But the fish, despite a deadly toxin that it contains, is also sought after by many for its tasty flesh, cooked in a curry or spicy tamarind sauce, grilled or fried, according to Bernama news agency.

The people who cook puffer fish know how to remove the toxin, which is said to be 1,200 times more poisonous than cyanide.

One such person is 56-year-old Dari Sait (rpt) Dari Sait of Kampung Manggut, Spaoh, who claims to have been handling the yellow puffer fish from the time she was just 20.

“Removing the toxin requires the use of a proper technique. The poison is in the blood vessels. Puffer fish eggs are also delicious. The toxin is found in the egg membrane. Steaming the eggs with bamboo shoots also drains away the poison,” she said.

Dari said the yellow pufferfish is popular in the Spaoh area, where the people are experts at draining away the toxin and cooking the fish, according to their respective recipes.

She put on gloves to protect her hands against the thorns and showed this reporter how adept she was at removing the toxin in less than a minute, the news agecy reported.

According to Assoc Prof Dr Samsur Mohamad, a lecturer at the Department of Aquatic Sciences of the Faculty of Resource Science and Technology of Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (Unimas), people in Japan eat the pufferfish to feel a ‘sensation’.

“A numbness is felt after eating the fish, and people in Japan seek the numbness when eating the pufferfish,” he said.

Dr Samsur said the season of the yellow pufferfish is between April and October annually along the Batang Saribas with Kampung Manggut, Spaoh, close to the river as the point of focus.

Fresh yellow puffer fish goes for RM10 per kg, dried puffer fish at RM10 for three fish while the yellow puffer fish eggs cost RM40 per kg, he said.

Mohd Remy Husin, 32, said he catches the puffer fish twice a month during the season using a net or the traditional method of using a tool called ‘sagang’.

“When the puffer fish enters Batang Saribas, fishermen snare the fish with a net fastened in the middle of the river. During the season, up to 180 kg of catch are landed compared to only 10 kg during the off-season,” said Mohd Remy who has been catching the fish since he was 12.

He said that after the fish had laid its eggs in the Tanjung Asam area of Batang Saribas, the fish become hungry and are caught with the ‘sagang’ with the use of shark meat as bait.

Dr Samsur said studies show that the Batang Saribas area is the focus of the puffer fish because the narrow passage of the river with its many promontories offers a conducive place for the breeding of the fish.

“During the breeding season, the pufferfish from the coastal area will come up the Batang Saribas to lay their eggs, after which they return to the coastal area. We are still studying how long it takes for the fish fry to go to the coastal areas,” he said.

Liam Fox, the international trade secretary and a vocal Brexit campaigner during the 2016 referendum, warned colleagues planning on voting against May that her plan was the only way to be “100 percent certain” that Britain would leave.

“If we were not to vote for that, I’m not sure I would give it much more than 50-50,” he told The Sunday Times.

May’s government is trying to persuade a sceptical British parliament to endorse a broad withdrawal deal she struck with European leaders last month.

    But the bill’s passage is far from certain, with May having to pull an initial vote with a crushing defeat looking, rescheduling it for the week beginning January 14.

Pro-Brexit supporters are particularly concerned about the deal’s so-called “backstop” provision, which could keep Britain locked in a customs union with the EU in order to avoid a “hard” border between British province Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

But Fox urged his colleagues to “put their own pride behind them” and take what was on offer.

“The worst possible outcome of this process would be no Brexit,” he told the paper.

“For me that would induce a sense that we had betrayed the people that voted in the referendum.

“What you can be sure of is that if we vote for the prime minister’s deal then its 100 percent certain that we will leave on March 29.”

He also warned parliament against trying to thwart the process through a series of legislative procedures.

“Shattering that bond of trust between parliament and the people, I think, would be incendiary,” he said.

    While the original stations were conceived as “palaces for the people”, the new designs are less formal with light boxes for seats and laser-printed glass patterns.

