■ Japan
Hitler slot machine rejected
Japan has decided to keep Adolf Hitler out of its boisterous gambling parlors, shooting down an attempt to name a pinball slot machine after the Nazi dictator, press reports said yesterday. Manufacturer Fuji Shoji said it wanted a commercial edge by naming its machines after 35 historical figures, including Hitler, the Moses, former US president Abraham Lincoln and some famous samurai. Japan's patent office rejected the proposal for all 35 names saying the trademarks could disrupt public order and violate the spirit of the pacifist constitution. Pachinko, a fast-paced game of pinball that yields cash rewards, is a popular pastime in Japan usually played in loud, smoky parlors.
■ China
Beauty queens quit contest
Ten of 28 beauty pageant contenders walked out of the final of China's Top Model of the World contest, saying it was fixed, a claim the organizers denied, the Beijing Morning Post said yesterday. The boycotters also said the models had been forced to participate in shows outside the competition, including being taken to an "entertainment venue" where some members of the audience wore nothing but pyjamas, the newspaper said. The organizers told the newspaper the competition was fair and that the trip to the "entertainment venue" was a mistake, and that it did not know the nature of the place before the contestants were taken there.
■ Singapore
Death row appeal dismissed
An appeal by a 24-year-old Australian against the death sentence was dismissed on yesterday by Singapore's Court of Appeal. Nguyen Tuong Van, an ethnic Vietnamese who has spent eight months on death row, will be executed by hanging unless President S.R. Nathan grants him clemency. "We will of course now prepare an application for clemency to the president," said lawyer Lex Lasry, an Australian Queen's Counsel. The London-based Amnesty International said it too would seek clemency for Nguyen, a former salesman, as will the Australian government, said high commissioner to Singapore Gary Quinlan.
■ Australia
Man shoots nail into heart
Doctors in Australia removed a nail from a carpenter's heart yesterday after he accidentally shot himself in the chest with a nail gun. Careflight helicopter service spokesman David Cooksley said the nail that pierced the man's aorta was removed by doctors after a mercy dash to a Gold Coast hospital. "He was bleeding into the sac around the heart and that was squashing his heart," Dr Cooksley told Australia's AAP news agency. "He's extremely lucky. He should go and buy a lottery ticket." The helicopter crew had the 37-year-old in hospital within 20 minutes of arriving at the scene.
■ Indonesia
New president sworn in
Ex-general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was sworn in as Indonesia's sixth president yesterday facing huge challenges to revive an economy ravaged by graft and tackle terrorism in the world's largest Muslim nation. Yudhoyono took the oath, cementing his victory in the country's first ever democratic presidential polls, at a heavily guarded ceremony in the capital attended by regional leaders including Australian Prime Minister John Howard. "In the name of Allah I swear I will meet my obligations as president of the republic of Indonesia as fully and as justly as possible," he said as an Islamic official held a copy of the Koran over his head.
■ Belarus
Opposition leader arrested
The police arrested one of Belarus' opposition leaders in Minsk on Tuesday during a second night of street demonstrations against the results of parliamentary elections and a constitutional referendum that would allow the country's president to extend his authoritarian rule. Anatoly Lebedko, chairman of the United Civic Party, one of a coalition of parties that unsuccessfully sought to win seats in parliamentary elections on Sunday, was seized by special police forces in the lobby of a pizza restaurant. He was taken to a police station and then by ambulance to a hospital, having been badly beaten during his arrest, according to officials from his party.
■ United Kingdom
Gay novel wins Booker Prize
Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty carried off the £50,000 (US$90,328) Man Booker prize on Tuesday in the face of strong opposition from rivals. His cuttingly fastidious view of gay lusts and ambition in Margaret Thatcher's Britain beat five other novels, including the runaway favorite, David Mitchell's highly touted Cloud Atlas. Hollinghurst's book was the first gay novel to win the Booker in its 35 years. The Line of Beauty is a sumptuously written parable of the well-upholstered rise, decline and disgraceful fall of Nick Guest, an Oxford postgraduate who is a proud, detached connoisseur of literature, music and style.
