■ Hong Kong
Angry brick dropper stopped
A man was arrested after he allegedly dropped bricks from high-rise buildings in a busy shopping district to vent his anger, police said yesterday. Officers caught the 42-year-old suspect preparing to hurl a brick from the 11th floor of a building in the bustling Mong Kok area on Sunday, police spokeswoman Ivy Yue said. "I toss them whenever I'm not in a good mood," The Apple Daily quoted the man as telling police. The news-paper said the man has confessed to dropping bricks off of buildings 11 times in the past three months. No one is known to have been struck, it said.
■ Indonesia
Knife attacker killed
A man who was deemed mentally ill and kept shackled for almost a year in a village escaped and fatally stabbed four people, before survivors of the attack beat him to death, police said. It was unclear how the man, identified as Nance, escaped from a pair of wooden stocks in the village of Karola in Central Sulawesi province late Sunday, a police officer said. The 32-year-old man then grabbed a long knife and blindly slashed at villagers, killing four and wounding 12 others, including a four-year-old girl, the officer said. The extent of their injuries was not immediately known. The survivors then beat Nance to death, the officer said.
■ Australia
Bad vibrations close airport
A buzzing sex toy in a trash can sparked a security scare and shut a regional airport for almost an hour, officials said yesterday. An emer-gency was declared at the airport in Mackay, 800km north of Brisbane after airport staff heard a strange noise coming from the bin, Australian Broadcasting Corp radio said. "It was rather disconcerting when the rubbish bin started humming furiously," cafe-teria manager Lynne Bryant said. Police evacuated the terminal and were about to call in bomb experts when a passenger came forward to identify the contents of a package left in the trash can. A police spokeswoman said the package was identified as an "adult novelty device."
■ Philippines
Fired janitor storms school
A man armed with a shotgun and a pistol barged into a nursery school in Manila yesterday and held the authorities and terrified parents at bay for more than an hour before surrendering, police said. Police said Moises Radan, who had recently been fired from his job as janitor by the Saint Stephen High School, snatched the firearms of school security guards and holed up inside the kinder-garten of the privately-run academy. Police commandos surrounded the building and negotiated with the gunman as anxious parents were kept outside the school gates. About 90 minutes later, police led more than a dozen children out of the building. Police later led out the suspect in handcuffs. No injuries were reported.
■ Singapore
Green tea helps heart
Drinking green tea regularly could dramatically improve a person's chances of survi-ving a heart attack, scientists at the National University of Singapore said yesterday. While the tea has been touted as a panacea for a wide range of conditions, the team has spent two years determining if the drink is actually helpful. The experiments show rats on green tea have a better chance of recovering from a heart attack and their heart muscles would be less damaged by such an attack, the lead researcher said.
■ Germany
Man grows new jaw on back
Doctors in the German city of Kiel have rebuilt a man's face after growing a new jaw on his back. By the fourth week after receiving the pioneering transplant the patient was able to enjoy his first solid meal for nine years. Doctors first made a titanium mesh mould of the jaw replacement, which was filled with bone mineral blocks, genetically engineered human bone protein and bone marrow taken from the patient. The cage was implanted under the skin below the man's right shoulder blade. It was allowed to remain and grow there for seven weeks before being removed. After extracting the graft from the titanium mesh, surgeons screwed it on to the stumps left of the original lower jaw.
■ United Kingdom
Pray for your food: RSPCA
Britons who say a Christian prayer before tucking into their traditional roast on Sunday were being urged to include in their thoughts the animals they will eat. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) has launched a service book, including prayers, dedicated to animals slaughtered for food as well as those used for laboratory tests or killed by hunters. "Clergy don't often appreciate that animal welfare is a Christian duty," said the Reverend Andrew Linzey, a theologian at Oxford University who wrote the booklet.
■ United Kingdom
Kids offered Bambi burgers
Children in the Highlands of Scotland are to be offered a new lunchtime treat to entice them away from fish fingers and smiley faces: the Bambi burger. Venison burgers -- made from locally culled deer -- will be offered to children in the region later this month. On the surface, at least, the logic is irrefutable. Left unchecked, red deer are an environmental menace in northern Scotland and their numbers need to be kept down by culling. Venison is also one of the leanest and healthiest meats available. To add even more merit, meat does not get any more free-range than venison. In short, it is exactly the sort of meat that nutritionists and environmental campaigners say should be more prevalent in our diet. It is also, however, forever associated with Bambi.
■ Germany
Tolkien lord of the books
In Germany's largest-ever poll of people's favorite books, repondents placed The Lord of the Rings at the top of their most-loved literature. The Bible followed in the list of prized publications in TV station ZDF's Das Grosse Lesen. The most popular books featured either escapist, moralistic or self-improvement literature, such as Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince and Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist. Elisabeth Lienert of the University of Bremen said: "The mood of people in Germany is very low at the moment ... People need some sort of way to escape and they are finding the answer in fantasy literature."
■ Tunisia
Italy-bound migrants drown
Tunisian coastguard has found the bodies of 17 migrants who drowned after a boat carrying them to Italy sank off the Tunisian coast, government officials said yesterday. "Seventeen bodies were recovered, 11 people rescued and 47 are still missing," a senior official told reporters. The officials said the boat had 75 illegal migrants -- 70 Moroccans and five Tunisians -- when it sank off the town of Chott Meriem, 170km southeast of Tunis, a few hours after it left the Tunisian shoreline on Sunday toward Italy.
■ United States
Home paper roasts Bush
The editor of the Crawford, Texas weekly that bills itself as US President George W. Bush's hometown newspaper says he has no regrets about endorsing Bush's Democratic opponent John Kerry, even after a dozen businesses pulled their advertising from the publication. "I'd do it again," Leon Smith, publisher of the Lone Star Iconoclast, told the Waco Tribune-Herald in Sunday's edition. The Iconoclast, which endorsed Bush in 2000, said it now supports the Democrat because of disillusionment with the war and Bush's actions on social security, the economy and other issues.
■ United Kingdom
Scientists chase the trots
It's called Montezuma's Revenge, Pharaoh's Curse and Delhi Belly. Now a team of UK scientists have won funding to identify the causes of the intestinal disorder which is thought to strike half of all Western travelers to Third World countries. Researchers at the University of Birmingham and Cambridge's Wellcome Trust Research Institute hope to "sequence" the DNA of the bacterium behind the illness, enterotoxigenic E. coli. The bug is the most common cause of food and water-borne human diarrhea and is thought to claim the lives of 800,000 people in developing countries each year. Study leader Ian Henderson said it was also the biggest medical problem for troops sent overseas, including 60 percent of those sent to Iraq.
■ Bosnia
Nationalists gain in poll
Nationalist parties took the lead in weekend municipal elections in Bosnia, but moderate Serbs made inroads in some traditionally hardline areas, according to preliminary results in a vote marked by a disappointingly low turnout. The results released on Sunday by the electoral commission gave no breakdown in percentages for each party. But they showed that nationalist Serb, Croat or Muslim parties won 99 of the 122 municipalities where counts were completed. The vote for new councils and mayors in a total of 142 municipalities was the first postwar election fully funded and organized by Bosnian authorities.
■ Mauritania
Locusts strip capital city
Some wore buckets on their heads, others swung sticks, and those who could sheltered indoors, praying for an end to the locust invasion which swept through Mauritania's capital, Nouakchott, on Sunday. The swarm devastated crops and the city's few parks, and left residents feeling besieged and impotent in the face of west Africa's worst locust infestation for over a decade. This was Mauritania's third swarm in as many months, a plague which the government said had destroyed up to half the country's crops and 60 percent of its pastures.
■ Belgium
Migrant center opposed
Belgium opposes a German proposal to set up holding centers in north Africa to process asylum and immigration requests, arguing it would not stop illegal migration, Belgium's interior minister said. Germany had set out proposals for immigration "gateways" outside EU borders, notably in north Africa, to deal with asylum and immigration applications. Belgian Interior Minister Patrick Dewael was also reported as saying on Monday that he did not believe different cultures had equal value. "My view is that people are of equal value, but not all cultures are. I cannot accept cultures which still deal in religious circumcision," Dewael said.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of