■ Australia
Election brawl erupts
Shotgun blasts wounded four people when tensions linked to the Iraq election boiled over into a brawl among about 100 Iraqi expatriates on the street, police said yesterday. Some Iraqis in Australia have questioned the legitimacy of the election, saying their homeland is under occupation and jeering at voters who cast absentee ballots. Fights broke out Saturday and Sunday among about 100 Iraqis and drew several shotgun blasts, damaging several cars and a shop and leaving four people with minor ricochet wounds. Voting hours were extended at Auburn after a brawl and a bomb scare halted voting for an hour. Despite the disruptions, officials said 94.6 percent of the 11,806 voters registered to vote in Australia.
■ Tajikistan
Car bomb at ministry
A car loaded with explosives blew up in the Tajik capital Dushanbe yesterday morning, killing the driver and wounding three people, the emergencies minister said. Three officers of the ministry were wounded and five cars in the area damaged in the blast in Dushanbe, Emergencies Minister Mirzo Ziyoyev said. Earlier, the deputy emergencies minister had said about a dozen people were wounded. Interior Minister Humdin Sharipov launched an investigation into whether the blast was a terrorist act.
■ China
Officials caught for graft
Chinese authorities have caught 44 officials in Gansu Province suspected of misusing US$930 million dollars as part of a widening crackdown on graft, state press reported. An official audit last year found that massive amounts of state allocated capital for public works in one of China's poorest provinces had been diverted or embezzled by provincial officials. Among the largest cases of corruption, nearly 970 million yuan (US$117 million dollars) meant for construction works had not been used, while another 425 million yuan has been embezzled by the Gansu Provincial Bureau of Transportation. Auditors discovered that 25.28 million yuan meant to compensate residents evicted from their land to make way for road construction had not been handed out. Another 7.83 million yuan in requests for funding were found to be fraudulent.
■ Australia
Aboriginal deaths high
The government must do more to combat infant mortality among Aborigines, whose babies die of unexplained causes at a rate six times higher than other Australian children, an expert on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) said. National SIDS Council of Australia chief executive Jan Carey said SIDS among Aborigines was six times higher than the national average. The SIDS rate for Aborigines is 4.49 deaths per 1,000 live birth compared with the national average of 0.73.
■ Cambodia
Dwarf buffalo on tour
A Cambodian farmer thinks he has found an act that will hit the big time -- a dwarf buffalo that impersonates a famous local comedian. Standing just 50cm high at the shoulder although he is already a year old, the baby buffalo is the bovine equivalent of one of Cambodia's pre-eminent comics, the diminutive Loto, with whom he shares a name, according to its owner, Son Yan. So convinced is the 37-year-old farmer of buffalo Loto's star qualities that he has sold his other four buffalo and put the young bull's story on the front page of a national newspaper, hoping agents will beat a path to his door.
■ Colombia
Militia surrender weapons
A group of 126 right-wing militia fighters surrendered their weapons in northeast Colombia, the latest paramilitary demobilization ahead of an international conference next week that will take stock of the much-criticized peace process. The disbanding on Sunday of the Southeast Antioquia unit of the United Self-Defense Forces, or AUC, in the rural municipality of Ciudad Bolivar, 250km northeast of Bogota, brought to at least 4,700 the number of AUC fighters who have demobilized in the past two years.
■ Germany
Baltic fish poisonous: report
Fish and seafood taken from parts of the Baltic are so contaminated with carcinogenic chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenals (PCBs), that they should not be sold for human consumption, a new report by the World Wildlife Fund has warned. The report cited evidence that from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, 31kg of PCBs -- a banned chemical which disrupts hormones and has been linked to cancer -- accumulated annually in fish caught in the Baltic. Salmon, sea trout, cod and turbot are showing signs of reproductive problems, probably linked to the poisons in the sea.
■ France
Tunnel inferno examined
A major trial aimed at establishing responsibility for the 1999 inferno in the Mont-Blanc tunnel linking France and Italy that killed 39 people was set to begin yesterday in eastern France. Sixteen individuals and companies are defendants in the manslaughter case, including the driver of the truck which caught fire half-way through the 11km tunnel through the Alps on March 24, 1999. The blaze spread to 24 other vehicles backed up behind the stopped truck, creating intense heat and deadly, thick smoke. The truck's manufacturer, Volvo, the Italian and French companies that manage the tunnel, safety regulators and the mayor of the nearby town of Chamonix are among the others in the dock.