In a major break with tradition, the Moscow city government has allowed outside architects to submit designs for several new stations in competitions that included a public vote on a phone app.

It has paved the way for “truly interesting and original stations that are outside any tradition,” says architecture journalist Nina Frolova.

    The first of these to open is in the high-rise suburb of Solntsevo, once notorious for its local mafia.

Moscow’s Nefa Architects won with a design inspired by the sun, the Russian word for which forms the root of the suburb’s name.

“We wanted to let the sun inside,” said Nefa’s lead architect Dmitry Ovcharov, surveying the newly opened station on a recent afternoon.

They punched holes in the walls of the station entrances to “create light and shadow”, he said.

Down on the platform, cylindrical white light boxes serve as seats that Ovcharov promises are sturdy enough to withstand passengers’ weight.

This year the transport system, which dates back to 1935, opened 16 new stations and carried around two billion passengers.

– ‘A battle for quality’ –

Frolova, editorial director at the Archi.ru architecture website, said Solntsevo is a bright example of new metro trends.

“There’s a concept that any passenger can see. It feels pleasant being in the station.”

But she said another design competition for the Novoperedelkino station ended less happily, with “significant changes” to the design.

It featured dramatic patterned glass ceilings that ended broken up with ugly seams and “turned out much less interesting than was planned”, she said.

Architect Ovcharov has grumbled about Solntsevo too, pointing out incorrectly printed panels and overhead lights that do not work.

“It was a really unrelenting battle for quality, to get the design decisions complied with,” he said.

Yet he adds that he’s now considering taking part in another metro design competition.

Another architect with a winning station design, Tatiana Leontyeva of Moscow’s Blank Architects, said the prestige of the commission was a draw.

She was part of a team who designed a station called Rzhevskaya, which will have an “archway” theme in a nod to its location near a mainline railway station.

The brief was to create a station for “the new times”, she said, using Russian materials and “without excessive decoration.”

“There was a large number of applications and (the competition) had a big impact, not just on the Russian architectural scene but abroad too because, of course, a lot of people wanted to get their hands on a site like the Moscow metro.”

The historic Moscow metro was a monumental construction in the 1930s, built as an example of quality and solidity, symbolising the grandeur of Stalin and the young Soviet Union. The country’s history was told in the mosaics that adorned the stations’ walls and the metro could serve as a bunker if needed.

– Metro expertise –

Previously the state company Metrogiprotrans had a monopoly on the transport system’s architecture, and it still designs the majority of new stations.

One of its architects recently argued that the company was the only one with the expertise to design the facilities.

“There’s a popular opinion that you can just come along to the metro and draw a picture of a station,” Alexander Orlov said at a recent presentation.

“Even if a drawing of something seems beautiful, it can be incompatible with all the metro technology.”

But Metrogiprotrans is also modernising.

The company’s latest station interiors feature laser-printed designs on glass or glossy aluminium panels, a simple approach that critic Frolova says also works.

“I think they kept a good balance with not many details and some simple, modern forms.”

– ‘Deprived of art’ –

The company is also behind more elaborate stations such as Fonvizinskaya, which depicts characters from the work of a playwright by the same name in ceiling-high 3-D panels.

“I’d never dreamed I’d do the metro,” digital artist Konstantin Khudyakov said.

“That’s monumental art,” said the designer, who explained his work is usually much smaller in scale.

Khudyakov’s stereoscopic panels use the same technology as novelty rulers or pens where figures appear to move — but using many more high-resolution images.

“It’s the first time in the world that this has been done” in the metro, Khudyakov said.

Public reaction to the decor at the station has been mixed.

School teacher Lyudmila told AFP she didn’t much care for the “gloomy” pictures, but was glad the metro system had been linked up to her neighbourhood.

But designer Alexandra, travelling on a weekday afternoon, said she liked the images “purely visually — they’re cool”.

Either way, Khudyakov believes the metro should still be a showcase for decorative art in a city with relatively few galleries.

“There’s not enough art. People are deprived of art… Let there be art at least in the metro.”

