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World News Quick Take

■SOUTH KOREA

Crash injures Moonie leader

Sect leader Sun Myung-moon was among seven people reported injured when their helicopter burst into flames after an emergency landing north of Seoul on Saturday. Moon, 88-year-old founder of the Unification Church, was taken to a nearby hospital owned by his movement, as were the other injured, including Moon’s wife Han Hak-ja, Yonhap news agency said. It said the Sikorsky S-92, fitted for medical missions, made an emergency landing with 16 people on board in hill terrain near the village of Gapyong 60km north of Seoul, from where it had taken off.



■NEW ZEALAND

Missing Indians fly home

A group of Indians who disappeared while reportedly on their way to Australia to see the Pope began going home yesterday, news reports said. About 40 young Indian men who joined a Catholic pilgrimage to the World Youth Day festival in Sydney that was scheduled for a week-long transit stop in Auckland, paid immigration fraudsters in New Delhi 500,000 rupees (US$11,700) believing that they were buying permanent residence in New Zealand. They abandoned their Catholic family hosts as soon as they realized they had been taken for a ride. They were tracked by the local Sikh society and at least half of them had been found by yesterday. Two were expected to fly home yesterday.



■PHILIPPINES

Cops save dogs from diners

More than 50 dogs were rescued during a police raid on a slaughterhouse in Mapandan town in the northern province of Pangasinan, where dog meat is considered a delicacy, police said yesterday. Police chief senior superintendent Haron Rasid Ali said 12 dogs had been slaughtered before the raid on Saturday. The butchered dogs were supposed to be delivered to several restaurants in the mountain resort city of Baguio. Each carcass sells for up to 1,000 pesos (US$22). The owner of the slaughterhouse was arrested during the raid.



■HONG KONG

TV slur raises complaints

Watchdogs were investigating after transgender people were described as “human monsters” in a Chinese language TV program, a media report said yesterday. The expression yan yiu (人妖) or “human monster” was used 23 times during a report on transgender people in Thailand broadcast by the ATV television station, the South China Morning Post said. Sam Winter, director of the Transgender ASIA Research Center, said the use of the expression would damage the territory’s reputation. He filed a complaint with the Broadcasting Authority and asked the station and producers of the program to publicly apologize. (The term — pronounced renyao in Mandarin — is also commonly used in Taiwan.)



■INDONESIA

Police arrest ‘separatists’

Police arrested 41 people in the country’s easternmost province of Papua for allegedly hoisting separatist flags, a media report said yesterday. Papua police spokesman Senior Commissioner Agus Rianto said the detainees were detained on Saturday in Papua’s Fakfak district. All 41 are former political prisoners, he said. Three of the them hoisted the Bintang Kejora (Morning Star) flag belonging to the Free Papua Movement separatist group in front of the former people’s self-determination vote office, the Jakarta Post reported. Agus said police seized the flag and several documents, written in a local dialect, as well as several sharp weapons as evidence.



■SPAIN

Shorter air routes mulled

The government is considering changing commercial airline routes to make them shorter and more direct in order to offset high fuel prices, Public Works Minister Magdalena Alvarez said on Saturday. Alvarez said she would ask the defense ministry to alter airspace currently reserved for military use in order to make this possible. “If the problem is the rise in fuel prices, the best measure to support airlines is to study how to reduce fuel consumption,” the minister told reporters in the southern port of Malaga. Shorter routes would reduce flying time and allow for airlines to use their planes and crews on more flights each day in addition to cutting fuel costs, the ministry said in a statement.



■GERMANY

Truckers protest fuel prices

Fuel price protests on Saturday saw truck drivers rumbling in long convoys of heavy vehicles along highways to demand lower tax on diesel fuel. Police said the various convoys that converged on a private truck stop at Berg, on the northern edge of Bavaria, totaled 10km in length. They did not block traffic but did cause tailbacks as other vehicles waited to pass the big rigs. An estimated 300 trucks took part in the “diesel demo.” Rudi Stoehr, who organized the protest, told 500 drivers and assorted farmers with tractors that soaring fuel prices were driving truck companies towards bankruptcy.



■SPAIN

King to meet Chavez

The government says King Juan Carlos will meet Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez next week. It is the first meeting planned between the two since the king told Chavez to “shut up” at a summit in Chile in November. A government spokesman said Chavez would visit Mallorca this week and hold a working breakfast with Juan Carlos. Chavez will then fly to Madrid to meet Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero about political, economic and bilateral issues. The trip is part of Chavez’s six-nation tour, which also includes Bolivia, Nicaragua, Russia, Belarus and Portugal.



