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World News Quick Take

■ Indonesia
Unrest on the menu
Students in Jakarta are selling snacks named after human rights violations they blame on Indonesian presidential candidate Wiranto in a bid to counter his campaign-related meal deals. The former military chief, one of five candidates in the July 5 election, has sponsored roadside food stalls that offer cheap meals. Students have set up their own stall near Jakarta's Bung Karno University offering items like Unrest Juice, referring to 1998 riots in Jakarta, as well as Human Rights Violation Noodles, Semanggi Toast and Trisakti Porridge, the last two named after incidents in which student demonstrators were killed in 1998 and 1999. Wiranto is also accused of crimes against humanity in East Timor in 1999, denies the allegations.

■ South Korea
Roh appointee approved
Parliament voted yesterday to approve former political dissident Lee Hae-chan as prime minister, setting the stage for a cabinet reshuffle. Lee, 51, is a five-term member of parliament who was imprisoned for years as a political prisoner for opposing South Korea's military rulers in the 1970s and 1980s. He helped set up the ruling Uri Party of President Roh Moo-hyun. Lee is expected to name culture, health and unifi-cation ministers in the coming days. Roh's Uri Party has a thin majority of 152 seats in parliament, meaning Lee also received support from opposition parties.

■ Hong Kong
Maid gets overdue pay
A housewife has been prosecuted for paying her Indonesian maid just US$15 a week, or one-sixth the legal minimum wage, a news report said yesterday. A policeman's wife, Mickey Chiu, gave maid Siti Mariyam just US$807 in wages over the course of a year, the South China Morning Post reported. When Chiu pleaded not guilty to underpaying her maid earlier this year, the labor department flew Mariyam back from Indonesia to testify against her former employer. Chiu was convicted and on Monday fined US$5,600 for the offense, the highest penalty ever recorded.

■ China
Dolphin reserve set up
A nature reserve will be set up in a central Chinese lake for the highly endangered Yangtze River dolphin, the world's only freshwater dolphin, the government said yesterday. The 6,800-hectare reserve in Poyang, China's largest freshwater lake, is a last-ditch effort to save the species from pollution and other damage to its habitat. The animals are often accidentally caught by fishermen's nets and hooks. The dolphins, once plentiful in the Yangtze, now number fewer than 2,000, and the population is declining at an average rate of 7.3 percent a year, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. Poyang, a vast freshwater lake and wetlands area, is home to most of the surviving population.

■ Hong Kong
Gucci's health worsens
Hong Kong's celebrity crocodile is suffering from a potentially fatal disease after being "frightened" and confined since its capture three weeks ago, a press report said yesterday. The 1.5m female croc named Gucci is suffering from capture myopathy from being kept in a confined area, the Ming Pao daily cited Idy Wong (王麗賢) of the Kadoorie Farm nature reserve as saying. She added the reptile was still refusing to eat and has been injected with vitamins to boost its immune system.

■ United States
Ties with Libya resumed
The US is resuming direct diplomatic ties with Libya even while exploring reports that Muammar Qaddafi took part in a plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia's crown prince. The announcement was made as Assistant Secretary of State William Burns held an unannounced meeting Monday with Qaddafi in Tripoli. Burns inaugurated a new US liaison office in the Libyan capital. He said Libya would take steps to establish a diplomatic office in Washington. Allegations of a plot against the Saudi prince were mentioned separately by an American Muslim leader jailed in Virginia, on federal charges of having illegal financial dealings with Libya, and by a Libyan intelligence officer currently in Saudi custody.

■ Netherlands
Babic given 13 years
A UN war crimes tribunal yesterday sentenced Milan Babic, the wartime leader of Croatia's rebellious Serbs, to 13 years imprisonment, saying his role in ethnic cleansing showed "ruth-lessness and savagery." Babic, 48, was convicted in January of one count of persecution for the seven-month campaign against non-Serbs in the self-proclaimed Croatian Repub-lic of Krajina. Hundreds of civilians were executed or murdered in Krajina and about 80,000 non-Serbs, mostly Croats and a few Muslims, were expelled. Babic pleaded guilty to the single count in a deal in which prosecutors dropped four other charges of murder, cruelty and the wanton destruction of villages during the war in Croatia. The sentence was harsher than the 11-year recommendation by the prosecution.