    The LA Times said Saturday that the attack, which was first assumed to have been a server outage, hit a computer network at Tribune Publishing which is connected to the production and printing process of multiple newspapers around the country.

As a result, the delivery of the Saturday editions of the LA Times and San Diego Union Tribune were delayed.

It also hit the distribution of the West Coast editions of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, which are printed at the LA Times’ printing plant.

    The report said it could not provide firm numbers on how many subscribers were impacted but a majority of LA Times customers received their papers Saturday morning, albeit several hours late.

“We believe the intention of the attack was to disable infrastructure, more specifically servers, as opposed to looking to steal information,” the LA Times quoted a source with knowledge of the situation as saying.

The paper cited officials as saying it was too soon to know whether it was carried out by state or non-state actors.

“We are aware of reports of a potential cyber incident effecting several news outlets, and are working with our government and industry partners to better understand the situation,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement.

Wisma Putra said bomb explosions and shootings had been reported in different parts of Narathiwat and Songkhla.

No Malaysians were affected by the incidents, it said in a statement on Sunday (Dec 30).

Wisma Putra said Malaysians are encouraged to register themselves with the Embassy of Malaysia in Bangkok or the Consulate General of Malaysia in Songkhla while they are in Thailand.

The registration can be done with the Embassy of Malaysia, Bangkok, 33-35, South Sathorn Road, Tungmahamek, Sathorn, Bangkok 10120, Thailand, via telephone +66-2-629 6800 / +66-87-028 4659 (after working hours), fax +66-2-679 2208 or email mwbangkok@kln.gov.my.

Registration can also be done with the Consulate General of Malaysia, No. 4, Sukhum Road, Muang District, Songkhla 90000, Thailand, via telephone +66-7-431 1062 / +66-7-431 6274 / +66-81-990-1930 (WhatsApp), fax +66-7-432 4004 or email mwsongkhla@kln.gov.my.

It was reported that two bombs exploded at 10 pm (11 pm Malaysian time) on Wednesday (Dec 26) at Samila Beach, Songkhla, which is popular among the local residents and foreign tourists including Malaysians.

On Thursday, six more bombs exploded in several districts in the Songkhla province close to the Malaysian-Thai border. These bombings toppled several electric poles, but did not result in injuries.

“Indeed, we see a diversity here, in which there are a lot of differences in society. However, this is not the cause of dissension but the source of our strength as a nation,” he said in a speech during the national Christmas celebration in Medan on Saturday evening.

Jokowi said that during the Christmas celebrations, all elements of society must rejoice over the gifts that God has given to the Indonesian people. He said God the Almighty had given a high sense of brotherhood and loving affection as the strongest assets of the nation.

“The strongest assets of the nation are unity, harmony and brotherhood,” the President said.

Jokowi said Indonesia was blessed by an extraordinary diversity, in which the country’s population was 260 million people who live on 17,000 islands in 34 provinces and 514 regencies and cities. Hence, all parts of society must maintain the unity of the nation so it will not be easily defeated by any parties, said the President who later conveyed his Christmas and new year greetings to the participants of the event and all Christians in the country.

Law and Human Rights Minister Yasonna H. Laoly, who chaired the 2018 National Christmas Celebration’s organizing committee, said he appreciated the support provided by all elements of society, including the security authorities, to ensure the safe and smooth implementation of the event.

Eighty musicians from four provinces, namely Jakarta, North Sumatra, West Java and Yogyakarta, performed a musical collaboration in this year’s celebration. Thousands of Christians attending the event were also entertained by a spectacular performance by a giant choir, which comprised 1,000 singers who represented various churches and ethnic groups from across North Sumatra.

A 100-member children’s choir from Pematang Siantar-Simalungun also performed in the celebration. All choir members wore traditional outfits from across Indonesia.

“Maybe this is the biggest choir we have ever seen throughout the history of Christmas celebrations in Indonesia. This also symbolizes the unity of our nation,” said Yasonna.