■ Greece
Temple faces the chop
The remains of a fifth-century BC temple, whose carvings conjured the golden age of Athens, is the subject of a row between potential developers and conservationists. With Greece's powerful Central Archaeological Council (Kas) pondering whether to allow building on the site, conservationists fear one of Athens' most sacred places is headed for extinction. The Ionic temple was dedicated to the goddess Artemis Agrotera (the huntress). Overlooking a boulevard facing the Acropolis, Socrates and his disciples are believed to have debated the tenets of philosophy there.
■ United Kingdom
Some people repel insects
Certain people emit "masking odors" that make them less attractive to mosquitoes, a British researcher claims after studying similar effects in cows. James Logan, a research student from the Rothamsted Research Institute in Hertfordshire near London, found that some people gave off odors that prevented mosquitoes from finding them. Biotech-nology and Biological Sciences Research chief executive Julia Goodfellow said, "Discovering what makes a person more attractive to mosquitoes presents scientists with the opportunity to develop safe, naturally occurring insect repellents."
■ United States
232 contractors killed
At least 232 employees of private contractors have been killed in Iraq while working on US military and reconstruction contracts, according to a quarterly report to Congress. "Iraq's unsettled security environment continues to present grave risks for contractors and employees," said the report released by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. Labor Department figures reported that US contractor deaths rose 93 percent during the fourth quarter of last year and said attacks on sites, employees and construction projects averaged 22 per week until Jan. 5.
■ Iraq
RAF plane crashes
As many as 15 British military personnel died Sunday when the transport plane they were travelling in crashed in central Iraq, the military said. The Royal Air Force C-130 Hercules, which can carry up to 128 troops, went down near Baghdad at 4:40pm. Military sources said the number killed in the crash was "around 10," with it "highly unlikely" to be more than 15. The cause of the crash was unclear.
■ Chile
Investigation deadline set
The Chilean supreme court has set a six-month deadline for the completion of hundreds of investigations into crimes allegedly committed by former members of Augusto Pinochet's military government. The ruling, which orders that by July investigators must either file charges or terminate the inquiries in 365 cases against former members of the armed forces, has incensed human rights activists. Many of the accused are alleged to have committed murder, kidnap and torture during the late 1970s. "The investigations are starting to show real progress; it is a false brake to put a time limit on them," said Joyce Horman, widow of American journalist Charles Horman, who was kidnapped and killed in 1973.
■ Canada
Church fights same-sex law
The Roman Catholic Church has launched a campaign to defeat a bill that would legalize same-sex marriage in Canada, which the government says will be introduced early this month when a deeply divided Parliament reconvenes. The bill is largely symbolic, because provincial and territorial courts have already expanded marriage rights in jurisdictions where 85 percent of Canadians live. But it will be the first time an elected body will vote on the issue, and polls show the population to be about evenly split. The church and Roman Catholic groups, allied with Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Orthodox Jewish groups, are revving up their strongest political effort in decades in what the government calls a challenge to the separation of church and state.
■ Spain
ETA bombs hotel
A bomb exploded in a seaside hotel in southeast Spain on Sunday, slightly injuring a tourist, after a warning call in the name of the Basque separatist group ETA. The bomb, the second claimed by ETA in two weeks, was hidden in a backpack and left in a courtyard in the hotel in Denia, near the resorts of Benidorm and Alicante. About 160 people, including several British tourists, were evacuated before the explosion, but one guest's eardrums were damaged by the blast. The blast, which ripped a hole 10m by 5m in an outside wall and shattered windows, followed a warning call to the Basque roadside assistance authority in the name of ETA, a spokesman there 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
‘DELUSIONAL’: Targeting the families of Hamas’ leaders would not push the group to change its position or to give up its demands for Palestinians, Ismail Haniyeh said Israeli aircraft on Wednesday killed three sons of Hamas’ top political leader in the Gaza Strip, striking high-stakes targets at a time when Israel is holding delicate ceasefire negotiations with the militant group. Hamas said four of the leader’s grandchildren were also killed. Ismail Haniyeh’s sons are among the highest-profile figures to be killed in the war so far. Israel said they were Hamas operatives, and Haniyeh accused Israel of acting in “the spirit of revenge and murder.” The deaths threatened to strain the internationally mediated ceasefire talks, which appeared to gain steam in recent days even as the sides remain far
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