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World News Quick Take

■ HONG KONG

All live poultry to be killed

The territory will begin culling all live poultry in a bid to stop the spread of the H5N1 bird flu virus among its many markets, Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Director Cheung Siu-hing (張少卿) said yesterday. H5N1 was found at a poultry stall in a market last week, prompting the culling of 2,700 birds. Cheung said results yesterday showed birds infected in four markets, but not in samples from chicken farms and distribution centers. The government has also temporarily banned all live poultry from China.



■AFGHANISTAN

Officials cancel census

The first planned census for 30 years has been canceled, delivering a serious blow to humanitarian aid in the country. It was planned to take place this summer, but officials have halted the project, citing security concerns. Abdul Sakhri, vice-president of the central statistics office, said: “We were planning to track each village’s humanitarian needs — for instance water supply or educational requirements — as well as the population. It’s a huge missed opportunity.”



■VIETNAM

Former PM dies, aged 85

Vo Van Kiet, the former prime minister who led the country through economic reforms and turned around foreign policy, died yesterday in Singapore at age 85, the government said. Kiet, a former Viet Cong revolutionary in South Vietnam, was considered the chief architect of the doi moi (renewal) market reforms of the late 1980s and 1990s. He served as prime minister from 1991 until 1997. Kiet was admitted to Singapore’s Mount Elizabeth Hospital on June 3 with unspecified ailments, an admissions officer said.



■CHINA

Rules target foreign press

Reporters Without Borders condemned on Tuesday regulations to increase control on foreign media and their local assistants and translators. Under the new regulations all Chinese citizens who work for foreign media as translators and assistants must be registered with the authorities. The Paris-based rights group quoted the Foreign Correspondents Club of China as saying the change could increase “oversight by authorities.” Authorities will “select and name appropriate candidates” to help foreign journalists. The foreign media may recommend a specific person only if they provide a criminal record, medical documents, CV and personal ID information.



■CHINA

Parents name kids ‘Aoyun’

More than 4,000 Chinese have been named “Aoyun” (奧運), or “Olympic Games,” in an apparent nod to the Beijing Olympics, state media reported yesterday. Nearly 680 of the names were registered in 1992, when Beijing first applied to host the Games and another 553 were registered in 2001, when it was awarded the 2008 Olympics, the Beijing Youth Daily said.



■AUSTRALIA

Sudoku causes mistrial

Sydney District Court Judge Peter Zahra aborted a drug conspiracy trial on Tuesday after jurors were found to have been playing Sudoku. The trial had run for 66 days and had cost an estimated A$1 million (US$950,000). The two defendants were facing a possible life sentence. The judge was alerted after it was observed the jurors were writing vertically, rather than horizontally. “Some of the evidence is rather drawn out and I find it difficult to maintain my attention the whole time, and that doesn’t distract me too much from proceedings,” the jury foreman told the judge on Tuesday.

■ SWITZERLAND

Dead ‘witch’ seen as victim

The last witch executed in Europe should be rehabilitated because she was a victim of “judicial murder” more than 200 years ago, said the government of the canton of Glarus on Tuesday. The 1782 execution of Anna Goeldi for an alleged case of poisoning was a miscarriage of justice, the cantonal government said. The recommendation to acknowledge that Goeldi was unfairly prosecuted and not a witch goes back to the parliament for final approval. Goeldi, a maidservant in the house of Johann Jakob Tschudi, was convicted of “spoiling” the family’s daughter, causing her to spit pins and have convulsions. The Protestant Church council, which conducted the trial, had no legal authority and had decided in advance that the woman was guilty, the government said.



■SOUTH AFRICA

Protesters boo minister

Thousands of anti-crime protesters marched through Pretoria on Tuesday, shouting down a Cabinet minister who received their petition calling on the government to make fighting crime a priority. About 5,000 people marched on the Union Buildings, where President Thabo Mbeki has his office, to protest against the sky-high crime rate. Bearing posters like: “I may not see tomorrow,” the protesters called for decisive action. The protesters booed and heckled prisons minister Ngconde Balfour, who received the memorandum in the company of two other ministers. Critics have slammed Mbeki’s government for not doing enough to combat crime.



