■ Cambodia
Parents attack child
Black magic may have driven a couple to bite off their daughter's thumb nails and suck her blood, officials said yesterday. Chheng Chhorn, 46, and Srun Yoeung, 37, attacked their 12-year-old child before dawn on Thursday while she was asleep, biting off her thumb nails and a small part of her nose to drink her blood, said Keo Norea Phy, a police official in Kampong Cham province. Relatives had taken her parents to a black magic healer to chase away the evil spirit that was believed to have possessed them, the police official said. "We, the police, just have no idea what offense to charge them with," Keo Norea Phy said. He said they may have been driven by the spirit guarding the altar they kept inside their house.
■ Hong Kong
Green groups push wind
Environmental pressure group Greenpeace yesterday sailed its flagship Rainbow Warrior into Hong Kong at the start of a 10-week Asia-wide clean energy campaign. The tour is aimed at pressing governments to move towards cleaner and safer renewable energy. Greenpeace China campaign director Lo Sze Ping said in a speech on board the Rainbow Warrior: The pressure group says Asia is in a position to avoid the mistakes made by industrialized countries which are heavily dependent on fossil fuels. China is already one of the world's top ten wind-energy markets with 1,300 wind turbines across the nation including 180 in Guangdong, its southernmost province neighboring Hong Kong. "Wind power is already big business in China, but while we welcome achievements like those in Guangdong, they are only the tip of the iceberg," Lo said.
■ Australia
Australians neurotic, too
Germans think they are far more conscientious than they actually are, Canadians are less agreeable than they think and famously relaxed Australians are just as neurotic as the rest of us. The findings come from research into the personality traits of different nationalities published yesterday in the learned journal Science. By comparing perception of national character with the personality profile of individuals, researchers found that the notion of national characteristics is bunkum. "Australians thought they had the lowest levels of neuroticism than any person in the world," said psychologist Jane Shakespeare-Finch, who led the Australian component of the research.
■ Iraq
Car bomb kills child
A car bomb exploded outside a building housing members of a Shiite militia associated with the Iraqi government yesterday, killing a child, police and witnesses said. The early morning blast also wounded six people in the southern city of Basra, a hospital source said. The explosion left a large crater and damaged a building housing members of the Badr movement, which is linked to one of the main Shiite parties in the US-backed-government. The attack came as tensions rise among rival Shiite groups and political parties from across Iraq's volatile sectarian divide as they jockey for position ahead of December elections.
■ United States
Bennett defends remark
Former Education Secretary William Bennett blamed the news media for distorting his remarks about aborting black babies to reduce crime, saying he had intended to make "a bad argument in order to put it down." Bennett, making his first public speech Saturday since the comment aired on his radio show last month, said the meaning of his remark linking the crime rate with black abortions was reversed in many news reports. "I was putting forward a bad argument in order to put it down," Bennett said, drawing sustained applause from nearly 4,500 people attending the Bakersfield Business Conference.
■ Russia
Police battle gunmen
Russian police and security forces battled a band of gunmen for more than two hours yesterday in Makhachkala, the capital of the restive Dagestan region. Two police officers and up to five suspected militants were killed, authorities said. The gunmen were discovered Saturday and police and Federal Security Service officers blockaded them in a single-story home in the center of the city, regional Interior Ministry spokeswoman Anzhela Martirosova said. Police and security forces took control of the building after more than two hours of fighting, killing four or five gunmen, Martirosova said.
■ Serbia
Massacre trial to begin
The trial of three Serb former Yugoslav army officers over the 1991 Vukovar hospital massacre of over 250 people in Croatia is due to start tomorrow at the UN war crimes court for the former Yugoslavia. The capture of Vukovar by rebel Serb forces and the Serb dominated Yugoslav army JNA in 1991 was a pivotal event at the start of the 1991-95 war in Croatia that pitted Croats against Belgrade-backed Croatian Serbs. The so-called Vukovar Three, Veselin Sljivancanin, Mile Mrksic and Mile Radic, are charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity including murder and torture.
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Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
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