■ China
Police flush out suspect
Police used a high-pressure water cannon to flush out a murder suspect holed up in a hospital ward, local media reported on Wednesday. Police in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, cornered Yu Wenyi in an eighth-floor hospital ward on Tuesday, after pursuing him in connection with the murder of his mother-in-law and son, the Liaoning Evening News said. Yu perched himself on a window ledge, the paper said. After trying to persuade him to surrender, firemen to opened fire with the hose.
■ China
Bomb explodes in kitchen
Five villagers, including three children, were killed when a discarded bomb they were salvaging for scrap metal exploded in their kitchen, Chinese state media reported. Two men trying to dismantle the 70cm-long bomb and three young boys were killed in the blast, Xinhua news agency quoted local sources as saying late on Wednesday. Two girls buried in the rubble of the house, in northwest China's Ningxia autonomous region, were rescued with only slight injuries.The men had brought the rusted bomb home from Inner Mongolia and had hoped to sell it as scrap metal.
■ South Korea
Hotline with China set up
The government agreed to set up an emergency military hotline with China to avoid possible maritime clashes, a news report said yesterday. The hotline between the two countries' navies and air forces will "help avoid clashes in the West Sea over illegal fishing," Chosun Ilbo quoted a Chinese official as saying. Chinese fishing boats frequently cross the disputed western maritime border between South Korea and North Korea, an ally of China's.
■ Australia
Arrests follow weapons loss
Three people, including an army captain, were arrested over the theft of eight rocket launchers after a series of police raids across Sydney yesterday. The arrests follow a long-running investigation into the disappearance of the M-72 shoulder-fired rocket launchers, designed to be used against tanks and armored vehicles, since 2002. Only one of the weapons has been recovered. New South Wales Police Deputy Commissioner Terry Collins said two men, aged 46 and 39, and a woman aged 63, had been detained after raids early yesterday. One of the men was an army captain and the other was a former member of the military.
■ Hong Kong
Former official arrested
The former transport minister of Macau, arrested in December for suspected corruption, has amassed a personal fortune of more than US$100 million, graft investigators said yesterday. They said Ao Man-long (歐文龍) had assets worth at least 57 times more than his family's income, including cash, bank deposits, watches and jewelry, a 300-bottle wine cellar and expensive delicacies like abalone and shark's fin. The Commission Against Corruption of Macau (CCAC), which has not yet concluded its investigation, said Ao awarded contractors public construction projects in return for kickbacks.
■ Indonesia
Rare rabbit spotted
One of the world's rarest rabbits was spotted for just the third time in the past 35 years, underscoring the importance of conserving the region's threatened rain forests, a conservation group said yesterday. Two grainy images shot by a camera trap at night show the 0.5m-long Sumatran striped rabbit nibbling on forest undergrowth in the Bukit Barisan National Park, said the World Conservation Union. The rare species of rabbit was last photographed in 2000, and the last sighting by a scientist was in 1972. The rabbit is only known to exist in the forests of Sumatra, and is listed as critically endangered by the World Conservation Union.
■ Afghanistan
Authorities conduct search
Authorities searched yesterday for two French aid workers and three Afghan guides, whom the Taliban say they have kidnapped. Taliban spokesman Qari Mohammad Yusuf said by satellite telephone on Wednesday that the insurgents had kidnapped the group in the southwest province of Nimroz on Tuesday. The French man and woman, who work for a French aid agency, went missing along with a local driver and two other Afghans in a region that has long been associated with drug runners, but has also suffered a rash of Taliban attacks recently.
■ China
School offers golf classes
A government-run primary school in Beijing has become the first in the country to offer golf classes, a sport often attacked for its elitist overtones, state media reported yesterday. The Zhongguanxun Third School has brought in instructors from a local golf club to teach optional classes for an extra fee of 3,000 yuan (US$388), the Beijing Times reported. The fee is about one 10th of the average salary of an urban worker in Beijing, based on the latest official income figures. Separate courses in the classroom on the history and understanding of golf will be mandatory for third-graders next semester.
■ Spain
Fake kidnap victim detained
Police have detained a Romanian woman who faked her own kidnapping to keep her boyfriend from discovering she had been unfaithful, police said on Wednesday. Mariana Catalina, 26, told police last week in the southeastern city of Orihuela that she had been sexually assaulted and held against her will by a group of men, a police statement said. She said one of the men involved in the kidnapping had lured her to Spain several years ago with a promise of a job and then forced her to work as a prostitute after she arrived in the country, it added.
■ Israel
Elephant kills matriarch
A 7 tonne bull elephant charged and killed a 46-year-old female elephant half his weight as visitors at a nature park looked on in horror. Officials at the Safari park near Tel Aviv said they were unable to stop Yossi, a 33-year-old male, from attacking Atari, the captive herd's matriarch and trampling her to death on Monday. "What happened to Yossi, who grew up all his life with Atari and they always got along?" Yigal Horowitz, a veterinarian at the park, told Israel Radio. "Here and there were small fights, but they never had a fight like this one."
