South Korean scientist sorry for scandal
Seoul, South Korea A disgraced South Korean researcher asked his nation’s pardon today for fraudulent claims of stem cell breakthroughs, but he said junior scientists deceived him and should share blame for the scandal.
“I ask for your forgiveness,” Hwang Woo-suk told a nationally televised press conference from Seoul in his first public appearance in nearly three weeks. “I feel so miserable that it’s difficult even to say sorry.”
Seoul National University, where Hwang is a professor, on Tuesday issued a final report that he fabricated landmark published claims in 2004 and 2005 to have created the world’s first human embryonic stem cells from cloned embryos.
“The use of fake data … is what I have to take full responsibility for as first author. I acknowledge all of that and apologize once again,” Hwang said.
However, Hwang repeated his earlier claims that he was deceived about the data by two junior scientists at a partner research hospital. He said that he believed that his papers were legitimate when they were published.
Conservatives lead in poll in Canada
Toronto Strong polling gains by Conservatives put Prime Minister Paul Martin’s Liberal Party on the defense Wednesday as campaigning for a new Canadian government grew increasingly ugly in its final days.
Both parties unleashed a series of negative TV ads in the run-up to the Jan. 23 vote. The Liberals have ruled since the last Conservative government under Brian Mulroney in 1993.
Martin threw another jab by implying his opponent, Conservative Leader Stephen Harper, might attempt to overturn a woman’s right to an abortion.
Martin’s minority government was toppled in a no-confidence vote by Parliament in November, with his opponents claiming the Liberals had lost the moral authority to govern. They had seized on a scandal in which some senior Liberal Party members were caught in a kickbacks scheme involving the misuse of millions of dollars in federal funding.
In a new poll released Wednesday, Harper was riding a wave of support with a 10-point lead over the Liberals, 38 percent to 28 percent. Three other parties were far behind.
Indonesians arrested in teachers’ deaths
Jakarta, Indonesia Police arrested 12 suspects in the killings of two American schoolteachers in a 2002 ambush, including a man indicted by a U.S. grand jury in the slayings, officials said Wednesday.
The suspects, all described as separatists from Indonesia’s Papua province, were arrested late Wednesday night Timika district, said local police chief Lt. Col. Dedi Junaidi.
The ambush on Aug. 31, 2002, took place on a road leading to a giant Timika gold mine owned by Freeport McMoRan Copper and Gold Mine Inc. The two Americans – Rickey Lynn Spier, 44, of Littleton, Colo., and 71-year-old Leon Edwin Burgon of Sunriver, Ore. – were schoolteachers at the mine. One Indonesian teacher was also killed in the ambush.
U.S., Australia funding greenhouse gas plan
Sydney, Australia The United States and Australia today pledged a combined $127 million to an Asia Pacific plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by promoting renewable energy sources and cleaner ways to use coal.
But environmentalists said the pledges were far too little and complained that forum focused on untried technologies to prop up the fossil fuel industry.
The six nations at the inaugural Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate meeting in Sydney acknowledged that burning fossil fuels – a major contributor to greenhouse gases – will remain “critical” to their economies.
The energy measures favored by the U.S. and Australia included greater use of such renewable sources as wind and solar power, and treating coal so it gives off fewer greenhouse gases when burned or burying the gases underground.