■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.
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