■ AUSTRALIA
Man dives into croc
A man was bitten on the face by a crocodile when he accidentally collided with the reptile after diving through a wave at a surf beach, a newspaper reported yesterday. Matt Martin, 35, received more than 40 sutures to gashes around his left eye and cheek after the mishap on Tuesday last week off the remote tropical northeast coast, the Cairns Post newspaper reported. Martin said the crocodile did not mean him serious harm. "He wasn't serious. He had all the cards and he played it soft," Martin said.
■ AUSTRALIA
Tasmanian devil threatened
An infectious cancer threatening to wipe out Australia's largest surviving marsupial carnivore, the Tasmanian devil, has spread into one of its last disease-free refuges, biologists said yesterday. The disease, which causes facial tumors and kills infected animals within six months, has been found in a national park in the state's north which had previously been thought to be disease-free."We expect that the disease will extend across the entire range of the devil within five years," Hamish McCallum, a biologist at the University of Tasmania, said.
■ JAPAN
Court jails S&M `prince'
A court sentenced a self-described "prince" to 14 years in prison yesterday for chaining a teenage girl with a dog collar for months and assaulting other women in a sadistic fantasy. Yasuyoshi Kobayashi, 26, the son of a wealthy family who sports groomed long hair, was convicted of raping four women after confining them at his home or hotels where he demanded they call him "master" or "the prince." "I've been in the world of sadomasochism for more than a decade. It's impossible for me to do something my partner dislikes as that goes against the principles of S&M," he earlier testified to the court, as quoted by media.
■ THAILAND
Crocs on the loose
Armed police yesterday were hunting more than 30 crocodiles that escaped after flood waters swept through the farm where they were being raised. Eight crocodiles had already been killed, police said. "We have to kill them because we don't have any tranquilizer guns to put them to sleep," one officer said. The crocodiles escaped in Nakhon Ratchasima Province, 300km northeast of Bangkok after 30cm of water inundated the area.
■ AUSTRIA
Drunk driver loses license
A motorist too drunk to change a tire phoned a police emergency number by mistake instead of the breakdown service and wound up losing his license, police said on Thursday. "He mixed up emergency service numbers," a police official in the central town of Andau told Reuters. "On the phone it was clear he was highly intoxicated and we sent over a patrol car. He doesn't need his vehicle now because we took his license."
■ GERMANY
Thief attempts slow getaway
A thief caught shoplifting a packet of cheese from a supermarket tried to make his getaway in a cement mixer, but he was quickly nabbed by police. "He was out on the job and suddenly got hungry, as honest workers sometimes do," said police spokesman in the eastern city of Chemnitz on Thursday. When a shop detective in the town of Limbach-Oberfrohna caught the man stealing a 2.79 euros (US$3.98) packet of processed cheese, the 55-year-old broke free and leaped into his cement mixing truck outside, police said. The shop alerted police, who arrested the man when he stopped his getaway vehicle at a red light a few hundred meters away.
■ SOUTH AFRICA
Lucky Dube shot dead
Reggae star Lucky Dube has been shot dead in front of his two children when robbers tried to hijack his car in Johannesburg, police said. "He was in Rosettenville [a Johannesburg suburb] around 8pm last night [on Thursday] apparently dropping off his child. The child had just gone off the car when unknown men approached him trying to hijack him. He was shot and he died on the scene," police spokeswoman Captain Cheryl Engelbrecht said. The Star newspaper quoted a witness at the scene saying Dube tried to drive away but lost control after hitting another car and a tree. The award-winning Dube, 43, was one of the first artists to introduce reggae music in the country.
