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World News Quick Take

■ KYRGYZSTAN

US officials found in raid

Police have raided a house in Bishkek where they found US embassy officials and soldiers along with arms including machine guns and night-vision goggles, the interior ministry said yesterday. “There were several employees of the US embassy with diplomatic immunity and 10 soldiers who supposedly came from the United States to carry out training with Kyrgyz secret services,” the ministry said in a statement. The US nationals have not been arrested and an inquiry is continuing, a ministry spokesman said.



■ MALAYSIA

Police suspects in drug theft

A drug haul worth 1 million ringgit (US$300,000) has gone missing from police custody, a report said yesterday. The New Straits Times said the 5kg stash of amphetamines that had been stored at police headquarters in southern Johor state was believed to be from the year’s biggest drug bust. The daily said the thieves were alleged to be policemen and that they had used acid to dissolve the padlock to the evidence room where the drugs were kept, while 60 officers were on duty in the building. It cited unnamed sources as saying that a police officer was detained on Saturday for failing a urine test carried out after the drugs were discovered missing on Thursday.



■ JAPAN

Sewage sweeps men away

A fire department spokeswoman said four people were missing after being washed away by a surge of sewage water while working in a manhole in downtown Tokyo. Tokyo Fire Department spokeswoman Masami Komura said rescuers found one of the five workers who were swept away yesterday. He was found floating unconscious in a nearby river. His condition was not immediately known. She says a sixth worker was able to escape when the sewage water suddenly surged through an area where the men were making repairs in the city’s southeast after heavy rains.



■ JAPAN

DPJ not Nazis, Aso says

Japanese ruling party heavyweight Taro Aso, no stranger to political controversy, was under fire yesterday after reportedly appearing to compare the country’s opposition party to the Nazis. The Nikkei business paper said Aso had brought up the Nazis, who were allied with Japan during World War II, in coversation with a senior member of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). “If you look at history, there is an example of regimes like the Nazis taking power as a result of people leaving the ruling party,” Aso reportedly said. “[German people] let the Nazis take power, leaving that consequence,” other papers quoted him as saying. Aso said he was simply criticizing the political stalemate in Japan since the opposition won control of one house of parliament last year. “I do not mean the DPJ are Nazis,” he said.



■ MALAYSIA

Addict sets fire to homes

A drug addict set his home ablaze in a fit of rage after his mother refused to give him 2 ringgit (US$0.65), reports said yesterday. The fire, which was set in the 35-year-old’s room, spread and destroyed three of his neighbors’ homes in the Monday evening incident, which left 20 people homeless, the Malay-language Berita Harian daily said. The suspect’s stepfather, Ibrahim Sulong, said his stepson had hit his 65-year-old wife in the forehead when she refused to give him the money. She then lodged a police report against her son. “As soon as he realised the police were coming to get him, he got angry and set his room on fire,” he said. No injuries were reported.

■ ITALY

Missing nipple offends

The government cover-up that Italians are whispering about these days has nothing to do with politics. Instead, it’s about a missing nipple. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s staff have altered a reproduction of a famous 18th-century painting by Giambattista Tiepolo to cover an exposed breast on full display in the press room of the prime minister’s palace, the Palazzo Chigi. Nude artwork rarely offends in Italy, but this particular bare breast, in Tiepolo’s Time Uncovering Truth, was the backdrop for press conferences and often caught on camera. Aides decided to repaint the woman’s gown to cover the offending nipple. “It was an initiative by those on the presidential staff who look after Berlusconi’s image,” his spokesman Paolo Bonaiuti, was quoted telling the daily Corriere della Sera. “That breast, that nipple ... it ends up exactly inside the frame captured by TV news stations at press conferences.” Vittorio Sgarbi, an art critic and once a culture undersecretary, called the move “crazy.”



■ ISRAEL

Couple forget toddler

An Israeli couple going on a European vacation remembered to take their duty-free shopping and their 18 suitcases, but left their three-year-old daughter at the airport, police said on Monday. The couple and their five children were late for a charter flight to Paris on Sunday and made a mad dash to the gate. In the confusion, their daughter got lost. Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said a policeman found her wandering in the duty-free area at Israel’s Ben-Gurion airport. He said the parents were unaware they had boarded the aircraft with only four children instead of five until they were informed by cabin staff after 40 minutes in the air. The child, accompanied by an airline staffer, took the next flight to Paris where she was safely reunited with her parents.



■ UNITED KINGDOM

Dying for a salad?

Celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson has apologized after accidentally recommending a potentially deadly plant in organic salads. The chef and TV presenter said in a magazine article that the weed henbane, also known as stinking nightshade, made an excellent addition to summertime meals. There was plenty of it, it grew locally and was used by the ancient Greeks and the Arabs for its anesthetic properties. Er, not quite. Henbane, or Hyoscyamus niger, is toxic and can cause hallucinations, convulsions, vomiting and in extreme cases death.



■ SPAIN

Electronic tongue developed

Scientists at the Barcelona Institute of Microelectronics have developed an “electronic tongue” for the rapid assessment of the age and variety of wine, Britain’s Royal Society of Chemistry said on Monday. The handheld device, which was described in the chemistry journal The Analyst, has six sensors capable of detecting wine components such as acid, sugar and alcohol. The tongue, which can be “trained” to taste new types of wine, was expected to cut time-consuming laboratory processing to detect fraud.



■ UNITED KINGDOM

Rail track thief sentenced

A thief who used a crane to steal five truckloads of track from Acton Turville, Gloucestershire, one of the country’s busiest railway lines, has been jailed for nearly three years. Anthony Porretta, 53, masterminded the theft of 171 tonnes of steel track, worth £83,000 (US$162,450), on Dec. 1, 2006, to sell for scrap.Charges against four others were dropped.

■ UNITED STATES

Man calls 911 for sauce

The sauce for a spicy Italian sandwich was apparently a must have for one Florida man. The man, Reginald Peterson, called police emergency hot line number 911 twice after a sandwich shop left off the sauce. Peterson initially called on Thursday so that officers could have his sandwiches made correctly, a police report said. The second call was to complain that police officers were not arriving fast enough. Subway workers told police that Peterson, 42, became belligerent and yelled when they were fixing his order. They locked him out of the store when he left to call police.



■ UNITED STATES

Man survives 76m fall

A tourist was nursing only cuts and bruises after sliding 76m down a cliff on California’s coast. Twenty-year-old Jost Ben of Wilnsdorf, Germany, had been tossing a football with friends on Sunday at a traffic pullout perched 122m above the Pacific. After a stray toss, he climbed over the edge to retrieve the football. Monterey County Sheriff’s Sergeant Garrett Sanders said Ben “just started sliding.” A sheriff’s team rappelled down, strapped Ben to a harness and helped him scale the cliff. Ben was treated for a gash to his face and other cuts. He was not able to recover the football, but Sanders said: “He’s lucky he’s alive.”



■ BARBADOS

Tiniest snake species found

A US scientist said on Sunday he has discovered the globe’s tiniest species of snake in the easternmost Caribbean island of Barbados, with full-grown adults typically stretching less than 10cm long. S. Blair Hedges, an evolutionary biologist at Penn State University whose research teams also have discovered the world’s tiniest lizard in the Dominican Republic and the smallest frog in Cuba, said the snake was found slithering beneath a rock near a patch of Barbadian forest. Hedges said the tiny-title-holding snake, which is so diminutive it can curl up on a US quarter, is the smallest of the roughly 3,100 known snake species.



■ TURKEY

Hospital baby deaths probed

The Health Ministry said it has appointed a team of investigators to probe the deaths of more than two dozen newborn babies at an Ankara hospital. The Zekai Tahir Burak hospital has acknowledged that 27 babies have died in the past two weeks. The hospital has one of the city’s busiest maternity units. It has said most of the babies were premature and died from a variety of complications and ruled out any hospital infection. A health workers’ trade union, however, has blamed poor sanitary conditions and negligence for the deaths. The ministry said on Monday inspectors would probe the deaths and vowed “necessary measures” against anyone found responsible.



■ UNITED KINGDOM

Youth mags criticized

Lads magazines such as Nuts and Zoo promote a shallow approach toward women and encourage young men to think of them as permanently available, the Conservatives said on Monday. They play a part in encouraging selfish irresponsibility among young men, which in turn contributes to high rates of teenage pregnancy, Shadow Children Secretary Michael Gove said in a speech. “We need to ask tough questions about the instant-hit hedonism celebrated by the modern men’s magazines targeted at younger males,” he said. “Titles such as Nuts and Zoo paint a picture of women as permanently, lasciviously, uncomplicatedly available,” he said.