■ 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.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing