■ The Philippines
Vice president supports Poe
Philippine Vice President Teofisto Guingona, a former ally of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, expressed support yesterday for Arroyo's most serious contender in the May 10 elections. The second highest leader in the Philippines said he has "accepted" an offer from movie icon Fernando Poe, an opposition presidential candidate, to become one of his advisers. "Poe asserts that he is his own man. If so, coupled with the right political will -- he can chart a meaningful change to rebuild the nation under God," Guingona said in a statement. Guingona bolted from the administration party following differences with Arroyo over policies.
■ China
Textbooks to tell truth
For decades, the Chinese have clung to the myth that their most famous creation, the Great Wall, is visible from space. Even today, elementary school textbooks in the world's most populous nation proclaim that the structure can be seen by the naked eye of an orbiting cosmonaut. But those schoolbooks are being rewritten after China's first man in space, Yang Liwei (楊利偉), shattered the myth when he returned from orbiting the earth last year, saying he couldn't see the wall, the Beijing Times newspaper reported Friday. "Having this falsehood printed in our elementary school textbooks is probably the main cause of the misconception being so widely spread," the paper said.
■ Vietnam
Grenade kills two
A war-era grenade exploded in Vietnam as a man was sawing into it, killing two men and injuring four bystanders, a local police officer said yesterday. Dang Hai and Dang Dung found the grenade and took it to a waste metal trader in Binh Thuan province who agreed to buy the unexploded ordnance if the explosives were removed, said Nguyen Duc Chien, a police officer from the province. The grenade exploded as Hai was sawing into it, killing him and Nguyen Thu Hue, the metal trader, immediately, Chien said.
■ Australia
Superfine wool sold
It is described as the sheep-farming equivalent of breaking the four-minute mile: a US$495,000 bale of wool produced in a climate-controlled barn -- and so fine it has to be kept in a bank vault. The waist-high bale of the finest wool ever produced was auctioned in Australia on Friday to a Chinese company which hopes to turn it into suits worth US$73,000 apiece. At 11.9 microns in thickness, the wool is twice as fine as the finest human hair, with roughly the diameter of a grain of talcum powder. The Sydney auction saw the 90kg bale, produced by a sheep farm nicknamed the Wooldorf Astoria, sell for more than US$5,400 a kilo.
■ Indonesia
`Carcass flower' sets record
A rare flower that smells like rotting flesh and grows nearly 3m tall has bloomed in Indonesia, setting a new record for the species' height, officials said yesterday. The Amorphophallus titanum -- known locally as a "carcass flower" for the stench its bulbs emit upon opening -- blossomed Thursday at the Cibodas Botanical Garden in Bogor. The flower comes from the rain forests of Sumatra island, and typically grows to more than 2.7m tall. Officials at the garden on the southern outskirts of the capital Jakarta claimed this particular flower reached a height of 2.9m. "This is the biggest flower I've ever seen," said Asih Wulandari, a spokeswoman for the botanical garden. "It's a giant flower, but no one likes the smell. It reminds you of a dead animal."
■ Iraq
Two US soldiers killed
Two US soldiers were killed and four were wounded in an explosion in the centre of Tikrit, 180km north of Baghdad, yesterday morning, a US military official said. At about 5am there was an explosion in the centre of the city targeting US military personal, said US Captain Tim Crowe. The soldiers killed or injured in the attack were from the 1st Battalion 18th Infantry Regiment, he told reporters. The source of the explosion was unclear. Tikrit is the hometown of former dictator Saddam Hussein. Added to an official Pentagon tally, the deaths raise to 270 the number of US soldiers killed in action since US President George W. Bush declared official hostilities over on May 1.
■ United States
Nazi deportation upheld
A federal immigration appeals board has upheld a judge's order to deport a 78-year-old man who served as a guard in a Nazi concentration camp, the Justice Department said Friday. Joseph Leprich will appeal the Board of Immigration Appeals' decision to the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals, his attorney said Friday. The board affirmed a November decision by Detroit immigration Judge Larry Dean, who concluded that Leprich entered the United States illegally. The court found that Leprich served as an armed guard at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. US officials continued to pursue Leprich after evidence suggested he was secretly living at his home in Clinton Township, Michigan.
■ United States
Rumsfeld's 911 souvenir
A Justice Department investigation that criticized FBI agents for taking relics from the Staten Island landfill that held the rubble of the World Trade Center also found that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld kept a piece of the airplane that struck the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. The report, which also determined that at least two senior FBI officials and numerous agents had kept mementos that once were in the World Trade Center, did not accuse Rumsfeld of any wrongdoing. Rumsfeld picked up a foot-long metal shard from the plane, had it mounted on a plaque that he keeps in his office as a vivid reminder of the terrorist attack, and has shown it to "hundreds of visiting dignitaries, members of Congress and other visitors," said Larry Di Rita, the chief Defense Department spokesman.
■ United States
Bush's gender confusion
US President George W. Bush marked International Women's Week on Friday by paying tribute to women reformers -- but one of those he cited is really a man. "Earlier today, the Libyan government released Fathi Jahmi. She's a local government official who was imprisoned in 2002 for advocating free speech and democracy," the president said in a speech at the White House. The only problem was that, by all other accounts, "she" is in fact "he". "Definitely male," said Alistair Hodgett, spokesman for the human rights advocacy group Amnesty International, whose representatives tried to see Jahmi in prison during a recent visit to Libya. The US House Committee on International Relations listed Jahmi as a 62-year-old civil engineer who was sentenced to five years in prison "after he reportedly stated during a session of the People's Conference ... that reform within Libya would never take place in the absence of a constitution, pluralism and democracy."
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