■ Russia
Warlord associate slain
Security forces killed a senior associate of slain Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev on Wednesday and killed or wounded nearly a dozen other wanted gunmen, Chechen police said. Suleiman Elmurzayev was killed in what Chechnya's Interior Ministry said was a special operation in the Vedeno region, southeast of Grozny. Ten other gunmen were wounded or killed during the operation, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported. No further details were released. Police said Elmurzayev was involved in the May 2004 bombing at a Grozny sports stadium that killed the Kremlin-backed Chechen president Akhmad Kadyrov.
■ France
Sarkozy caught speeding
When you talk tough on crime, make law and order a central plank of your election campaign and are nicknamed the country's "top cop," you might at least set a good example. Not so presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, whose car was allegedly snapped speeding in a sting operation by a motoring magazine. Auto Hebdo claims to have followed the main presidential candidates' chauffeur-driven vehicles for a month. Sarkozy -- responsible for introducing hundreds of extra radar traps and cameras across the country -- topped the list of worst offenders for speeding. His car was seen driving at 130kph in a 70kph zone.
■ Ireland
Officials trapped in elevator
Six senior government ministers were forced to call in the army after spending a sweaty half hour trapped in a tiny lift. Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern, who spent 30 minutes cooped up with cabinet colleagues, including Finance Minister Brian Cowen, said they had passed the time with "all sorts of jokes" but the atmosphere soon soured. "Literally it's only standing room. You can't move, to be honest," Ahern told RTE radio on Wednesday. "After about 20 minutes it wasn't very nice, it was getting quite hot," he said of his time spent with Cowen and the ministers for health, education, agriculture and communications.
■ United States
Horserider charged with DUI
A woman used a horse to ram a police car during a midnight ride through Sylvania, Alabama, and was charged with driving under the influence, police said. Driving under the influence (DUI) charges can apply even if the vehicle has four legs, Chief Brad Gregg said on Tuesday. Police received a call around midnight on Saturday about someone riding a horse on a street, Gregg said. An officer found Melissa Byrum York on horseback, Gregg said. After ramming the police car with the horse and riding away, York tried to jump off but caught her foot in a stirrup, Gregg said.
■ United States
Blue cheese coats canal
A freight train derailed in the Southern California desert, coating a canal with blue-cheese salad dressing and concrete sealant in what officials said on Wednesday was a spill that could take weeks to clean. Spills of sealant, blue-cheese dressing and other food products made it into a canal about 1.5km from the north shore of the Salton Sea, California's largest lake, hazardous materials specialist Robert Becker said. The Coachella Canal was mostly smeared with salad dressing. "There was blue cheese -- a lot of it," Becker said. Nineteen cars in the 52-car Los Angeles-bound train derailed for unknown reasons on Tuesday afternoon.
■ Paraguay
Search for four suspended
Police suspended a large-scale search for a Japanese businessman, his secretary and two local residents reportedly kidnapped by gunmen on a rural highway, saying they were concerned about the victims' safety. The Japanese nationals missing since the attack last weekend in the east were identified by police as Hirokasu Ota, an executive employed by agroindustrial company Victoria, and his secretary, Savako Shuma Takayama. Authorities said they were stopped at gunpoint along with a passing police officer, Rafael Ramos, and his girlfriend, Nancy Jimenez.
■ United Kingdom
Charles feels vindicated
Prince Charles says his long-running campaign to protect rare plants and livestock has been vindicated, despite facing a "chorus of ridicule." Charles, an environmental campaigner who owns an organic farm, said it was no surprise that there had been a shift back towards protecting heritage livestock and crops. He blamed EU laws for a sharp fall in the number and variety of plant seeds on sale and said they risked leading to a rise in plant diseases. "Hundreds of varieties have been lost," he said in a BBC interview released on Wednesday. "Wonderful things that our forefathers took enormous trouble to develop, which in many cases are resistant to all sorts of prevalent diseases."
■ Russia
Chechens get new president
Chechnya inaugurated a 30-year-old amateur boxer as its new president yesterday. Ramzan Kadyrov, a former rebel turned Moscow ally who has his own militia force, has been praised by allies for restoring order to the troubled region and accused by rights groups of murdering and kidnapping civilians. He swore to uphold Chechen laws during a lavish ceremony in the town of Gudermes, his clan stronghold 30km east of the regional capital Grozny. "My father often said to me power is not an end in itself but is a tool to achieve something else," he said in reference to Akhmad Kadyrov, the Russian-installed Chechen president assassinated in Grozny in 2004. Kadyrov has effectively ruled Chechnya since his father's death, but he could only take over the presidency once he reached the minimum required age of 30 earlier this year.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
‘POLITICAL EARTHQUAKE’: Leo Varadkar said he was ‘no longer the best person’ to lead the nation and was stepping down for political, as well as personal, reasons Leo Varadkar on Wednesday announced that he was stepping down as Ireland’s prime minister and leader of the Fine Gael party in the governing coalition, citing “personal and political” reasons. Pundits called the surprise move, just 10 weeks before Ireland holds European Parliament and local elections, a “political earthquake.” A general election has to be held within a year. Irish Deputy Prime Minister Micheal Martin, leader of Fianna Fail, the main coalition partner, said Varadkar’s announcement was “unexpected,” but added that he expected the government to run its full term. An emotional Varadkar, who is in his second stint as prime minister and at
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia