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World News Quick Take

■AUSTRALIA

‘Car Orchestra’ debuts

Ready, maestro; start your engines. A new musical piece called Car Orchestra, which features the engines and horns of five utility trucks, known as “utes”, alongside a saxophone, double bass and disc jockey, debuted at a music festival in western Sydney yesterday. Michael Atherton, a professor at the University of Western Sydney, says he composed the score to connect the festival with the local culture of the working-class Campbelltown area, inviting a local “Ute Club” to play the piece. “A festival’s concept of culture should be very broad,” Atherton told the Sydney Morning Herald. “People can expect to hear fanfares, jazz-funk sections, percussion solos. They will hear mag wheels played like Balinese gamelans.”



■HONG KONG

Big Buddha ride reopens

The troubled Big Buddha cable car ride reopened yesterday morning, a day after a fault left passengers stranded mid-ride for 90 minutes and forced its closure. More than 100 people were trapped aboard the US$125 million cable car shortly after midday on Friday when an alarm system detected two cars were too close together and shut it down. Staff had to push the cable cars forward by hand until the ride resumed operation 90 minutes later to allow passengers to disembark, but it was again closed while operators carried out further checks.



■THAILAND

Busted condoms lead to bust

An Australian man was in critical condition yesterday after swallowing condoms that were packed with hashish and burst inside his stomach, police said. John Paul Jones, 51, will be charged with drug trafficking when his condition improves, said police Lieutenant Colonel Weerasak Pokarat in Surat Thani township. Friends took Jones to a hospital in Surat Thani saying he had been complaining of severe stomach pain for five days, Weerasak said. An X-ray found he had 60 condoms packed with hashish in his stomach, weighing a total of 800g, Weerasak said. “Three condoms had burst, which was causing the pain,” Weerasak said. Jones had been staying on the southern island of Koh Phangan.



■SRI LANKA

Soldiers destroy bunkers

Soldiers destroyed two Tamil Tiger rebel bunkers the north while fighting in the region killed 11 separatists and wounded eight soldiers, the military said yesterday. Troops destroyed the bunkers in the village of Kilali on the northern Jaffna Peninsula on Friday night, a defense ministry official said. Two soldiers were wounded in the fighting, the official said. Also on Friday, soldiers killed four rebels in a battle in Vavuniya district, the official said.



■SINGAPORE

Court sentences smugglers

Three Malaysians were setenced to between four and 15 months in prison for child trafficking after they were caught trying to smuggle Sri Lankan children to London via Paris, reports said yesterday. They were caught at Changi Airport on Feb. 7 with the three children, aged 11, 14 and 15. Shangar Shanmugam, 39, was sentenced on Friday to 15 months in jail while his sister, Patmavthi Shanmugam, 31, was jailed for 10 months, the Straits Times reported. Shangar was promised US$1,000 by a woman known to him as Naga to deliver the children to London, the court heard. Naga made three Malaysian passports with false names for the children at a Malaysian immigration office. Shangar gave a cut of the money to his sister and asked her to pose as the mother of one of the children, the report said.

■SWEDEN

Spruces may be oldest

Scientists have found a cluster of spruces that, at an age of 8,000 years, may be the world’s oldest living trees. The Norway spruces were found high on a mountainside. Carbon dating showed the oldest of them set root about 8,000 years ago, making it the oldest known living tree. California’s “Methuselah” tree, a Great Basin bristlecone pine, is often cited as the oldest tree, with an age of between 4,500 and 5,000 years. “These were the first woods that grew after the Ice Age,” said Lars Hedlund, responsible for environmental surveys in Dalarna. “You can in these see pretty much every single climate change that has occurred.”



■UNITED STATES

Rats take over house

A Rochester, Washington, woman bought rats as food for her pet snakes, but grew attached to them and allowed them to overrun her house, which will need to be razed, officials said on Friday. The rats gnawed through wiring and walls, “so there’s no lights or heat or sewage” disposal, Thurston County animal services director Susanne Beauregard said. Michele Diller, 64, who had rejected agencies’ efforts to help her, agreed to move into an assisted living center to get her cat back. The cat was confiscated along with 11 caged animals — four severely malnourished snakes, five mice and two rats. The county will probably charge Diller with animal cruelty toward the snakes.



■KUWAIT

Sandstorm kills one

One person was killed and several wounded on Friday when a strong sandstorm triggered by gale-force winds and swept through the emirate, officials said. The victim, a man, drowned in the sea, while several people were injured at a mall where glass shattered, a security official said. The meteorological department said the storm was caused by winds at around 90km per hour and warned that a similar storm was expected yesterday. The violent winds also uprooted hundreds of traffic signs, billboards and trees and damaged many cars, witnesses said.



■MACEDONIA

PM calls snap elections

Lawmakers voted early yesterday to dissolve parliament and hold early elections within the next two months. Conservative Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski called the snap poll after a name dispute with Greece halted the country’s bid to join NATO. Elections had not been scheduled until 2010. In parliament, deputies voted 70-0 to dissolve the assembly. Opposition deputies who opposed the motion walked out before the vote. The 37-year-old Gruevski, counting on increased popular support for his VMRO-DPMNE party, said he was frustrated with party squabbles in parliament and wanted to speed up economic reforms.



■GAZA

Seven killed in raid

Israeli forces withdrew from the Gaza Strip yesterday, the army said, after a raid that left seven people dead, including a 10-year-old boy. Palestinian medics said the toll from the operation rose overnight when a militant from the armed wing of the Hamas movement died of his wounds. Another 27 people were wounded, with four in a serious condition. Palestinians reported seeing several Israeli tanks rolling out of the territory before dawn and the army confirmed that the operation had ended at 4am.

■UNITED STATES

Man uses fake bill for bail

Police say it was no surprise a fake US$50 bill got a Long Island man arrested: He was trying to use it to pay his bail on a traffic charge. The transaction compounded Cyheam Forney’s legal problems and landed him in jail. Police say they spotted the 31-year-old Forney making an illegal left turn on Thursday and discovered his license had been suspended. Forney was arrested on a misdemeanor suspended license charge — until officers said he proffered the counterfeit currency as bail money. He was being held early on Friday on a felony charge of possessing a forged instrument.



■UNITED STATES

Iguana smuggler convicted

A Californian man faces jail after being convicted of smuggling stolen rare iguanas inside his prosthetic leg, justice officials said on Friday. Jereme James, 34, was convicted on two counts of smuggling and possessing endangered animals and is scheduled to be sentenced on July 14, a statement from the US Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles said. Prosecutors said James stole three baby Fiji Island banded iguanas from an ecological preserve while on a trip to the islands in 2002 and smuggled them by concealing them in the compartment of a prosthetic leg.



■UNITED STATES

Misfired artillery hurts cat

A piece of artillery that was apparently misfired by the military crashed through the roof of a home kilometers away on Friday and injured a young girl’s cat, which had to be euthanized, officials said. No people were injured when the 1kg piece hit the Jefferson Township home about 4km from the Picatinny Arsenal and landed in the girl’s bed, said Peter Rowland, arsenal spokesman. She wasn’t home, but her cat was sleeping on the bed.


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