■ CHINA
Baby traffickers caught
Police have broken up a baby trafficking ring, arresting 47 people and rescuing 40 infants, state media said on Friday. The operation began in late May after police questioned four women on a train, each holding a baby in her arms, Xinhua news agency said, citing officers with the Nanjing railway police office. One woman confessed that they had bought the babies in Yunnan Province and planned to sell them to a person in Shandong Province. Authorities arrested 10 suspects in the two provinces and learned that the gang had already sold 27 newborns, Xinhua reported.
■ THAILAND
Viper kills cancer patient
A cancer patient lying on a gurney waiting to be treated was fatally bitten by a snake at a hospital, the hospital said on Friday. A pit viper bit Wasant Pinpluemjit, who suffered liver cancer, last week at Kanchanaburi Memorial Hospital in Kanchanaburi Province. He died on Tuesday. Gurneys at the hospital, in a semi-rural area, are usually laid outside the hospital buildings to wait for incoming patients, and the snake apparently slithered onto the gurney when it was outdoors.
■ MALAYSIA
City rewards dog-catching
A Malaysian town won't let sleeping dogs lie on its streets anymore. Officials launched a competition earlier this week offering cash and other prizes to people who catch stray dogs in the town of Selayang in central Selangor State. Razif Zainol Abidin, an official of the Selayang Municipal Council said the council will pay 20 ringgit (US$5.70) for each dog that is delivered alive to their local community associations. The council will also spend a total of 39,000 ringgit to build playgrounds or other projects for the three community associations that catch the most dogs, with a minimum of 150 dogs each within six months, Razif said. So far, no dogs have been caught through the competition.
■ PAKISTAN
Two women beheaded
Suspected Islamic militants beheaded two women in northwest Pakistan after accusing them of being prostitutes, police said. Villagers spotted the decapitated bodies on the outskirts of Bannu, where extremists seek to impose Taliban-style social norms, a police official said on Friday. The two women, 28 and 30, were riding an auto rickshaw when five armed men wearing masks overpowered them, bundled them into a car and drove away, he said, quoting witnesses. A note found with the bodies accused them of "doing acts of obscenity," a term meaning prostitution. Extremists have bombed shops selling music and movies in North West Frontier Province, and barbers have been warned not to shave customers' beards -- moves similar to those imposed by the Taliban in Afghanistan.
■ CHINA
Doctors to remove needles
Chinese doctors will try to remove 26 needles found throughout the body of a young woman which they suspect were inserted just after she was born to kill her for not being a boy. Luo Cuifen, a 29-year-old farmer from Yunnan Province, said two needles had been pulled from her abdomen when she was a young child. "At the time, we thought my grandparents did it because they wanted a boy," the Beijing Morning Post on Friday quoted her as saying. Luo said she never felt the needles and they were found by x-ray when she went into hospital complaining of blood in her urine. Some had pierced her liver, kidneys, lungs and intestine.
■ ALGERIA
Suicide blast kills 17
Seventeen people were killed in a suicide car bomb attack on a naval barracks in Dellys, on Algeria's east coast, medical sources said yesterday. More than 20 people were also wounded in the attack, they said. The attack came only two days after a suicide bomber killed 22 people and wounded more than 100 in a failed assassination bid against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika in Batna, in the east of the country. Access to the city of Dellys was immediately blocked off, and a security cordon thrown around the port where the attack took place. A unit of coast guards were reportedly based at the barracks targetted yesterday.
■ FINLAND
Air guitar showdown begins
Contestants from 10 nations were fine-tuning their imaginary Stratocasters on Friday for the final showdown in the Air Guitar World Championships. Both professional and amateur performers were taking part in the two-day event, battling it out for the "King of the Air" title. The quality on display was variable at best during qualifying at 45 Special, a rock club in Oulu, near the Arctic Circle. The surprise of the qualifying round was Oulu native Hilkka "Gore Kitty" Suvanto, who has twice before scored the lowest points ever in the qualifying round but now achieved a perfect six from many of the judges.
■ FRANCE
Radiation patients called in
French Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot has called on 4,500 former cancer patients at a hospital in eastern Epinal to contact authorities after more than 700 people at the clinic were given excessive radiation doses. She said that the call aims to ensure that all cancer patients treated at the hospital since 1989 get proper medical advise in case they had developed adverse effects from the radiation. More than 400 people were known to have been given too high a dose of radiation between 2000 and 2005, but experts had now found 300 new cases that occurred between 1999 and 2000, Bachelot told the newspaper Le Parisien in an interview.