■ KENYA
Man has bottle removed
Doctors in central Kenya have successfully removed an empty half-liter beer bottle from a man's colon, a report said yesterday, but how it got there remains a mystery. The 26cm bottle was removed on Monday from the colon of the 33-year-old man after two operations in a Kiambu District Hospital, about 20km from the capital, the Daily Metro newspaper reported. "The first operation was not successful, forcing us to perform a second one, which went fine," the hospital's administrator Patrick Okoth said. Although the man, whose identity was not disclosed, said he had pushed the bottle through his rectum, Okoth said it was nearly impossible for the man to have done that by himself.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Deborah Kerr dies
British actress Deborah Kerr, a Hollywood icon who shared one of cinema's most famous kisses as an army officer's unhappy wife in From Here to Eternity and danced with the Siamese monarch in The King and I, has died, her agent said on Thursday. She was 86. Kerr, who suffered from Parkinson's disease, died on Tuesday in Suffolk, eastern England, agent Anne Hutton said. Kerr's roles as forceful, sometimes frustrated women pushed the limits of Hollywood's treatment of sex on the screen during the censor-bound 1950s.
■ UNITED STATES
Spittoons escape ban
Arkansas lawmakers will not have to give up their portable spittoons or cans of snuff after House members rejected a rule banning chewing tobacco from their chambers on Thursday. With a 51 to 27 vote, the House of Representatives fell short of the 67 votes needed to change the rules to ban the use of all tobacco products. House rules and state law already prohibit smoking. "Here we go again, telling us how to live and how to die, and the very people that are most for this amendment are about 50 pounds [23kg] overweight," said Representative Billy Gaskill, who opposed the bill.
■ COLOMBIA
Six goldminers murdered
Six goldminers were killed on Thursday by unidentified machete-wielding men who attacked them as they worked in the impoverished western province of Choco, authorities said. The attack came amid a wave of killings in which dozens of candidates, campaign workers and politicians have been gunned down ahead of next week's local elections. But police said this incident did not appear to be election-related. Choco is a violent cocaine-producing area between Panama to the north, a common destination for smugglers, and Valle del Cauca province to the south, home to Colombia's toughest drug cartel.
■ UNITED STATES
Copperfield being probed
FBI agents have seized nearly US$2 million in cash from a Las Vegas warehouse owned by illusionist David Copperfield, local media reports said on Thursday. The agents also took a computer hard drive and a memory chip from a digital camera system during Wednesday's late-night operation. The reports said the raid stems from an investigation in Seattle. The local CBS affiliate KLAS-TV quoted a source as saying the cash was stashed in a safe and that agents took the cash. Copperfield is famed for stunts such as making the Statue of Liberty disappear.
■ UNITED STATES
Viagra may cause deafness
Viagra and other impotence drugs are about to bear new warnings that users may experience sudden hearing loss. It is not clear that the drugs truly trigger hearing loss, but the US Food and Drug Administration decided on Thursday to add a warning about the possible risk after counting 29 reports of the problem since 1996 among users of this family of medicines. The impotence drugs Viagra, Cialis and Levitra will bear the warnings. So will Revatio, a drug for pulmonary hypertension, which contains the same ingredient as Viagra. Viagra's label already mentioned hearing loss as a possibility, because a few cases were reported during initial testing.
■ BOLIVIA
Prostitutes threaten protest
Hundreds of outraged prostitutes are ready to fight a morality campaign targeting their trade, a spokeswoman said on Thursday after an angry mob of "morality" campaigners on Wednesday destroyed bars and brothels in a suburb near La Paz. After the violence, authorities decided to close more than 1,000 brothels in El Alto. Lily, speaking on behalf of the prostitutes, warned prostitutes would "march nude in the streets of La Paz" and forsake checks from health authorities. "Our businesses are burned and we are left in the street, our money is stolen and we are beaten," Lily said. About 30 bars and more than a dozen brothels have been ransacked and furniture torched.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
‘DELUSIONAL’: Targeting the families of Hamas’ leaders would not push the group to change its position or to give up its demands for Palestinians, Ismail Haniyeh said Israeli aircraft on Wednesday killed three sons of Hamas’ top political leader in the Gaza Strip, striking high-stakes targets at a time when Israel is holding delicate ceasefire negotiations with the militant group. Hamas said four of the leader’s grandchildren were also killed. Ismail Haniyeh’s sons are among the highest-profile figures to be killed in the war so far. Israel said they were Hamas operatives, and Haniyeh accused Israel of acting in “the spirit of revenge and murder.” The deaths threatened to strain the internationally mediated ceasefire talks, which appeared to gain steam in recent days even as the sides remain far
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of