Hong Kong leader survives impeachment bid

HONG KONG: Hong Kong pro-democracy lawmakers failed in an unprecedented bid on Wednesday to impeach the city's embattled Beijing-backed leader, after they accused him of breaking housing laws and urged him to quit.

The city's first impeachment motion, which accused Leung Chun-ying of lying, dereliction of duty and serious breaches of the law in a row stemming from illegal structures at his luxury home, was denied after eight hours of debate.

The 27 pro-democracy lawmakers who signed the joint motion -- which they said was a symbolic move -- voted in favour, while 37 voted against in the 70-seat legislature which is dominated by pro-Beijing members.

Wednesday's vote followed a protest on New Year's Day in which tens of thousands took to the streets to urge Leung to quit and to press for greater democracy, 15 years after the city returned to Chinese rule.

The former British colony maintains a semi-autonomous status, with its own legal and judicial system, but cannot choose its leader through the popular vote.

Leung took office in July after he was picked by a 1,200-strong election committee dominated by pro-Beijing elites, amid rising anger over what many perceive to be China's meddling in local affairs.

China has said the chief executive could be directly elected in 2017 at the earliest, with the legislature following by 2020.

Unauthorised structures are a politically sensitive issue in the space-starved city of seven million and demonstrators have used the scandal to press for universal suffrage in choosing Hong Kong's leader.

Leung secured the chief executive role after criticising his rival Henry Tang over illegal structures at Tang's home.

But he has since acknowledged and apologised for structures at his own home which were built without planning permission.

Maverick lawmaker "Long Hair" Leung Kwok-hung, wearing a T-shirt reading "We topple a tyrant", accused the new leader of lying about his own structures during campaigning when he presented the impeachment motion earlier on Wednesday.

"He has used dishonest ways to win the election," he said.

Chief Secretary Carrie Lam, second in command in Leung's administration, said the motion was unnecessary and urged lawmakers to work together on policy and livelihood issues.

But Democratic Party chairwoman Emily Lau said the motion was a symbolic gesture to show the deepening public mistrust toward Leung, claiming the leader had "cheated his way to power".

"This is the first time we have a motion in the legislature to impeach a cheating chief executive," she said.

If the motion had been passed, the city's highest court would have had to initiate an investigation. At least two-thirds of the legislature would need to endorse a guilty finding before Leung could be removed from office.

Earlier, rival protesters traded barbs outside the legislature and security personnel had to step in at one point when an angry pro-government supporter charged towards the rival group, TV footage showed.

Leung's popularity ratings have fallen since the controversy, with discontent over issues including sky-high property prices and anti-Beijing sentiment remaining high.

- AFP/xq

Read More..

People of integrity not joining politics, says Supreme Court

NEW DELHI: Painting none too rosy picture of politics in the country, the Supreme Court on Wednesday said people of character and integrity were not attracted to politics.

The apex court noted that the philosopher Plato had the same complaint about ancient Greece.

"We have men of character and integrity, but they don't join politics", said the apex court bench of Justice AK.Patnaik and Justice Gyan Sudha Misra in the course of hearing a petition assailing sub-section (4) of Section 8 of the Representation of People Act, 1951, as ultra vires of the Constitution.

The judges noted that Plato had said that "Greece's city-states were not electing good people." Plato had penned his celebrated treatise "The Republic", advocating "philosopher-kings" who would have long years of training and exceptional ability.

"Judges will be failures as rulers," said Justice Patnaik, when the petitioner-in-person S.N. Shukla, general secretary of the NGO Lok Prahari, told the court that the legislature and judiciary have failed the country, and now judges should come forward and assume greater responsibility.

"Judges can at least correct rulers," Shukla responded.

Shukla assailed the sub-section (4) of the Section 8 of the Representation of People Act, 1951 saying that while convicted persons were barred from contesting elections, the said Section allowed a sitting member of either parliament or the state assembly to continue to function as such upon conviction, if they file an appeal against the conviction and the sentence.

"There can't be two categories where upon conviction a person is barred from contesting election and other by virtue of being a sitting member continues, and can even contest future elections also," Shukla contended, adding that if, after being convicted of an offence a person cannot contest elections, then a sitting member could not continue to retain his membership of the house.