■GERMANY

Bad-meat merchant jailed

A merchant who supplied substandard meat to snack bars across the country was given an 18-month jail term and fined on Friday, but judges rejected claims in the media last year that the meat was “rotten.” The disclosure that non-certified meat was being mixed into doner kebab meat, a popular take-away food, climaxed a series of revelations about condemned meat being sold as fresh. Doner sales plunged. The court in Itzehoe convicted the merchant, 54, on 1,262 counts of fraud and fined him US$15,500, the amount it assessed as his profit in the scam. The media headlined the case and others like it “the rotten meat scandal.” On Friday however, judges said the meat had tasted and smelled fine and did not make anyone sick.



■EGYPT

Police shoot man at border

Police shot dead a Sudanese man at the border with Israel yesterday as he tried to slip into the Jewish state, bringing to 17 the number of African migrants killed there this year, security sources said. Police killed the migrant after he ignored orders to stop and instead tried to flee toward Israel, the sources said. Another seven Sudanese were also arrested in a separate attempt to cross the border. “Sudanese man Abdel-Wahab Abdel-Karim Ahmed Adam, age 32, was killed after being shot in the chest as he tried to sneak into Israel,” one of the sources said.



■UNITED STATES

Plutoid named Makemake

A dwarf planet orbiting beyond Neptune has been designated the third plutoid in the solar system and given the name Makemake, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) said on Saturday. The red methane-covered dwarf planet formerly known as 2005 FY9 or “Easterbunny” is named after a Polynesian creator of humanity and god of fertility. Just last month the IAU, which names planets and other heavenly bodies, decided to create a new class of sub-planets called plutoids. Pluto, demoted from planet status, and Eris are the other two plutoids. A fourth dwarf planet named Ceres has been excluded from the plutoid club because it orbits in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Makemake is just slightly smaller than Pluto.



■UNITED STATES

Diamonds found in dump

Diamonds in the rough? Try a US$20,000 pair of the glittering gems in a truckload of trash. A Staten Island jeweler has gotten her 3-carat diamond earrings back after she, her husband and city sanitation employees sorted through a smelly heap of garbage. The studs were in a small jar of cleaning solution, which a worker at the couple’s jewelry store had accidentally thrown away. The earrings were recovered on Thursday at the former Fresh Kills landfill, where trash is compacted and shipped out of state. Owner Haya Sharon calls the find “a miracle.” The earrings were an anniversary gift from her husband.



■UNITED STATES

Church blesses boxers

Blessed are the boxer shorts. Members of the St. James United Church of Christ in Casco Township, Michigan, planned to take 150 boxer shorts to the altar yesterday for a blessing. The shorts have been modified for wounded veterans who wear bulky prosthetics or braces on their legs. About 15 women at St. James replaced the shorts’ side seams with a fabric fastener for easy access. Volunteer Kris Dombrowski says: “If you have the need for special pants, you have the need for special boxer shorts.” The boxers will go to an Ohio distribution center of Sew Much Comfort, a national volunteer group that adapts clothing for wounded troops.



■BRAZIL

Picasso thief arrested

Police recovered a Pablo Picasso print and arrested one person in connection with an armed robbery at Sao Paulo’s Pinacoteca Museum last month, local media reported on Saturday. The print The Painter and the Model from 1963, was one of four works taken in broad daylight on June 12, the official Agencia Brasil government news agency said. The Spanish artist’s Minotaur, Drinker and Women from 1933 and two works by Brazilian artists are still missing. Police found the print with Wesley Teobaldo Barros, who was arrested as he prepared to steal an automated teller machine, Agencia Estado said.



■MEXICO

Tonnes of cocaine found

Authorities found nearly 5.2 tonnes of cocaine in a makeshift submarine seized last week off the Pacific coast, the navy said on Friday. The 10m-long, green fiberglass craft was designed to travel just beneath the water, leaving almost no wake. It was one of the country’s largest maritime drug seizures and the first time the country has seen drug smugglers using a submarine, the navy said. Four Colombians aboard the submarine said they had navigated up the Pacific coast from Colombia, the navy said. Colombian officials said last month that diesel-powered drug submarines travel up to two weeks to reach Central America.


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