■ BURUNDI
Man kills self, 16 others
A man killed himself and 16 other people with a grenade in northern Burundi when he was stopped from addressing scores of family members at a welcome home party for his sister, a spokesman for the police said on Friday. The man threw the grenade late on Thursday, killing his sister and her husband, who were being honored with the traditional ceremony in Muyinga District, spokesman Pierre Channel Ntarabaganyi said. The man who threw the grenade was not a soldier, policeman, or former rebel, raising "the whole question of disarming the civilian population because it is difficult to tell when someone is carrying a grenade," Ntarabaganyi said.
■ SWEDEN
Hundreds join cartoon rally
Some 550 people rallied in the town of Uppsala on Friday against a local newspaper's publication of a cartoon depicting the Prophet Mohammed as a dog, police said. The group protested against the Upsala Nsya Tidning newspaper's publication of the caricature last month, the same sketch that has prompted previous protests in Sweden and abroad. "This is an insult to Muslims' feelings. You can have arguments against Islam, but you can't humiliate 1.5 billion Muslims," Fayek Saleh, one of the organizers of the protest, told the newspaper.
■ UNITED STATES
Airline picky about skirts
A 23-year-old woman who boarded a Southwest Airlines plane in a short skirt for a flight to Arizona was led off the plane for wearing an outfit that was considered too skimpy. Kyla Ebbert said a Southwest employee asked her to leave her seat while the plane was preparing to leave on July 3. Ebbert said on Friday on NBC's Today show that the employee told her she would have to catch a later flight. Ebbert was allowed back on the plane after offering to adjust her sweater but said she was humiliated. "They had all heard him lecturing me," she said.
■ COLOMBIA
Robbery goes very wrong
A feckless stick-up man made a very wrong choice when he decided to rob a karate school. He was beaten and hospitalized during the attempted robbery in Bucaramanga, police said. "The man entered the academy with a firearm, but could not intimidate the dozens of students, who fortunately reacted and disarmed him," said Colonel Julio Cesar Santoyo, police commander in the province of Santander. Police arrived at the scene only to take the would-be robber to a hospital for treatment of multiple contusions at the hands of the karate students.
■ UNITED STATES
Judge rules against Noriega
A judge ruled against Manuel Noriega for a second time on Friday, concluding that the one time Panamanian dictator could be extradited to France to face trial on money laundering charges. Noriega's attorney immediately filed notice that he would appeal. Noriega's drug racketeering sentence ends today, but with the appeal, it remained unclear just when he would leave the country and where he would be sent. Noriega's attorney says he should be returned to Panama because of his status as a prisoner of war. The government says French officials have given assurances that they will honor his prisoner of war status.
■ UNITED STATES
Fired cop loses porn case
An Arizona police department had the right to fire a police officer who made and sold "vulgar and indecent" sex videos in which he performs with his wife, an appeals court ruled. The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals said on Wednesday that Ronald Dible had engaged in "sleazy activities" and ruled that a lower court had properly dismissed Dible's claims that the Chandler, Arizona, police department infringed on his First Amendment rights to free speech by firing him. Dible lost his job in 2002 after Chandler Police Department learned he was running a sexually explicit Web site featuring him and his wife to make money.
■ UNITED STATES
Rich man wins lottery again
US Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, already a millionaire and heir to the Kimberly-Clark fortune, plays the lottery every week and is on a lucky streak. The Republican hit it big in 1997 with a US$250,000 jackpot in the Washington lottery. Last spring he won US$1,000 in the Wisconsin lottery and he won another US$1,000 in that lottery last week. Sensenbrenner, 64, was born into a family that helped build Kimberly-Clark, maker of Kleenex tissue and Scott paper towels, and he recently reported a net worth of about US$11.6 million. He said he spends about US$10 a week on lottery tickets. The latest winnings came in a Super 2nd Chance drawing, in which people who mail in at least US$5 in losing tickets vie for 10 US$1,000 prizes each week. Lottery officials put the odds of winning just one time at one in 5,000.
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
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
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not