■ Pakistan
Tourist's body discovered
The body of a murdered South African national was found in a plastic bag on the outskirts of the northwestern city of Peshawar on Sunday, police said. The body of the 26-year-old man was found in the plastic bag in Peshawar's Baboo Garhi suburbs, local police investigator Kachkol Khan said. According to the passport found in his pocket the man was identified as Kenneth Scott Andrew, a resident of Durban, Khan said, adding that he had entered Peshawar on January 1 this year on tourist visa. Police are now treating the case as murder, Khan said. Doctors who carried out the post mortem on the body said that the man had no wounds and they suspected that he had been poisoned.
■ Vietnam
Mouse delays flight
A small white mouse running around a Boeing 777 delayed a Vietnam Airlines flight to Tokyo for more than fours, newspapers reported yesterday. A passenger saw the mouse on the aircraft, which had arrived in Hanoi from the central city of Danang at 10pm on Saturday and was scheduled to continue to Japan. Reports in state-run newspapers said the passengers went to a hotel and luggage was removed during the search for the mouse. The rodent was found early on Sunday and the aircraft took off at 4am.
■ China
Play-away official expelled
A provincial Communist Party official has been expelled from the party for having too many children by both his wife and a mistress, a state-run newspaper reported yesterday. The Beijing News said Qin Huaiwen was kicked out of the party because an investigation found he had three daughters with his wife, and a son and a daughter by his 31-year-old mistress, who was almost two decades younger than Qin. Qin, who ran a government construction office in Yulin, Shaanxi Province, had been his mistress' boss, the newspaper said. His family situation was exposed after the mistress complained about a lack of child support, it said.
■ South Korea
Wolf cloners probed
Scientists disgraced for massive fraud in stem cell studies are being investigated for possibly manipulating data in a paper on producing the world's first cloned wolves, officials said yesterday. "We will investigate suspected data inflation to increase the cloning success rate," Kuk Young, chief of Seoul National University's office of research affairs, told reporters. Lee Byung-chun, a professor who helped lead the wolf cloning, has asked the periodical Cloning and Stem Cells to issue a correction on the paper, but denied data was intentionally massaged, Kuk said. The team last month showed off 18-month old Korean wolves named Snuwolf and Snuwolffy.
■ China
Modern life affects infertility
Pollution, stress, smoking and multiple abortions are all leading to a rise in infertility, which may affect up to one-tenth of Chinese couples, Xinhua news agency said yesterday. Sperm counts had fallen noticeable since the 1970s, the report quoted Wang Yifei of Shanghai's Jiaotong University as telling a symposium on reproduction health in Hangzhou. Rising wealth resulting from the country's headlong economic boom had contributed to the problem in helping promote unhealthy lifestyles, said one academic. "The problem deserves attention because it threatens the quality and structure of our future population," said Huang Hefeng of Zhejiang University.
■ United States
Cartoonist Johnny Hart dies
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