Justice Misra sought to know if a person upon conviction is stripped of his membership of an elected house and eventually gets acquitted by the appellate court, then what would happen to his right in the intervening period.

She said that a balance had to be struck between the scales of justice.

Addressing the query from the court, senior counsel Fali Nariman said that in most of the cases it is the sentence and not the conviction that is stayed. He said that so long as conviction persists, the disqualification clause would be attracted. This is the law, Nariman told the court, saying that conviction is stayed in extraordinary cases.

Making a distinction between the stay of conviction and stay of sentence, Nariman said that the apex court had stayed the conviction of former cricketer and BJP Lok sabha member Navjot Singh Sidhu in a murder case and in the case of film star Sanjay Dutt's conviction in Bombay serial blast case, his sentence was stayed; not the conviction.

The court was told that the larger public good could not be dwarfed before the statutory rights of an individual.

The court will continue hearing the matter Thursday.

Read More..

2012: Hottest Year on Record for Continental U.S.

Temperatures across the continental United States soared in 2012 to an all-time high, making last year the warmest year on record for the country by a wide margin, scientists say. (Related: "July Hottest Month on Record in U.S.—Warming and Drought to Blame?")

"2012 marks the warmest year on record for the contiguous U.S., with the year consisting of a record warm spring, the second warmest summer, the fourth warmest winter, and a warmer than average autumn," Jake Crouch, a climate scientist at the National Climatic Data Center at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said in a press conference Tuesday.

According to a new NOAA report, the average temperature for the lower 48 states in 2012 was 55.3 degrees Fahrenheit (13 degrees Celsius), which is higher than the previous 1998 record by one degree Fahrenheit (0.6 degree Celsius).

A single degree difference might not seem like much, but it is an unusually large margin, scientists say. Annual temperature records typically differ by just tenths of a degree Fahrenheit.

"That is quite a bit for a whole year averaged over the whole country," said Anthony Barnston, chief forecaster at Columbia University's International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), who was not involved in the study.

2012: An Odd Year

To put that difference in perspective, said NOAA's Crouch, consider that the entire range of temperature increase between the coldest year on record, which occurred in 1917, and the previous hottest year in 1998 was just 4.2 degrees Fahrenheit (2.3 degrees Celsius).

"2012 is now more than one degree above the top of that. So we're talking about well above the pack in terms of all the years we have data for the U.S.," he added.

2012 was also the 15th driest year on record for the nation: The average precipitation total for the contiguous U.S. was 26.57 inches (67.5 centimeters), 2.57 inches (6.5 centimeters) below average.

Moreover, every single one of the lower 48 states had above average temperatures. Nineteen states had their warmest year on record and an additional 26 states experienced one of their top ten warmest years on record.

2012 was unusual in another way for the nation, according to the NOAA report. Last year was the second most extreme year on record for the U.S., with 11 natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy and a widespread drought that each cost at least a billion dollars in losses. (See pictures of the U.S. drought.)

Global Warming at Play?

The country's record year can't be explained by natural climate variability alone, noted Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the Boulder, Colorado-based National Center for Atmospheric Research.

"It is abundantly clear that we are seeing [human-caused] climate change in action," Trenberth, who also did not participate in the NOAA report, said in an email. "These records do not occur like this in an unchanging climate." (Test your global warming knowledge.)

(Also see "Climate Predictions: Worst-Case May Be Most Accurate, Study Finds.")

Just how much of a role climate change played is still unclear, however. "That's kind of hard to state at this point," NOAA's Crouch said.

"Climate change has had a role in this ... but it's hard for us to say at this time what amount of the 2012 temperature was dependent on climate change and what part was dependent on local variability."

For example, Columbia University's Barnston pointed out, an atmospheric weather pattern known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) was in the positive phase for much of the winter of 2012, which lead to warmer winters in the eastern U.S.

Warming Trend May Continue

There's no guarantee that the weather pattern will continue in 2013. "It could be in the negative phase, which would make it more like it was a few years ago when we had very snowy winters in the eastern part of the country," Barnston said.

The NAO is an example of "a factor that makes the U.S. annual mean temperature kind of jog up and down from year to year. It won't just gradually go straight up with global warming. It can take big dips and have big jumps."

But if climate change continues unchecked, heat records will become more common, NOAA's Crouch said.

"If the warming trend continues, we will expect to see more warmer than average years."

Read More..

Hospitals Flooded With Flu Patients

U.S. emergency rooms have been overwhelmed with flu patients, turning away some of them and others with non-life-threatening conditions for lack of space.

Forty-one states are battling widespread influenza outbreaks, including Illinois, where six people -- all older than 50 -- have died, according to the state's Department of Public Health.

At least 18 children in the country have died during this flu season, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The proportion of people seeing their doctor for flu-like symptoms jumped to 5.6 percent from 2.8 percent in the past month, according to the CDC.

Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago reported a 20 percent increase in flu patients every day. Northwestern Memorial was one of eight hospitals on bypass Monday and Tuesday, meaning it asked ambulances to take patients elsewhere if they could do so safely.

Dr. Besser's Tips to Protect Yourself From the Flu

Earliest Flu Season in a Decade: 80 Percent of Country Reports Severe Symptoms Watch Video

Flu Season Hits Country Hard, 18 States Reach Epidemic Levels Watch Video

Most of the hospitals have resumed normal operations, but could return to the bypass status if the influx of patients becomes too great.

"Northwestern Memorial Hospital is an extraordinarily busy hospital, and oftentimes during our busier months, in the summer, we will sometimes have to go on bypass," Northwestern Memorial's Dr. David Zich said. "We don't like it, the community doesn't like it, but sometimes it is necessary."

A tent outside Lehigh Valley Hospital in Salisbury Township, Pa., was set up to tend to the overflowing number of flu cases.

A hospital in Ohio is requiring patients with the flu to wear masks to protect those who are not infected.

State health officials in Indiana have reported seven deaths. Five of the deaths occurred in people older than 65 and two younger than 18. The state will release another report later today.

Doctors are especially concerned about the elderly and children, where the flu can be deadly.

"Our office in the last two weeks has exploded with children," Dr. Gayle Smith, a pediatrician in Richmond, Va., said

It is the earliest flu season in a decade and, ABC News Chief Medical Editor Dr. Besser says, it's not too late to protect yourself from the outbreak.

"You have to think about an anti-viral, especially if you're elderly, a young child, a pregnant woman," Besser said.

"They're the people that are going to die from this. Tens of thousands of people die in a bad flu season. We're not taking it serious enough."

Read More..

India says two soldiers killed in clash with Pakistan troops

SRINAGAR, India: Pakistani troops killed two Indian soldiers on Tuesday near the tense disputed border between the nuclear-armed neighbours in Kashmir and one of the bodies was badly mutilated, the Indian army said.

The firefight broke out at about noon on Tuesday (0630 GMT) after an Indian patrol discovered Pakistani troops about half a kilometre (1,600 feet) inside Indian territory, an army spokesman told AFP.

A ceasefire has been in place along the Line of Control that divides the countries since 2003, but it is periodically violated by both sides and Pakistan said Indian troops killed a Pakistani soldier on Sunday.

Relations had been slowly improving over the last few years following a rupture in their slow-moving peace process after the 2008 attacks on Mumbai, which were blamed by India on Pakistan-based militants.

"There was a firefight with Pakistani troops," army spokesman Rajesh Kalia told AFP from the mountainous Himalayan region.

"We lost two soldiers and one of them has been badly mutilated," he added, declining to give more details on the injuries.

"The intruders were regular (Pakistani) soldiers and they were 400-500 metres (1,300-1,600 feet) inside our territory," he said of the clash in Mendhar sector, 173 kilometres (107 miles) west by road from the city of Jammu.

In Islamabad, a Pakistan military spokesman denied what he called an "Indian allegation of unprovoked firing". He declined to elaborate.

On Sunday, Pakistan said Indian troops had crossed the Line of Control and stormed a military post. It said one Pakistani soldier was killed and another injured.

It lodged a formal protest with India on Monday over what it called an unprovoked attack.

India denied crossing the line, saying it had retaliated with small arms fire after Pakistani mortars hit a village home.

A foreign ministry spokesman said Indian troops had undertaken "controlled retaliation" on Sunday after "unprovoked firing" which damaged a civilian home.

The deaths are set to undermine recent efforts to improve relations, such as opening up trade and offering more lenient visa regimes which have been a feature of talks between senior political leaders from both sides.

Muslim-majority Kashmir is a Himalayan region which India and Pakistan both claim in full but rule in part. It was the cause of two of three wars between the neighbours since independence from Britain in 1947.

- AFP/fa

Read More..

Pak troops cross LoC, kill 2 Indian jawans brutally

JAMMU: In a gruesome attack, Pakistani troops on Tuesday crossed into Indian territory and ambushed an Army patrol party killing two soldiers whose heads were reportedly chopped off.

The attack took place along the Line of Control in Poonch district when Pakistanis came about 100 metres into Indian territory and assaulted the patrol party. Besides killing two Lance Naiks, Hemraj and Sudhakar Singh, they also injured two other soldiers.

During the brutal assault on the patrol party, the Pakistanis are said to have chopped off their heads, one of which they carried with them, informed sources said.

However, the Army, while confirming the killing of Indian soldiers, did not comment on reports that they had been beheaded.

According to the sources, the border action team (BAT) of Pakistani army entered the Indian territory at Krishna Ghati area of Poonch district and carried out the strikes.

Army's Udhampur-based Northern Command came out with a statement terming the attack as a "significant escalation" to the continuing series of ceasefire violations and infiltration attempts supported by Pakistan army.

"A group of their regular soldiers intruded across the Line of Control in the Mendhar sector on January 8. Pakistan army troops, having taken advantage of thick fog and mist in the forested area, were moving towards our posts when an alert area domination patrol spotted and engaged the intruders," it said.

"The fire fight between Pakistan and our troops continued for approximately half an hour after which the intruders retreated towards their side of LoC. Two soldiers Lance Naik Hemraj and Lance Naik Sudhakar Singh laid down their lives while fighting the Pakistani troops," it said without giving any further details.

This is yet another "grave provocation" by Pakistan army which is being taken up sternly through official channels, the statement said.

The external affairs ministry is in touch with the defence ministry over the incident.

There has been escalation in ceasefire violations by Pakistan army, which has been attempting to push militants across the LoC into Indian side by taking advantage of inclement weather.

In last about one month, Pakistan army has violated the ceasefire agreement nearly a dozen times. Most of these firing incidents were in Rajouri, Uri and Keran sector to help infiltration attempts, Army officials said.

The attack comes a day after Pakistan lodged a strong protest over what it described as an "unprovoked Indian attack" on one of its military posts along the Line of Control, a claim which the Indian Army rejected.

Indian deputy high commissioner Gopal Bagley was called to the Foreign Office in Islamabad on Monday and handed over a protest note over the incident in the Haji Pir sector.

The incident had resulted in the death of a Pakistani soldier and injuries to another, the Pakistani side claimed.

Read More..

Primitive and Peculiar Mammal May Be Hiding Out in Australia

It’d be hard to think of a mammal that’s weirder than the long-beaked, egg-laying echidna. Or harder to find.

Scientists long thought the animal, which has a spine-covered body, a four-headed penis, and a single hole for reproducing, laying eggs, and excreting waste, lived only in New Guinea. The population of about 10,000 is critically endangered. Now there is tantalizing evidence that the echidna, thought to have gone extinct in Australia some 10,000 years ago, lived and reproduced there as recently as the early 1900s and may still be alive on Aussie soil.

The new echidna information comes from zoologist Kristofer Helgen, a National Geographic emerging explorer and curator of mammals at the Smithsonian Institution. Helgen has published a key finding in ZooKeys confirming that a skin and skull collected in 1901 by naturalist John T. Tunney in Australia is in fact the western long-beaked echidna, Zaglossus bruijnii. The specimen, found in the West Kimberley region of Western Australia, was misidentified for many years.

(More about echidnas: Get to know this living link between mammals and reptiles.)

Helgen has long been fascinated by echidnas. He has seen only three in the wild. “Long-beaked echidnas are hard to get your hands on, period,” he said. “They are shy and secretive by nature. You’re lucky if you can find one. And if you do, it will be by chance.” Indeed, chance played a role in his identification of the Australian specimen. In 2009, he visited the Natural History Museum of London, where he wanted to see all of the echidnas he could. He took a good look in the bottom drawer of the echidna cabinet, where the specimens with less identifying information are often stored. From among about a dozen specimens squeezed into the drawer, he grabbed the one at the very bottom.

(Related from National Geographic magazine: “Discovery in the Foja Mountains.”)

“As I pulled it out, I saw a tag that I had seen before,” Helgen said. “I was immediately excited about this label. As a zoologist working in museums you get used to certain tags: It’s a collector’s calling card. I instantly recognized John Tunney’s tag and his handwriting.”

John Tunney was a well-known naturalist in the early 20th century who went on collecting expeditions for museums. During an Australian expedition in 1901 for Lord L. Walter Rothschild’s private museum collection, he found the long-beaked echidna specimen. Though he reported the locality on his tag as “Mt Anderson (W Kimberley)” and marked it as “Rare,” Tunney left the species identification field blank. When he returned home, the specimen was sent to the museum in Perth for identification. It came back to Rothschild’s museum identified as a short-beaked echidna.

With the specimen’s long snout, large size, and three-clawed feet, Helgen knew that it must be a long-beaked echidna. The short-beaked echidna, still alive and thriving in Australia today, has five claws, a smaller beak, and is half the size of the long-beaked echidna, which can weigh up to 36 pounds (16 kilograms).

As Helgen began tracing the history and journey of the specimen over the last century, he crossed the path of another fascinating mind who had also encountered the specimen. Oldfield Thomas was arguably the most brilliant mammalogical taxonomist ever. He named approximately one out of every six mammals known today.

Thomas was working at the Natural History Museum in London when the Tunney echidna specimen arrived, still misidentified as a short-beaked echidna. Thomas realized the specimen was actually a long-beaked echidna and removed the skull and some of the leg bones from the skin to prove that it was an Australian record of a long-beaked echidna, something just as unexpected then as it is now.

No one knows why Thomas did not publish that information. And the echidna went back into the drawer until Helgen came along 80 years later.

As Helgen became convinced that Tunney’s long-beaked echidna specimen indeed came from Australia, he confided in fellow scientist Mark Eldridge of the Australian Museum about the possibility. Eldridge replied, “You’re not the first person who’s told me that there might be long-beaked echidnas in the Kimberley.” (That’s the Kimberley region of northern Australia.) Scientist James Kohen, a co-author on Helgen’s ZooKeys paper, had been conducting fieldwork in the area in 2001 and spoke to an Aboriginal woman who told him how “her grandmothers used to hunt” large echidnas.

This is “the first evidence of the survival into modern times of any long-beaked echidna in Australia,” said Tim Flannery, professor at Macquarie University in Sydney. “This is a truly significant finding that should spark a re-evaluation of echidna identifications from across northern Australia.”

Helgen has “a small optimism” about finding a long-beaked echidna in the wild in Australia and hopes to undertake an expedition and to interview Aboriginal communities, with their intimate knowledge of the Australian bush.

Though the chances may be small, Helgen says, finding one in the wild “would be the beautiful end to the story.”

Read More..

Jodi Arias: Who Is the Admitted Killer?

Jodi Arias is a woman that many can't keep their eyes off of--a soft-spoken, small-framed 32-year-old who last year won a jailhouse Christmas caroling contest. But she is also an admitted killer who is now on trial in Arizona for the 2008 murder of her ex-boyfriend Travis Alexander.

Sitting in a Maricopa County court, Arias, whose trial resumes today, cries every time prosecutors describe what she admits she did -- stab her one-time boyfriend Travis Alexander 27 times, slit his throat and shoot him in the head.

Arias grew up in the small city of Yreka, Calif. She dropped out of high school, but received her GED while in jail a few years ago. She was an aspiring photographer; her MySpace page includes several albums of pictures, one of which was called "In loving memory of Travis Alexander."

FULL COVERAGE: Jodi Arias Murder Trial

Woman Facing Death Penalty Called Jealous by Prosecutors Watch Video

Ariz. Woman Faces Death Penalty in Boyfriend's Slaying Watch Video

"Jodi wanted nothing but to please Travis," defense attorney Jennifer Wilmot said in her opening statements, but added that there was another reality – that Arias was Alexander's "dirty little secret."

Arias' attorneys want the jury to believe she killed Alexander in June of 2008 in self defense, that he abused her, and she feared for her life when she attacked him in the shower of his Mesa, Ariz., home.

Alexander's family and friends say Arias was a stalker who killed him in cold blood. They say the 30-year-old was a successful businessman who overcame all the odds. His parents were drug addicts, and he grew up occasionally homeless until he converted to Mormonism and turned his life around.

Jodi Arias Trial: A Timeline of Events in the Arizona Murder Case

"He actually had everything going for him," said Dave Hall, one of Alexander's friends. "A beautiful home, a beautiful car, a great income."

Alexander kept a blog, and in a haunting last entry, just two weeks before his murder, he wrote about trying to find a wife.

"This type of dating to me is like a very long job interview," he wrote. "Desperately trying to find out if my date has an axe murderer penned up inside of her."

Alexander did date a killer. It's now up to the jury to decide if she killed in self defense.

Read More..

Obama to nominate Hagel for Defense, Brennan for CIA

President Obama on Monday will nominate former Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense and counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan to direct the Central Intelligence Agency, the White House said.

The announcement will be made in the East Room of the White House shortly after 1 p.m.

The successful nomination of Hagel would add a well-known Republican to the president’s second-term Cabinet at a time when he is looking to better bridge the partisan divide, particularly after a bitter election campaign. But the expected nomination has drawn sharp criticism, particularly from Republicans, who have questioned Hagel’s commitment to Israel’s security.

The choice sets up a confirmation fight of the sort that Obama appeared unwilling to have over Susan E. Rice, his preferred pick for secretary of state. Rice pulled out of consideration for that job last month after facing sharp Republican criticism about her characterization of the September attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

In an appearance Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) called Hagel’s selection an “in-your-face nomination.”

But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Hagel’s record would be given a fair shake in the Senate if he is nominated. McConnell stopped short of saying whether he would support his former colleague.

“He’s certainly been outspoken in foreign policy and defense over the years,” McConnell said on ABC’s “This Week.” He added: “The question we’ll be answering, if he’s the nominee, is: Do his views make sense for that particular job? I think he ought to be given a fair hearing, like any other nominee. And he will be.”

Brennan, a veteran CIA analyst who rose to become deputy executive director during the first term of President George W. Bush, was also considered for the top CIA post in 2009, when Obama first took office. He was forced to withdraw from consideration after liberal groups accused him of complicity in the agency’s use of brutal interrogation measures under Bush — criticism that Brennan denounced as unfair and inaccurate.

His nomination now — after serving for four years as Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, a position which did not require Senate confirmation — could spur scrutiny of his role in escalating the CIA’s drone war, and renew debate over the agency’s use of harsh methods.

But the level of opposition appears to have subsided. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, recently said that she believed that Brennan could be confirmed.

Brennan, 57, would be filling the vacancy created by the resignation of David H. Petraeus, following the discovery that Petraeus was having an adulterous affair.

“Brennan has the full trust and confidence of the President,” an administration official said in a statement Monday. “For four years, he has seen the President every day, and been by his side for some of his toughest decisions.... Brennan is as close to President Obama as any member of his national security team.”

Read More..

Indonesia police investigate baby-for-sale online ad

JAKARTA: Indonesian police on Monday said they are investigating an advertisement offering two babies for sale at US$1,000 each after it was spotted on the popular auction and shopping website Tokobagus.com.

"We are still investigating the existence of the online advertisement," Jakarta police spokesman Rikwanto told reporters.

"We have asked Tokobagus how the advertisement came to be posted, for how long, and whether any transaction was made," he added.

The National Commission for Child Protection lodged a police report last week after spotting the posting, its chairman Arist Merdeka Sirait told AFP.

"There was a photo of a baby and a telephone number. We called the advertiser and he said he wanted to sell two 18-month-olds, a boy and a girl, for Rp 10 million (US$1,000) each," Sirait said.

"We were negotiating, talking about birth certificates when he suddenly hung up. We tried contacting him again but failed," he added.

"This seems to be a new modus operandi by baby-selling syndicates. We are very concerned and must stop this crime against humanity," Sirait said, adding that human-traffickers could be jailed from 15 to 20 years.

Tokobagus posted an apology on Twitter, saying the advertisement was a result of "pure human error and was unintentional" and had been removed.

Indonesians have been using local auction and shopping sites to sell anything from cars and jewellery to body organs such as kidneys, exploiting a loophole in local laws.

Hundreds of advertisements have appeared on Indonesian personal advertising websites offering kidneys for as little as 50 million rupiah each.

- AFP/xq

Read More..