■New Zealand
Man cleared of poison charge
A 33-year-old New Zealander has been cleared of charges that he tried to poison his wife while they had sex. A High Court judge in Hamilton threw out attempted murder charges against Andrew Scott Wright, telling a jury there was no evidence to support claims by his wife Kelly, news reports said yesterday. She claimed that she found a medicine dropper in the bed after they made love which she believed her husband was using to insert something poisonous into her vagina, and that he also tried to poison her coffee. Wright told the New Zealand Herald the police should never have brought the charges, which had cost him his marriage, his job and access to his children.
■ Indonesia
Journalist on trial in Aceh
An American freelance journalist who traveled with rebels in Indonesia's Aceh for a month before surrendering to government troops went on trial yesterday charged with immigration offences. Wearing a long white-sleeved shirt and blue tie, William Nessen smiled as he entered the court in the provincial capital Banda Aceh. He faces a maximum penalty of five years in jail. "The defendant misused his Indonesian visa," prosecutor Efdal Effendi told the court, adding Nessen's activities were incompatible with the visa. He did not elaborate.
■ The Philippines
Man holds son hostage
A 33-year-old man briefly held hostage his two-year-old son in the Philippines in a desperate bid to escape his nagging wife by landing in jail, police said yesterday. Ramon del Castillo also threatened to commit suicide and kill his son during the one-hour hostage drama in the city of Makati on Tuesday, said police Superintendent Jose Ramon Salido. Salido said del Castillo took his son while his wife was sleeping and forcibly entered a neighbor's house, where he took a knife from the kitchen. The man then climbed to the third floor of the house and tied a rope around his and his son's necks, while poking the knife at anyone who tried to get near them.
■ New Zealand
Asian drivers `the worst'
The case of a 13-year-old Chinese student clocked driving a high-powered car at 132kph on a South Island highway has produced a warning from New Zealand police about young Asian drivers on the nation's roads. "Plenty of young people drive irresponsibly, but it's Asian students who are the worst culprits," Sergeant Wayne Christie, highway patrol chief in Marlborough province, told Radio New Zealand yesterday. He said the 13-year-old and his 18-year-old sister -- who owned the car and was a passenger at the time they were timed at 32kph over the highway speed limit -- had been sent back to their parents in China.
■ Thailand
Brass bells kill buffaloes
Thailand's Ministry of Agriculture is urging the country's farmers to stop adorning the necks of their water buffaloes with fashionable new brass bells and go back to traditional wooden ones because too many of the beasts are getting struck down by lightning. "The fashion leads to the deaths of their buffaloes and wastes state money," the Bangkok Post quoted the ministry's deputy permanent secretary, Dhammarong Prakobboon, as saying. He said the ministry had allocated 1.1 million baht (US$26,000) to replace buffaloes that had been killed by lightning bolts in six provinces since the rainy season began in May.
■ France
Eiffel Tower fire doused
Tourists gazed in disbelief as plumes of gray smoke poured from the top of the Eiffel Tower, forcing the evacuation of thousands of startled visitors to the Paris landmark. A fire broke out at the top of the tower around 7:20pm Tuesday, fire officials said. As many as 100 firefighters were summoned to fight the flames in the telecommunications room, fire Commander Christian Decolloredo said. The blaze was out within an hour, he said. Decolloredo said the fire broke out at 276m, the highest level accessible to tourists, in an area sealed off from the public. The same portion of the tower caught fire in 1956, destroying the structure's summit.
■ United States
Jail caught in copyright suit
A Louisiana jail illegally copied and sold its inmates copies of recordings by hundreds of artists, including the Rolling Stones, Eminem and Garth Brooks, according to a record company's lawsuit. The suit alleges that the Claiborne Parish prison gave incoming inmates a list of 330 rock, rap, country and R&B recordings available through the commissary for US$3 per compact disc. An inmate copied the ones requested by prisoners or visitors, said Roy Maughan Jr., the lawyer who filed the suit for Baton Rouge-based Utopia Entertainment. "You'd just tell them what you wanted and they'd burn you a copy," Maughan said Tuesday.
