■ South Korea
Executive said to defect
A North Korean living in Hungary and three people believed to be his family have arrived in the South in an apparent rare defection of an official from one of Pyongyang's state-run firms, news reports said yesterday. Most North Korean defectors are ordinary citizens who flee to neighboring China and then seek passage to the South. Only a handful of the elite who work for North Korean firms overseas have ever defected through Europe. The North Korean company official and the others defected in Hungary and were being questioned by Seoul authorities, Yonhap news agency quoted a South Korean government official as saying.
■ China
Go vegetarian to avoid flu
Scared about bird flu? Then the only really safe way to protect yourself is to go vegetarian, an animal rights group said on yesterday. Headlining a new Chinese and English-language Web site (www.avianflu.cn) "Avian flu: it's your fault," the group says it is drawing attention to unsavory factory farming practices. The cramming together of thousands of chickens in buildings where the birds are never allowed outside was an ideal breeding ground for disease, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) said in a statement. "Avian flu is just one symptom of a very sick and cruel industry," it quoted PETA Asia-Pacific director Jason Baker as saying.
■ AFghanistan
Bombers die in botched blast
Two suicide bombers were killed in Afghanistan yesterday when one of their bombs went off prematurely, a police official said. The pair were killed while walking along a road on the outskirts of the southern city of Kandahar, which has been hit by a wave of violence in recent months, including suicide attacks on foreign troops. "We've established that the two were suicide attackers and were killed prematurely by their own bombs because of some technical fault," provincial police chief Maalik Wayezi told reporters.
■ Australia
No grounds for whaling
A new study shows there is no justification for scientific whaling programs under which thousands of the mammals have been killed in the name of research, Australia's environment minister said yesterday. "[The 10-year research project] demonstrates once and for all, if it needed to be demonstrated, that the so-called scientific programs of the countries like Japan, Norway and Iceland, are a sham," Campbell told reporters. "Japan claims that the major objectives for its scientific whaling programs are to monitor the Antarctic marine ecosystem," Campbell said. That "is precisely the type of data that Australia has now collected" without killing any whales, he added.
■ New Zealand
US blocks Web porn zone
The US has blocked a move to create a ".xxx" Internet address to take the bulk of pornographic sites on the World Wide Web, according to a newspaper report yesterday. ICANN, the international body that manages the Internet, was earlier reported likely to approve the new address, at a meeting that opened on Monday in Wellington. Stuart Lawley, chairman of Canada's ICM Registry, which developed the proposal, was quoted in the Dominion Post as blaming "religious conservatives in the US that appear to have access to the powers that be" for blocking it. Lawley said it was the third time the US had delayed the creation of ".xxx" addresses.
■ Croatia
Crank caller collared
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