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World News Quick Take

■ Pakistan
Shiite family massacred
Six members of a Shiite Muslim family, including two women and two children, were found shot dead in their house in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore yesterday, police said. The hands and feet of the victims, including a seven-month-old girl, were bound. All had been shot in the head. The words "Shiites are infidels" were spray painted on the walls of the house, on the outskirts of the city. "It is not yet clear whether it was a sectarian attack or related to some enmity," senior superintendent of police Aftab Cheema told reporters.

■ Australia
E-stalker jailed
An Australian man found guilty of stalking his US ex-girlfriend by bombarding her friends and relatives with e-mails showing her performing sex acts was jailed for 12 months yesterday. Geelong Magistrates Court in Victoria state was told Nicholas Stacey, 35, had been living in the US until late last year when his girlfriend dumped him while he was visiting his homeland. In response, Stacey sent offensive e-mails to the woman and made up to 40 threatening phone calls a day. He also e-mailed 60 explicit pictures of the woman and himself engaged in sex acts to the woman's family, friends, university and workplace.

■ China
Tainted liquor kills eight
Liquor diluted with formaldehyde killed eight people and landed another eight in hospital in southern China this week, the Beijing News said yesterday. The moonshine baijiu, a high-proof spirit made from sorghum, was made in Guangzhou, capital of southern China's Guangdong Province, the newspaper said. Billions of dollars worth of counterfeit and substandard goods are produced every year in China.

■ Vietnam
Duty-free smugglers nabbed
Vietnamese police have busted a smuggling ring operating through a chain of duty-free stores in southern Vietnam, a police officer said on Friday. The Saigon Port Duty Free Shop, which was under the management of the former state-run Import and Export Services, was caught overstating the amount of duty-free goods it had sold and then selling the goods on the open market, the police officer said. The investigation showed that, since 1999, the company had been selling 70 per cent of its tax-free goods to restaurants and nightclubs. Police confiscated 22,400 bottles of wine and more than 2,000 packets of cigarettes after raiding three of the company's shops, the police official said. Seventeen people involved in the ring were summoned by the police for questioning.

■ Holy See
Gays threaten all Europe
Same-sex unions are destroying the concept of marriage and of humanity itself, the powerful guardian of Roman Catholic doctrine said on Thursday. "If the union of homosexuals is increasingly seen on the same level as marriage, we are facing the dissolution of the image of man," Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said during a televised conference on the spiritual roots of Europe. Ratzinger, prefect of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said, "Europe wouldn't be Europe anymore if this fundamental nucleus of its social structure disappeared."

■ United States
Doggie DNA snares thief
A dead poodle's DNA led Louisiana police to arrest a man suspected in the thefts of five pedigreed puppies from a pet store in January. Police in Chalmette, a suburb north of New Orleans, charged Edwin Gallo with felony possession of stolen property, namely the body of the six-month-old poodle discovered at his home. It died mysteriously in Gallo's care after detectives braced him about the missing dogs, said Sergeant Adam Nunez with the St. Bernard's Parish Sheriff's Department. Gallo presented forged ownership papers, he said. "I knew the only way I could possibly link him to that burglary without a witness or anything was to go ahead and get this dog tested," Nunez said.

■ Colombia
Counterfeiters arrested
US Secret Service agents and Colombian police seized US$4 million in counterfeit US currency, breaking up a network capable of printing US$1 million in fake bills every month, police said. Authorities arrested 15 suspects during the dawn raid on Thursday on a printing workshop in the southwestern city of Cali, Colonel Oscar Naranjo said. Five of those arrested had previous counterfeiting convictions, he said. The counterfeiters would take Colombian and Venezuelan bills, wipe the ink off, then print the bogus dollars on the same paper, Naranjo said.

■ Canada
Police swoop on gangs
Sixty-five accused gangsters were behind bars in Toronto on Thursday after a police swoop produced a slate of 500 criminal charges. Police smashed down doors, lobbed stun grenades and seized caches of drugs and firearms in hammer-blow raids on Wednesday in three suburban areas and in Barrie, 80km to the north. The pre-dawn strikes followed a 14-month undercover police probe. "Street gangs are cancers that, left unchecked, consume and destroy our communities," Toronto police chief Julian Fantino said. Toronto's self-image as a safe North American city has been sullied in recent years by rising crime, an influx of guns, suspected to be from the US, and a recent string of shootings and assaults.

■ Russia
Deserter alarms ministry
An armed soldier deserted his post in Russia's far east, the Defense Ministry said yesterday, and authorities warned residents in the region to be on the lookout. Alexei Susanin, who was drafted last fall, fled from his motorized rifle unit in the Primorye region on Wednesday, the ministry's press office said. The 20-year-old servicemen took his Kalashnikov rifle and two cartridges with him, reports said. Authorities yesterday erected road-blocks and were alerting local residents, Echo of Moscow radio reported.

■ Greece
Bomb threat stops ferry
Greek police evacuated a passenger ferry before it left the port of Piraeus for the Greek islands after receiving a bomb threat early yesterday, a police official said. The official said the threat was probably a hoax, but that police decided to evacuate the ship to ensure the safety of passengers. Police are currently sweeping the ship with bomb-sniffing dogs, he said. The official said an anonymous call was made to a newspaper a few minutes before the vessel was due to sail to the Greek islands with 1,619 passengers. Greece has stepped up security with fewer than 100 days before the summer Olympic Games.

■ Great Britain
Regiment may be disbanded
A British army regiment at the center of allegations of Iraqi prisoner abuse could be disbanded due to its consistently poor disciplinary record, a report said yesterday. The abuse claims were the "final straw" for the Queen's Lancashire Regiment, said the Daily Telegraph, a right-wing newspaper known to have good contacts with the British military, citing "defense sources." The regiment was at the center of claims that its soldiers beat and urinated on Iraqi detainees. According to the Daily Telegraph, the Queen's Lancashire Regiment has experienced other cases of indiscipline previously, such as the permanent disabling of a junior officer after a soldier attacked him with a pick-axe during pre-Iraq training.

■ Great Britain
Escape into prison
A pair of prisoners at a British low-security open jail have escaped, but only to knock on the door of a more secure prison nearby and ask to be detained there instead, a report said Thursday. The duo fled from Leyhill prison near Gloucester, central England, because the reformed drugs users found narcotics too easily available there, the Times said yesterday. Audie Carr, 29 and 23-year-old Benjamin Clarke were found to be missing at a roll call held last Sunday night, but by Monday lunchtime they had knocked on the doors of Gloucester Prison around 32km away. The pair, jailed for offenses including burglary, theft and assault, had originally been held at Gloucester Prison, where they were able to kick their drug habits, but found that the lower-security facility offered too much temptation.

■ United States
Private rocket nears space
A tear-shaped rocket became the first privately-funded vehicle to reach the edge of space Thursday when it carried a 62-year-old test pilot to a height of 64,435m, The Los Angeles Times reported. SpaceShipOne was released from spider-like mother plane White Knight at a height of 14,020 feet. A few seconds late, pilot Mike Melvill fired its rockets and the pod shot straight up into the Mojave desert sky for almost a minute before reaching its peak altitude and gliding down to earth.

■ United States
Woman, 97, arrested
Police guidelines calling for anyone wanted on a warrant to be arrested have been revamped following the public outcry over an officer's arrest of a 97-year-old woman. The woman was handcuffed and taken to jail for an outstanding traffic warrant. Officers in the Dallas suburb of Highland Park now can use discretion in arrest cases if they have a supervisor's approval. Several factors will be weighed when making that decision, including physical disabilities or old age.

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