■ France
Muslim schoolgirls expelled
Two teenage Muslim schoolgirls have been expelled from their school for ignoring a controversial French law on the wearing of religious insignia in schools. "In the past two months we have had several meetings with the families and with these students," said Michelle Feder-Cunin, headmistress at the Jean Mace school in the eastern French city of Mulhouse. The aim of the meetings had been to explain to the girls the need to comply with the terms of the law, which bans the headscarf and other "conspicuous" religious insignia from state schools.
■ Norway
Butcher named Keikoburger
A young Norwegian with a hankering for an unusual name likely won't win any friends among fans of the Free Willy films. The 20-year-old, who works in a butcher shop, legally changed his middle name to Keikoburger this month, Norwegian media reported on Tuesday. A killer whale called Keiko starred in the trilogy of Free Willy films. Espen Scheide decided to make his Internet moniker "Keikoburger" part of his legal name. The young man, now known as Keikoburger Scheide, said that he happened to see a form for name changes on the Internet, and decided, on a whim, to apply for Keikoburger.
■ France
Racism on the rise
Mounting racism and anti-semitism in France represent "a radical threat to the survival of our democratic system," according to a government-commissioned report presented to the French interior ministry on Tuesday. The 50-page report said "a specific armory" was urgently needed to fight the growing risk of racist and anti-semitic sentiments giving birth to "organized political forces." Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin said the police had recorded 123 racist attacks and 294 threats in the first nine months of the year, as well as 166 anti-semitic attacks and 584 threats. The totals were higher than for the whole of last year.
■ United States
Web transplant allowed
Doctors who postponed a kidney transplant between two men who met through a private organ donation Web site decided to allow the operation to proceed. The operation, scheduled for yesterday, is believed to be the first transplant arranged through a Web site designed to match organ donors with recipients, said Jeremiah Lowney, medical director of MatchingDonors.com, where the two men made contact. Doctors at a hospital in Denver initially postponed the procedure to replace Bob Hickey's kidney, but the hospital's ethics committee said on Tuesday that the operation should be allowed as long as both men pledged that neither was profiting financially.
■ United States
Eight die in plane crash
A commuter plane crashed in woods as it approached an airport in northeastern Missouri, killing at least eight of the 15 people on board, officials said. At least two people on board the flight from St. Louis survived Tuesday's crash and were being treated at a hospital, and five were missing, said Adair County Chief Deputy Larry Logston. Of the 15 onboard, 13 were passengers and two were crew members. The last communication from the plane indicated it was on a normal approach to Kirksville Regional Airport, and there was no mention of any problems, said a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration.
■ United States
Support of Bush costs Arnie
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has revealed that his support for President George W. Bush cost him two weeks without sex, according to the Monterey Herald on Tuesday. The movie-hero-turned-political-star is married to Maria Shriver, a scion of the Kennedy family and a committed Democrat. Asked in an interview what his wife thought of his address last month to the Republican National Convention, Schwarzenegger replied "there was no sex for 14 days. Everything comes with side effects." Schwarzenegger said he was envious of President George W. Bush and John Kerry because of their light debate schedule. "They were lucky. They only had to do it three times," he said. "I have to do it every morning over breakfast."
■ Peru
Super guinea pig developed
After 34 years of patient tinkering, researchers at Peru's most prestigious agrarian university have bred a new culinary export they hope will scamper onto dinner plates throughout the US and the world: the super guinea pig. The animal is a cuddly companion for millions of children in the US. But in Peru, the rodent's birthplace, it remains a vital source of protein in rural communities, a mainstay of Andean folk medicine and a common religious sacrifice to the gods.
■ United States
`Mary Poppins' can't vote
Elections officials knew something was wrong when they got voter registration cards for Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy, Michael Jordan and George Foreman. They notified the Defiance County, Ohio, sheriff, who arrested Chad Staton on Monday on a felony charge of submitting phony voter registration forms. Investigators also were looking into allegations that he was paid with cocaine in exchange for his efforts. Staton, 22, had fraudulently filled out more than 100 voter registration forms, Sheriff David Westrick said. Staton was charged with false registration and was released without bond pending arraignment.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the