■ United States
Storms cause havoc
A line of thunderstorms swept through the Ohio Valley toward the East Coast, killing three people, including two Ohioans who drowned in a laundry room where they were trapped by rising waters. The storms on Tuesday spawned at least one tornado with wind of up to 253kph in upstate New York.
■ United Kingdom
Potter-house auction flops
No-one was prepared to cough up a minimum bid of UK Pound 280,000 (US$450,000) for the English house which served as Harry Potter's home in the recent hit films, reports said Tuesday. The house played the part of No. 4 Privet Drive, Little Whingeing, Surrey, in all three Harry Potter movies, the dull suburban home where the boy wizard spends an unhappy childhood with his nasty foster parents Vernon and Petunia Dursley. But No. 12 Picket Post Close, Bracknell, Berkshire, would have fetched only UK Pound 249,000 (US$400,000) at auction, failing to meet its reserve price. Children often come to the house to look through the windows, although the interior was not used in the film.
■ Israel
Group castigates soldiers
A leading Israeli human rights group has accused Israeli soldiers of "malicious and cruel" treatment of Palestinians and the military leadership of indifference to widespread abuses. The Association of Civil Rights in Israel issued its annual report Tuesday. "Most of the abuses occur not as a result of operational necessity on the part of the army, but from vindictiveness on the part of soldiers," it says.
■United Kingdom
Royal flash beats Queen
Britain's Queen Elizabeth got an unexpected view of one of her subjects on Tuesday when a guest at one of her regular garden parties dropped his trousers and scampered off among the tea-drinking crowd. "He was a young man, an invited guest. He was about 10m from the Queen when he suddenly took off his trousers -- nothing more -- and sort of sprinted away from her as it were," said another guest, who asked not to be named. A Metropolitan Police spokesman confirmed that a 17-year-old guest at the party, one of three the Queen hosts each year, was speaking to police about the incident but had not been arrested.
■ United States
Art musuem sued
The grandson of a Russian art collector is suing a Los Angeles museum over 25 paintings due to show there on Sunday which he claims were stolen from his family by the Bolsheviks in 1918. Andre Marc Delocque-Fourcaud, the grandson of Sergei Shchukin, a merchant and one of the biggest art collectors in tsarist Russia, filed a lawsuit last week for a share of the revenue from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's show. The paintings include works by Van Gogh, Cezanne, Degas and Matisse, together with many notable Picasso works.
■ Germany
Man thinks he's F1 driver
"I'm a Formula One driver and so I always have the right of way." That was the explanation of a driver whom police described as mentally deranged after stopping him following a harrowing high-speed chase on a German motorway late Tuesday. Police in the southern state of Bavaria yesterday said the 39-year-old man, racing at speeds of 150 to 185kph, flashed his lights and forced other drivers out of the passing lanes with his aggressive driving. He hit seven cars, but miraculously, nobody was injured. Only after 60km did the police manage to stop the man and confiscate his license.
■ United States
POW `hero' returns home
Former US Army POW Jessica Lynch returned to her West Virginia home to a flag-waving hero's welcome on Tuesday. Lynch's 507th Maintenance Co convoy was ambushed on March 23 near the Iraqi city of Nasiriyah in an attack that killed 11 soldiers. US forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital on April 1. The story of the rescue, however, has sparked accusations that US defense officials and officials with President George W. Bush's administration exaggerated the circumstances of her capture and her rescue in order to make Lynch an American hero at a time when the US war in Iraq appeared to be bogging down.
■ Iran
Canadian journalist buried
A Canadian journalist who died in custody in Iran was buried in her birthplace in southern Iran yesterday, the official news agency IRNA said, despite calls from Ottawa and her son for her body to be returned to Canada. Zahra Kazemi, 54, a photojournalist of Iranian descent living in Canada, died on July 10, more than two weeks after she was arrested for taking pictures outside a prison in Tehran. A government inquiry into her death said she had died of a brain haemorrhage caused by a severe blow to the head. But despite calls from the EU and Canada for Iran to prosecute those responsible for her death, Iran has yet to say whether Kazemi was hurt deliberately or who may have caused her death.
Agencies
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not