rejected Biden’s
“Build Back Better” bill again. His
rejection of the social spending
plans before Christmas led
Goldman Sachs to lower growth
forecasts and imperilled hundreds
of billions of dollars earmarked
for climate policies. (Reuters)Germany closes half its
nuclear power plants
Germany Three of the country’s
six nuclear plants were shut down
yesterday, a year before the use of
atomic power is due to end.
Germany has insisted that closing
the plants and phasing out coal
by 2030 will not affect its energy
security or its goal of making the
economy climate neutral by 2045.
The decision to close the nuclear
plants was taken after Japan’s
Fukushima disaster in 2011. (AP)Deadly toll of journalists
killed for their work
Belgium Forty-five journalists
were killed for doing their job last
year, nine of them in
Afghanistan, the International
Federation of Journalists (IFJ),
based in Brussels, said. Mexico
was the second most deadly
country, with eight deaths. In
total there were 20 countries in
which members of the media
were killed. The IFJ said that
reporters were most often
targeted for exposing corruption,
crime and abuse of power in their
communities. The organisation
said that their deaths “remind us
of the terrible sacrifice journalists
across the world continue to pay
for serving the public interest and
we remain in debt to them”. (AP)Singles looking for love in China might
once have wandered around parks to
glimpse posters hung by parents with
the details of their unmarried children.
Now the authorities in Luanzhou, a
city of 570,000 in the northern
industrial province of Hebei, are play-
ing Cupid, building a database for
young people looking to find that spe-
cial someone.
Those who want to take part in the
Youth Happiness Project are asked to
fill out a form with personal details, in-
cluding age, financial situation and
family background, to help the author-
ities find them a suitor. “Blind date cor-
ners” will be created in several of the
city’s parks and botanical gardens.
China has been grappling with nose-
diving fertility and marriage rates; in
2020 there were 8 million weddings,
down from 13.5 million in 2013. The
most recent census revealed that it had
Spin chief who
turned against
Putin is facing
attacks in exile
or individuals to submit detailed finan-
cial reports and label published ma-
terial as being produced by a “foreign
agent”, a term that hints at spying or
sabotage on behalf of a foreign power.
Gelman told the Meduza website
based in Latvia that Russia’s siloviki —
security and military figures around
Putin — had defeated Alexei Navalny,
the opposition leader, by putting him in
jail, persecuting his supporters and
closing his organisation.
“But they are not going to resign,” he
said. “They won’t come to Putin and
say: ‘The job’s done, the opposition is
destroyed, we’re resigning and going
over to peaceful work.’
“The people who were running this
repressive political campaign have to
demonstrate that they are still needed.
And they are going to look for new
enemies. If the enemies in politics and
the media have run out, new ones are
needed... these will be from the worlds
of science, art and education.”
Gelman said that he had not been in
Russia for a long period but began re-
turning a year and a half ago, when he
donated 200 works of art to the State
Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the fore-
most repository of Russian fine art, and
organised two exhibitions.
“Apparently, someone didn’t like this
and they have sent me the signal: ‘Go
back to Montenegro,’ ” Gelman said.
Shenderovich, who is active on social
media, said the designation was part of
a campaign to force him out of Russia.
He said: “The threat of a criminal
prosecution from a former criminal
and the brand of ‘foreign agent’ re-
ceived from people who long ago sold
their motherland is a completely nor-
mal thing in the Orwellian world in
which we have been living.”
Russia must know the heavy costs if it
invades Ukraine, leading article, page 27Supersize me This polar bear has been named Fat Albert after he was snapped by
photographer Ed Boudreau. Albert is bigger than other bears in his part of AlaskaRussia
Tom Parfitt Moscow
China
Louise Watt
Swipe right to find love,
China tells young singles
nearly 35 million more single men than
women, about half of them within the
“marriageable age” range.
In May the government announced
that it would allow all couples to
have three children, up from two, and in
September it scrapped fines for having
more. Many couples prefer sons, which
led to high rates of femicide under the
previous one-child policy.
The Youth Happiness Project was re-
vealed this week in response to a ques-
tion on an online message board for
leaders run by the official Communist
Party paper People’s Daily.
The citizen who posted the message
expressed hope that the government
could organise activities to help young
singles who are struggling to meet part-
ners because they are too busy with
work, according to state media. The
authorities replied that party commit-
tees had been entrusted to forward the
form to residents as part of Luanzhou’s
drive to promote marriage among
young people.The Taliban have ordered a series of
mannequin beheadings because they
supposedly offend Islam.
The guidance was given by the Min-
istry for the Propagation of Virtue and
the Prevention of Vice in the western
province of Herat.
Aziz Rahman, leader of the ministry’s
Herat department, said that manne-
quins were statues, the worship of
which is prohibited under Islamic law.
“I ordered that they [the manne-
quins] should have their heads re-
moved,” he said.
Malls and shopkeepers face severe
punishments if they violate the ruling,
though Rahman said he had tried to be
lenient by reducing on-the-spot sen-
tences on appeal.
Traders, who are already struggling
under a floundering economy, criti-
cised the ruling. “We use the manne-
quins to display clothes,” Aziz AhmadOff with her head! Taliban
decapitate mannequins
Haidar, a garment seller, said. Mehran
Azizi, of Herat, added that mannequins
were used to display clothes every-
where, “including in Islamic countries”.
The virtue and vice ministry is the
state agency in charge of implementing
the Taliban’s interpretation of Islamic
law. It was reinstated soon after the
Islamists returned to power in Kabul,
replacing the Ministry for Women’s
Affairs. It has already announced that it
will continue to chop off thieves’ limbs
and is likely to resume other severe
punishments.
The group has also resumed public
hangings and displayed several head-
less corpses of hastily convicted
kidnappers in market squares.
In the 1990s the Ministry for the
Propagation of Virtue and the Preven-
tion of Vice regularly beat men who had
“short” beards and people of both sexes
who failed to wear “sufficiently modest
clothing”. There have been several
reports that it is slowly enforcing a simi-
lar code again.Afghanistan
Anchal VohraPresident Putin’s former spin doctor
has accused the Kremlin of seeking
“enemies” in the arts because it has
extinguished political opposition.
Marat Gelman, an art collector who
once managed public relations for
Putin, was one of several public figures
to be designated “foreign agents”.
The group included Nadezhda Tolo-
konnikova, 32, the activist from the
feminist group Pussy Riot, and Viktor
Shenderovich, 63, a satirist who ridi-
culed Putin and others in an equivalent
of Spitting Image from 1994 to 2002.
Gelman, 61, who has lived in Monte-
negro since 2014 but visits Russia, has
criticised the Kremlin recently. Last
November he said that arts festivals he
held in the Balkan country were “an
attempt to create a platform outside
Putin’s jurisdiction” at a time when émi-
grés constituted “a significant part of
Russian culture”.
He also compared Putin’s handling of
dissent to that of Stalin.
Gelman said last night that he found
it strange to be labelled a “foreign
agent” because he was not a journalist
and simply had a job abroad.
The designation, applied by the jus-
tice ministry on Thursday, has been
used to smear Kremlin critics among
media outlets and reporters who alle-
gedly receive foreign funding and are
involved in politics. It requires groups
Marat Gelman says
the arts are under
siege in RussiaED BOUDREAU/ CATERS NEWS