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■CHINA

Hijack ‘joke’ not found funny

Police arrested a man on a flight who said he wanted to hijack the plane and then said he meant the threat as a joke, media said yesterday. The man, in his 30s, was on a plane from Shanghai to Beijing on Saturday when he made the threat, Xinhua news agency reported. “Just as the plane was landing, someone suddenly yelled, ‘I want to hijack the plane’”, a passenger said. “The passenger’s explanation was that he was just joking, but because he created terror he has now been placed in legal detention,” the report said. The man never produced any weapons, the report said. After the plane touched down, police took the man away. He said he “only wanted to joke around with everyone.”



■PHILIPPINES

Biologists find rare rat

A rare rat species last seen over a century ago has been rediscovered by a team of US and Filipino biologists, a report said yesterday. Lawrence Heaney, team leader and curator at the Chicago-based Field Museum of Natural History, said the dwarf cloud rat was last seen by scientists 112 years ago. He said the rat was dead when the team found it in a national park in Mount Pulag in northern Luzon, the Philippine Daily Inquirer said. The animal was small “with reddish brown fur, a black mask around its large dark eyes, small round ears, a broad and blunt snout and a long tail covered with dark hair,” the report said.



■NAURU

Ruling party wins polls

President Marcus Stephen’s government has been returned to power with an increased majority, provisional results after a snap weekend election said. Stephen can expect a majority of at least 10 members in the 18-seat parliament, which should end a two-month deadlock that has hampered the passing of budgetary bills. All government members of parliament retained their seats in what Justice Minister Mathew Batsiua called a resounding victory. “This more than vindicates the stand we have taken and now lets us get on with the job of governing for the people of Nauru, who have sent a clear message to the entire parliament that they want political stability,” he said.



■THAILAND

PM wants to puke

Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej said yesterday that his official jet could do with some modifications for special needs that arise after he reads critical press reports. Speaking on his weekly TV show, the right-wing leader said his critics are so unreasonable and intent on causing chaos that he wanted to throw up on one recent trip out of Bangkok. “The Boeing 777 is a very good plane but it has no place for me to vomit,” he said on Talk in Samak’s Style.



■MALAYSIA

Border to be tightened

New detention camps will not be built for illegal immigrants to ease overcrowding, but plans to tighten border security to keep them from entering the country, a news report said yesterday. Human-rights activists have renewed criticism about cramped conditions at 17 prisons where some 10,000 illegal immigrants are held while awaiting deportation, after detainees at a southern center rioted and set fire to a building last week. But Home Minister Syed Hamid Albar said the solution was stricter border controls, the New Straits Times reported yesterday. “Our borders are porous at the moment. What we need to do now is beef up security and increase border patrols so that they cannot enter the country through land or sea,” he said.

■SYRIA

Saudi executions decried

Scores of angry protesters turned out in Damascus to demonstrate against Saudi Arabia’s beheading of a countryman convicted of drug smuggling. Ibrahim al-Jarekh was beheaded on Friday in Saudi Arabia, two weeks after two other Syrians were beheaded there on the same charge. Nearly 100 protesters held a sit-in to demand that Riyadh hand over other Syrian prisoners. One of the protesters, 38-year-old Abdul-Karim Mohammad, said his brother had been in Saudi jails for four months and was waiting execution on drug charges. “These are politically motivated verdicts,” Mohammed said. Relations between the two countries have been strained, with Saudi Arabia accusing Damascus of promoting Iranian interests in the Arab world and interfering in Lebanese politics.



■SWITZERLAND

Leonardo parachute works

An amateur parachutist made a successful 650m drop on Saturday using a replica of a parachute designed more than 500 years ago by Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci. “I came down ... smack in the middle of the tarmac at Payerne military airport,” Olivier Vietti-Teppa said. Vietti-Teppa is the first person to have made it safely to the ground with the Leonardo model. In 2000, Britain’s Adrian Nicholas tried it but had to pull the ripcord on a backup parachute to complete his descent.Vietti-Teppa jumped from a hovering helicopter. The parachute he used was made using modern fabric along lines designed by the Renaissance genius.



■GERMANY

Train hits flock of sheep

A high-speed ICE train slammed into a flock of sheep in a tunnel near the city of Fulda, derailing before coming to a halt, police in the state of Hessen said yesterday. Twenty-three passengers were hurt, three of them seriously, in the incident that took place in the 10km tunnel at around 9pm on Saturday evening. The state-owned rail company, Deutsche Bahn, said 20 sheep were killed. Some 170 passengers were aboard the ICE, which travels at speeds of up to 250km an hour. Four carriages derailed in the incident. A company spokesman said the damage was considerable and that the line could be closed for days.



■SERBIA

Church calls for Kosovo vow

The Serbian Orthodox Church urged its followers in an Easter message yesterday to take a vow to defend Kosovo. The head of the church, Patriarch Pavle, and other top dignitaries said in the message that “Kosovo is part of every Orthodox Christian Serb’s life.” “We are urging all, from scientists and politicians to the youngest and most modest sons and daughters of our nation, to deserve and preserve Kosovo with our work and honorable living,” the message said. Kosovo was the ancient seat of the Serbian medieval state. But the region is now dominated by ethnic Albanians who declared independence in February.



■IRAN

Youth sentenced to death

A 17-year-old youth who knifed and killed a rival suitor for a girl has been sentenced to death by a court in Tehran, a newspaper said yesterday. The accused attacked the victim after finding out he was talking to the girl in question, the Etemad daily said. Amnesty International said in a report published last June that the country has executed more child offenders than any other country since 1990.

■IRAQ

Teen slain in ‘honor killing’

A 17-year-old girl has been murdered by her father in an “honor killing” after falling in love with a British soldier in Basra. Rand Abdel-Qader was killed after her family discovered she had formed a friendship with a 22-year-old infantryman she knew as Paul. Rand, who met the soldier while working on an aid project for displaced families, was suffocated by her father and then hacked at with a knife. All the time he was calling out that his honor was being cleansed, Rand’s mother said. The father was arrested, held for two hours, then released without charge.



■UNITED STATES

Man kills family

An 18-year-old man gunned down his father, stepmother and two siblings at the home they shared in suburban South Carolina, authorities said. Nathaniel Dickson, 18, was arrested on Saturday evening at a home in Belton about 30km from where the bodies of his family members were found, Anderson County Sheriff’s spokeswoman Susann Griffin said. He was charged with four counts of murder. Less than 12 hours earlier, an emergency call led paramedics to find the father dead in the yard. Inside the home they found the other three victims, all shot to death. The youngest victim, Dickson’s 14-year-old brother, was apparently trying to hide behind a clothes dryer when he was slain, authorities said.



■CANADA

Trudeau tomb defaced

Vandals have defaced the tomb of one of the country’s most charismatic former prime ministers. Quebec provincial police discovered the words “FLQ” (Front de liberation du Quebec) and “traitor” painted in black on the family crypt of Pierre Elliott Trudeau on Saturday in Saint-Remi, south of Montreal. “We don’t know exactly what happened, we suppose it happened during the night,” police spokesman Sergeant Gregory Gomez del Prado said. He would not say how police were notified. There have been no arrests and police have launched an investigation, he said. The FLQ was responsible for more than 200 bombings and at least five deaths in the 1960s and early 1970s.



■COLOMBIA

Witness warned of threat

An exiled paramilitary who is a key witness in the prosecution of politicians — including President Alvaro Uribe’s second cousin — said on Saturday he had been warned of a planned attempt on his life. Jairo Castillo said he received a call and faxed letter from the witness protection program on Monday cautioning that two gunmen posing as tourists had been dispatched to kill him. The letter, a copy of which was published online on Saturday by the El Tiempo newspaper, said “intelligence” had uncovered the plot and advised Castillo to boost his security.



■COLOMBIA

FARC attacks troops

The army said yesterday that Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas had opened fire on its troops with home-made mortars from across Ecuador’s border in the latest incident to test frayed relations between the Andean neighbors. Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa broke off diplomatic ties with Colombia last month during a regional crisis when Colombian troops killed a top FARC commander in an attack on a base inside Ecuadorean territory. Army Commander General Mario Montoya said rebels had launched gas cylinder mortars from the Ecuadorean side of the frontier to attack Colombian soldiers in southern Putumayo Province, where armed groups often grow coca to make cocaine.


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