■ France
Court upholds scarf ban
The European Court of Human Rights ruled yester-day that Turkish state universities had the right to ban the Muslim headscarf to uphold the principle of the division of church and state. In what could be a prece-dent-setting decision, the Strasbourg-based court rejected appeals by two Turkish students who said the ban and their subse-quent exclusion from class violated their freedom of religion. Muslim Turkey argued before the court that headscarves violated the secular nature of its state. France has barred girls in state schools from wearing headscarves for the same reason while Germany has outlawed them for teachers.

■ Congo
Aid supplies stolen
Recent clashes between the government and armed groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo allowed looters to get away with US$1.5 million in humani-tarian supplies, equipment and vehicles, the UN said on Monday. The supplies and much needed equipment and vehicles belonged to 20 aid agencies, forcing some of them to suspend their activities, the UN said. It said a total of 193 staff from relief agencies, both UN and non-governmental organi-zations, had been relocated to safer areas following violence in Congolese cities.

■ Kenya
Sudan talks underway
Sudanese government and rebel officials have begun negotiating ceasefire details as part of a comprehensive agreement to end a 21-year war, chief mediator Lazaro Sumbeiywo said. The talks in Naivasha seek to set a ceasefire date, hammer out details on peacekeeping and monitoring, as well as demobilization of troops and their reintegration into civilian life, Sumbeiywo said on Monday.

■ United Kingdom
Qat may improve fertility
Qat, the plant chewed for the euphoria-inducing properties of its leaves, may increase the potency of men's sperm, scientists said yesterday. Qat has been widely used in east Africa and the Arabian peninsula for centuries, and as people from those regions have come to live in the UK, they have brought the chewing habit with them. Some seven tonnes of the leaves, categorized as vegetables, are legally imported into the UK every week. Researchers at King's College London have now found that immersing sperm in chemicals extracted from qat stimulates them to become more active more quickly, and thus more likely to fertilize an egg.

■ United States
Drug makes female rats flirt
A drug that seems to drive female rats mad for sex may offer the first real scientific aphrodisiac for women, US and Canadian researchers said on Monday. The drug, Palatin Technologies' PT-141, is being developed for use to fight impotence in men, but tests showed it also aroused female rats. "PT-141 may be the first identified pharmacological agent with the capability to treat female sexual desire disorders," they wrote in their report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

■ Kuwait
Kuwait renews ties with Iraq
Kuwait has officially renewed diplomatic relations with Iraq after they had been severed since Baghdad's 1990 invasion of the emirate, the Kuwait News Agency reported yesterday. Kuwait announced the resumption of ties with Iraq late Monday following the handover of power the same day by the US-led coalition authority to a newly appointed interim Iraqi government. Kuwait will appoint an ambassador to Iraq soon, a source at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs told the agency. Ties with Baghdad were frozen after Saddam Hussein's troops invaded Kuwait in 1990 and occupied the emirate for seven months, leading to the first Gulf War.

■ Iraq
Insurgents release hostages
Turkey yesterday said three Turkish hostages held under threat of execution by an al-Qaeda linked militant group in Iraq had been freed. "We only know they have been released," a Turkish government official told reporters, saying he had no other immediate details. Al Jazeera television, monitored in Dubai, said a group led by suspected al-Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had freed the three. The group had kidnapped the three civilian workers last week and threatened to behead them yesterday unless Turks stopped working for US-led forces in Iraq. State-run Anatolian news agency said Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul confirmed the release of the three hostages. "Jama'at al-Tawhid and Jihad announces the release of the Turkish hostages for the sake of Muslims in Turkey and their demonstrations against [US President George W.] Bush," a masked man said on a video recording aired by Jazeera.

■ United States
Buckley stepping down
William Buckley Jr. is stepping away from the National Review, the conservative magazine he founded nearly a half-century ago, according to a published report. Buckley, 78, is planning to relinquish his controlling shares in the magazine to a board of trustees he has selected, The New York Times reported on its Web site on Monday night. The magazine will continue to publish his syndicated column.

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