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■SOUTH KOREA

Baby gender ban lifted

The Constitutional Court overturned a ban on doctors telling parents the gender of unborn babies, saying on Thursday the country has grown out of a preference for sons and that the restriction violates parents’ right to know. The government introduced the ban in 1987 to try to prevent abortions of female fetuses in a country that had traditionally favored sons in the widespread Confucian belief that males carry on family lines. Abortion has also been illegal but practiced widely.



■AUSTRALIA

Pest controller eats bugs

A pest controller who got lost in the desert while prospecting for gold survived by turning for help to the bugs he usually kills — and eating them. Theo Rosmulder, 52, managed to stay alive in the harsh West Australian desert for five days by knocking the tops off termite mounds and “getting stuck into them”, the Australian newspaper reported. “It’s quite funny that the things that I kill to make a living are the things that kept me alive,” said Rosmulder, who was eventually found by Aboriginal trackers. Police said the part-time prospector was in a “particularly good condition for the ordeal” when he was found about 10km from his group’s campsite about 130km north of Laverton.



■AUSTRALIA

Rudd has convict ancestry

One of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s ancestors was a street urchin sentenced to death for stealing a dress and underwear, researchers said on Thursday. And his paternal fourth great-grandfather, Thomas Rudd, was transported to Australia in 1801 to serve a seven-year sentence for “unlawfully acquiring a bag of sugar”, according to a new family history. Far from being the embarrassment it might have been just a couple of decades ago, the discovery is likely to give Rudd’s image a boost as convict ancestry is something of a badge of honor in modern times.



■PHILIPPINES

Communists kill three

Communist guerrillas have killed three soldiers and burned a telecom facility in related attacks in the north, the military said yesterday. The New People’s Army (NPA) set fire to the site near the town of Pinukpuk on Wednesday and ambushed an infantry unit sent to investigate, the soldiers’ battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Lastimado said. The ambush occurred on the same day near the town of Balbalan, in the Cordillera mountain range, he said in a written report. Three soldiers were killed and a fourth was wounded. The NPA, 5,000 strong, has been waging an armed campaign in the Philippines since 1969.



■SOUTH KOREA

Scientist told not to clone

The government yesterday barred disgraced scientist Hwang Woo-suk from resuming his research into cloned human embryonic stem cells. Hwang has been on trial for more than two years on charges of breaking the law on research ethics and for misusing 2.8 billion won (US$2.8 million) in state funds and private donations. He was once hailed as a national hero for bringing the country to the forefront of work on cloning and stem cell research aimed at finding cures for illnesses that current medicine cannot adequately treat. While on trial, Hwang has returned to the lab to resume work on animal cloning with Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, that has cloned specialist sniffer dogs, endangered breeds and even occasional pets for private clients.



■MONTENEGRO

Former soldiers charged

A Montenegrin prosecutor is charging eight former Yugoslav army soldiers with war crimes for allegedly killing 23 ethnic Albanians during the NATO air war against Yugoslavia. The prosecutor in the northern town of Bijelo Polje says the eight “committed war crimes against 23 ethnic Albanian civilians who did not take part in the hostilities.” The statement says the crimes were committed during the 1999 NATO bombing of what was then Yugoslavia.



■UKRAINE

Caravaggio painting stolen

A painting attributed to the Italian artist Caravaggio has been stolen from a museum in the southern city of Odessa, local media reported on Thursday. The Taking of Christ, painted between 1573 and 1602, was stolen on Wednesday night, a museum source told Interfax news agency. “The windows had been carefully removed and that is how the criminal got into the museum. The alarm did not go off because the windows had not been broken,” Odessa police chief Vladimir Bossenko was quoted as saying.



■FRANCE

Escaped bulls hunted down

Mounted cattle-herders and gendarmes hunted escaped bulls in a sunflower field in southern France on Thursday with orders to bring them in dead or alive by the end of the day. By the end of the afternoon the death sentence had been lifted, with all but four recaptured and the remainder located, Sappin’s deputy Jacques Simmonet said, calling the operation a success. The horned Camargue bulls — weighing upwards of 200kg and reared for use in bull-running festivals — were the remnants of a herd of 48 that escaped last Saturday after vandals apparently tore down fences enclosing them.



■UNITED KINGDOM

No verdict in bombing trial

A jury announced yesterday that it had failed to reach verdicts in the case of three men accused of helping to plan the London subway and bus bombings in 2005 — the worst attack on Britain’s capital since World War II. British prosecutors said they could not immediately confirm whether or not they would seek a retrial in the case. The three men, who acknowledged at their trial that they knew the four London suicide bombers, are the only people so far charged over the attacks on the capital’s transit network that killed 52 commuters on three subway trains and a bus. Following 15 days of deliberations, a jury at a London court said it could not agree on verdicts and was discharged. Waheed Ali, Sadeer Saleem and Mohammed Shakil all denied a charge of conspiring with the bombers to cause the explosions.



■UNITED KINGDOM

World’s oldest joke traced

The world’s oldest recorded joke has been traced back to 1900 BC and suggests toilet humor was as popular with the ancients as it is today. It is a saying of the Sumerians, who lived in what is now southern Iraq and goes: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.” It heads the world’s oldest top 10 joke list published by the University of Wolverhampton on Thursday. A 1600 BC gag about a pharaoh, said to be King Snofru, comes second — “How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.” The oldest British joke dates back to the 10th Century — “What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before? Answer: A key.”



■MEXICO

Drug trafficker arrested

Authorities have captured a key Colombian drug trafficker who was a top supplier of cocaine to the fractured Sinaloa cartel, police said on Thursday. Ever Villafane Martinez was detained on Wednesday for illegally carrying a gun in Mexico City, they said. Villafane supplied drugs to a gang led by Arturo Beltran Leyva, a one-time ally of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, considered Mexico’s most wanted man, police said. The Beltran Leyva and Guzman gangs are waging a turf war for control of the Sinaloa cartel. Beltran Leyva’s hitmen reportedly killed one of Guzman’s sons in May.



■MEXICO

Official denies family killed

Agriculture Minister Alberto Cardenas confirmed on Thursday the fatal shooting of six people, including two children, in western Mexico, but denied that they were from his family. An official and news reports said earlier that six of the minister’s relatives, including two girls aged seven and eight, were found executed in his home in Jalisco. Cardenas confirmed the killings but said that the victims had been close friends living in a house he had sold them. The prosecutor’s office said that the family could have been caught up in a robbery because one of the victims had recently withdrawn a large amount of money from the bank.



■UNITED STATES

Fat cat abandoned

A 20kg cat found lumbering around New Jersey was abandoned by a woman who said her home was foreclosed, an animal shelter official said on Thursday. The porky white cat found on Saturday became a local media sensation and was dubbed “Princess Chunk.” But the animal is really a male whose name is Powder. Jennifer Anderch, director of the Camden County Animal Shelter, said that the cat’s owner came forward to describe the animal’s background. Anderch said she had received hundreds of calls from people seeking to adopt Powder. The largest cat on record weighed 21.3kg.



■UNITED STATES

Body found in restroom

The body of a woman was found inside an airplane restroom after a Delta Airlines flight from Los Angeles landed in Atlanta early on Wednesday, a Delta statement and media reports said. “Medical professionals on the flight were called to assist the crew,” and authorities meeting the flight “confirmed that the passenger had passed away,” Delta spokeswoman Maria Schnabel said. There were no signs of foul play and the body of a woman in her 60s was taken to a medical examiner’s office for an autopsy, the Los Angeles Times said, quoting Atlanta police. The identity of the deceased was not released “as a matter of passenger privacy,” Delta said.



■CANADA

Man decapitates seat mate

A passenger traveling across the Western plains on a bus stabbed, gutted and decapitated a man seated next to him, and then taunted police with the head, a witness told media on Thursday. The victim, about 18 years old, had been sleeping with headphones on his ears before he was repeatedly stabbed in the chest by the man with a “big Rambo knife,” witness Garnet Caton told public broadcaster CBC. The other 34 passengers and the driver were jolted by “blood-curdling screams” and fled, bracing the door on their way out to trap the assailant inside the bus, he said. Moments later, police surrounded the bus and arrested the man after a nearly three-hour standoff, an official said. “He was taunting police with the head in his hand out the window,” Caton said.


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