■ SRI LANKA
Rebels killed in clashes
A wave of new fighting between government forces and Tamil Tiger rebels across the country’s war-ravaged northern region killed 35 guerrillas and one soldier, military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara said. The battles took place on Wednesday in the Vavuniya, Mannar, Welioya and Jaffna areas bordering the rebels’ de facto state in the north, he said. In the worst battle, soldiers killed 20 insurgents and five soldiers were wounded in Vavuniya, he said. Clashes in the nearby Mannar district killed 11 rebels and wounded one soldier, Nanayakkara said. Other battles in Jaffna and Welioya killed four rebels and one soldier, he said.
■ PHILIPPINES
Tondo fire kills three
A fire swept through a Manila shantytown early yesterday, killing a family of three and leaving about 2,500 others homeless in Manila, officials said. The four-hour blaze — believed to be caused by a toppled candle — destroyed more than 100 shanties, each housing about 20 people, in the impoverished Tondo district, senior fire officer Wilson Tana said. Three members of a single family suffocated while trying to escape along an alleyway, while two people were injured, including a 19-year-old hit by a fire truck, Tana and radio reports said.
■ PAKISTAN
Militants kill soldier: official
Suspected Islamic militants tortured and shot dead a Pakistani paramilitary soldier in the restive tribal belt bordering Afghanistan, officials said yesterday. The soldier’s body was found dumped near a road in Sheikh Killy, a village in the semi-autonomous tribal region of Bajaur, local military officer Javed Khan said.
■ POLAND
Miners killed in explosion
Four miners have been killed and 19 others injured in a methane explosion in the south, officials said yesterday. The explosion took place late on Wednesday at the Borynia mine in Jastrzebie Zdroj near the Czech border. “Some of the wounded are in a serious condition,” said Katarzyna Jablonska-Bajer, a spokeswoman for the company that runs the mine. “This was a methane explosion. Unfortunately we do not know what caused the accident as all the sensors were destroyed.” She said there had been no sign of increased methane concentration prior to the blast. “This is a tragedy for all of us. I worked on the same shift [as those who were killed]. I am very sad,” miner Tomasz Lisiak said.
■ NETHERLANDS
Bike theft lessons offered
A cyclist lobby group plans to teach more people how to steal bikes after lessons it conducted in big cities showed that bike owners became more security-conscious. “Someone specialized in locks shows people how to pick them. This teaches people how to better secure their bikes,” a spokeswoman for bike group Fietsersbond said on Wednesday. About 700,000 bikes were stolen countrywide last year. Bikes are the country’s most common form of transport. Fietserbond will tour the country, offering its bike theft lessons.
■ ITALY
Authorities confiscate cars
Authorities have begun confiscating the cars of people driving under the effect of drugs or alcohol in the latest attempt to lower one of western Europe’s highest rates of road casualties. Two drivers in their early 20s, a woman under the influence of alcohol and a man who had smoked cannabis, have had their cars seized since the legislation came into effect at the end of last month. The new legislation states that any driver who tests positive for any illegal drug or has blood alcohol levels exceeding set limits can have their car confiscated. The cars are to be auctioned off or used by the police.
■ GERMANY
Woman finally pays fine
A remorseful US woman surprised police by mailing them US$100 to cover a 12-year-old parking fine. Police in Cologne said on Wednesday that the woman, identified only as Julie H., sent them a handwritten confession in German of her failure to pay the fine, incurred during a visit to the city in 1996. In the letter to “Dear Cologne police,” mailed from Draper, Utah, the woman wrote that she had not understood local parking rules and had been annoyed by the fine. “I feel better now — thank you,” her letter concluded. Police said in a statement that they sent a response thanking Julie H. and returning her check. They said it was impossible to figure out where the woman had left her rented car during her family’s 1996 vacation.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
N Ireland to nominate head
A new leader of the regional government of Northern Ireland was to be nominated yesterday, following the departure from office of Ian Paisley, the veteran Protestant politician. He is to be succeeded as First Minister by Peter Robinson, his long-term protege who has also taken over the leadership of the main Protestant Democratic Unionist Party. As Paisley before him, Robinson is to work with Martin McGuinness, of the Irish nationalist Sinn Fein party, as his deputy in a power-sharing government.
■ UAE
Landmark visit made to Iraq
United Arab Emirates (UAE) Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahayan arrived in Iraq yesterday in the first visit by a Gulf Arab foreign minister since the US-led invasion in 2003, a UAE source said. The US has been pressing Sunni Arab governments to shore up the Baghdad government by forgiving debts and establishing high-level diplomatic representation in Baghdad. The UAE withdrew its top envoy from Iraq in May 2006 after one of its diplomats was kidnapped and held for nearly two weeks by Islamist militants. It has maintained only low level representation in Iraq since. No ambassador from any Sunni-led Arab country has been stationed permanently in Baghdad since Egypt’s envoy was kidnapped and killed shortly after arriving in 2005.
■ OUTER SPACE
Cosmonaut fixes faulty toilet
A cosmonaut-turned-space plumber fixed the only toilet at the International Space Station on Wednesday, bringing relief at the orbiting outpost one week after it began to malfunction. While nine other astronauts worked on their own space projects, cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko toiled away in the Russian Zvezda module for more than two hours to replace a toilet pump. “It appears to have been successful. Three separate tests of the pump indicated normal operations,” a NASA television commentator said. Moscow Mission Control has given the station crew a “go” to use the facility again, the US space agency said on its Web site.
■ UNITED STATES
Couple sue over paddling
A family sued a justice of the peace on Wednesday, complaining that he ordered a man to paddle his teenage stepdaughter in the courtroom and threatened to convict her of truancy if he didn’t. The lawsuit filed by Mary Vasquez and her husband, Daniel Zurita, described the paddle provided by Gustavo Garza, Cameron County justice of the peace, as fashioned from a thick piece of lumber. “The word ‘club’ could be fairly used as a substitute for the word ‘paddle’ here as it appears to be something which may have been cut from a piece of lumber,” attorney Mark Sossi wrote in the family’s petition.
■ UNITED STATES
Tower found on West Coast
Massachusetts historians for decades thought the 9m tall lighthouse that once overlooked Wellfleet Harbor had been taken down and destroyed in 1925. Turns out, it had just been moved to the California coast. The fate of the cast-iron tower was uncovered last year by lighthouse researchers and reported by Colleen MacNeney in this month’s edition of Lighthouse Digest. MacNeney told the Cape Cod Times in Wednesday’s edition it was her most exciting discovery. Wellfleet historian Helen Purcell says the discovery of the lighthouse at Point Montara at the southern end of San Francisco Bay was a genuine shock.
■ UNITED STATES
Homeless man arraigned
A homeless man accused of duping 13 women by posing as a millionaire on an Internet dating service was arraigned on Wednesday in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, suburb of Souderton. Paul Krueger, 50, used a laptop to meet the women on Millionairematch.com, prosecutors said. He is accused of stealing more than US$100,000 from the women after convincing them he was a Grammy-nominated record mogul who needed investors for a new business venture that manufactured DVDs, CDs and other videos.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.