■UNITED KINGDOM

Rowling draws huge bid

An 800-word prequel to the Harry Potter series, handwritten by author J.K. Rowling, sold for £25,000 (US$49,320) at an auction on Tuesday. An absent bidder paid more than £30 per word for Rowling’s short story at an auction at the flagship of Waterstone’s book store chain in London. Proceeds will benefit the writers’ association English PEN and a dyslexia charity. Rowling made it clear there was no hope for a new Potter novel and finished her card by writing: “From the prequel I am not working on — but that was fun!”



■UNITED KINGDOM

Court sentences cash-burner

A man has been sentenced to community service for burning a pile of cash at his home. Leo Casey, 63, torched the cash after an argument with his partner in July last year. He admitted to locking himself inside a home he was renovating in Nottingham. He set fire to a bundle of £20 notes, tossed them out of a window and burned other notes inside the house. Police were unable to determine the amount of money but estimated it was £17,000 (US$34,000). Casey admitted to a charge of arson. He was sentenced on Monday to community service and will be under supervision for 18 months.



■SWEDEN

More people than numbers

Officials say the country is running out of social security numbers for its citizens, mainly because of increased immigration. An investigator at the national registration office says there has been a marked increase in immigrants who don’t know what day they were born on. Such people are usually given Jan. 1 or July 1 as their birth date, and social security number combinations for that group are running out. The Swedish Tax Agency said on Tuesday it had proposed to change the two digits that indicate the date of birth to random numbers between 01 and 31 for all new registrations.

■UNITED STATES

Movie inspires book hunt

A consumer alert for the millions who have seen the Sex and the City movie: There is no such book as “Love Letters of Great Men,” which Carrie Bradshaw reads while in bed with Mr Big. The closest text in the real world apparently is Love Letters of Great Men and Women: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day, first released in the 1920s and reissued last year by Kessinger Publishing, which specializes in bringing back old works. Richard Davies, press manager for online seller AbeBooks.com, said he had received hundreds of queries about the book’s existence. Enough readers have been directed to the Kessinger anthology, on AbeBooks and elsewhere on the Internet, that it ranked No. 134 on Amazon.com on Tuesday afternoon.



■UNITED KINGDOM

Charles pays off royal debt

Prince Charles on Tuesday paid off a family debt incurred more than 350 years ago — but was spared the accumulated interest that could have run into tens of thousands of pounds. Charles handed over £453.15 (US$885.04), which King Charles II failed to pay to the Clothiers Co in Worcester, central England, in 1651. The king had commissioned uniforms for his troops to fight the forces of Oliver Cromwell at the Battle of Worcester that year. Prince Charles handed over the cash on a visit to the former headquarters of the royalist troops in the Faithful City, so called because it remained loyal to his ancestor during the English Civil War. The high commissioner of the Clothiers Co accepted the money and gave Charles a receipt.



■UNITED STATES

Highway trooper charged

A South Carolina Highway Patrol trooper who was caught on video ramming a suspect with his patrol car was indicted on Tuesday on a federal civil rights charge, the justice department said. Steve Garren was indicted by a federal grand jury in Greenville on a charge of willfully depriving a man of his constitutional right to be free from the use of unreasonable force by a police officer, authorities said. Garren is white; the suspect he rammed is black. State and federal authorities began investigating the highway patrol in March after videos emerged that showed troopers using a racial epithet and ramming their cruisers into fleeing suspects. The head of the patrol, as well as the head of the agency that oversees it, both resigned in February amid charges of racism among troopers.



■BRAZIL

Police find drugs in books

Police have discovered nearly 4kg of cocaine hidden among children’s books and cards being sent through Rio de Janeiro’s international airport for Europe, officials said on Tuesday. Sniffer dogs and X-ray scans revealed the drugs during a check in the postal section of the airport. Police have been carrying out sweeps of correspondence being sent abroad since the beginning of last month.



■FRANCE

Couple lose hospital suit

A French Muslim couple who sued a hospital after their son was born handicapped were turned down and ordered to pay court costs on Tuesday on the grounds they refused the presence of a male doctor during labor. Mohammed Ijjou was born severely handicapped on Nov. 8, 1998, as a result of neurological complications during birth. According to the appeal court ruling, his father Radouane Ijjou physically barred a male intern from entering his wife’s room for half an hour, citing religious reasons, after a midwife asked for help with the labor.


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