■AUSTRALIA
River inflow at record low
Rivers in the most important farming region are in critical condition because of the long-running drought, with no end in sight, officials said yesterday. The Murray-Darling Basin Commission, which monitors the east coast region that accounts for some 40 percent of the nation’s farming production, said the level of water entering the Murray River was at a record low. The Bureau of Meteorology has said the system needs several months of torrential rain to return the rivers to health, but that such a weather pattern was not on the horizon. Drought and irrigation have so depleted the system that freshwater lower lakes at the mouth of the Murray are turning to acid, the bureau said.
■AUSTRALIA
School apologizes to Sikh
An exclusive school yesterday apologized for refusing to enroll a 12-year-old Sikh boy unless he discarded his turban and cut his hair to conform with the school’s uniform regulations. The apology formed part of a settlement won after the boy’s parents complained to Queensland state’s Anti-Discrimination Commission after he was turned away from Ormiston College in the eastern city of Brisbane in 2006. Sikhs were outraged by the school’s stance as their religion mandates that the faithful should wear turbans and not cut their hair.
■INDIA
Lawyer dies arguing case
An 89-year-old Indian lawyer collapsed and died as he was arguing a case before a judge in Mumbai, newspapers said yesterday. A doctor and colleagues tried to save Vinayak Trivikram Walavalkar after he slumped into his chair at Bombay High Court on Monday morning. The lawyer, who began practicing in 1944, was found to have suffered a massive heart attack.
■AUSTRALIA
Boomerang may be fake
A boomerang that international auction house Christie’s says was a souvenir taken by Britain’s Captain James Cook on his voyage to Australia in 1770 is almost certainly a fake, an expert said yesterday. Aborigines in Sydney have urged the Australian government to bid for the boomerang when it goes to auction in London later this month. “There is not the slightest shred of evidence that this boomerang was anywhere around Cook, even within 50 years of his death,” ethnographer and collector Arthur Palmer told the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper.
■PHILIPPINES
Offensive scaled down
Manila has ordered troops to scale down an offensive to flush out rogue Muslim rebels in the south to allow Islamic communities to observe the holy month of Ramadan, the military chief said yesterday. General Alexander Yano said the military would minimize the use of artillery and air strikes on positions occupied by renegade members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) on the southern island of Mindanao.
■AUSTRALIA
Kangaroo mauls jogger
A jogger was attacked by a kangaroo on Monday on the outskirts of Australia’s second-largest city, and hospitalized with a cut on his head, an ambulance officer said. The man, in his 50s, was taken by ambulance to a Melbourne hospital in stable condition, Metropolitan Ambulance Service spokeswoman Christine Paterson said. He was attacked as he ran between a male and female kangaroo near his home in a suburb of Melbourne.
■SWITZERLAND
Long life? Take the stairs
A small study released on Monday showed that walking up and down stairs for three months led to an improvement in aerobic capacity equivalent to a 15 percent fall in the risk of dying prematurely from any cause. Philippe Meyer of the University Hospital in Geneva studied 69 employees of the university with a sedentary lifestyle. After not using elevators for 12 weeks, they increased their use of stairs to an average of 23 stories ascended or descended a day from five before, with a resulting sharp increase in fitness levels.
■GERMANY
Half-sisters to run opera fest
The struggle played out backstage, pitting the great-grandchildren of composer Richard Wagner against their cousin for control of the festival dedicated to his music. Now half-sisters Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier will take the helm of the Bayreuth Festival, revered by opera connoisseurs. The festival’s 24-member board announced on Monday that they would replace their father, Wolfgang, as directors.
■NIGERIA
Man to divorce 82 wives
An 84-year-old man with 86 wives and 170 children has accepted a decree issued by Islamic authorities that he must divorce 82 of them, reports said on Monday. Mohammadu Bello Abubakar on Saturday agreed to the mass divorce. Abubakar, a former teacher and preacher, faced the death penalty under Shariah law. The Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs said Shariah law limited a man to four wives.
■DR CONGO
Aid plane crashes
The UN said a plane carrying 17 people on a humanitarian aid flight had crashed. Air Serv International said on its Web site that an aerial survey by helicopter indicates there are no known survivors. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said the Beechcraft plane went missing in bad weather late on Monday with two crew and 15 passengers on board. It was located yesterday 15km northwest of the airstrip at Bukavu, its intended destination. The UN office’s spokeswoman Elizabeth Byrs said rescuers are trying to reach the site.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Insurance scam fails
Six months after Ahmad Akhtary allegedly died in Afghanistan, a visit to the doctor scuttled his ex-wife’s attempt to collect £300,000 (US$550,000) in life insurance. At a hearing last week in Gloucester, a judge sentenced 34-year-old Akhtary to 60 hours of community service and his former wife, Anne Akhtary, to 40 hours of community service. Anne Akhtary, 43, admitted trying to claim the payout by using a forged death certificate claiming that her husband had died of brain trauma in an accident. “[Investigators] were told that Mr Akhtary’s GP had seen him at his practice and he had attended hospital, so it was not the most sophisticated way of going about making a false claim,” a prosecutor said.
■FRANCE
Minister lauds English
Minister of Education Xavier Darcos says the secret to success is speaking better English. French high school students will be offered optional intensive seminars in English-language skills during school vacations in February and the summer, he said. While “well-off families pay for study sessions abroad, I’m offering them to everyone right here.” The minister’s comments on Monday were a sign of growing pragmatism in a country where politicians have often tried to preserve the influence of French.
■MEXICO
Police to be laid off
Some 400 corrupt police officers will be laid off in the violent city of Ciudad Juarez, officials said on Monday, in a police purge to tackle escalating crime. Police are notoriously corrupt and often involved in kidnappings and organized crime. “Just over 400 police officers who failed a reliability test will be dismissed,” said Jose Reyes, mayor of the city across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, that has registered almost 1,000 murders so far this year, out of some 3,000 nationwide. Another 10 police commanders would also be laid off, also for failing to pass reliability tests, said an official for the Chihuahua state government.
■BRAZIL
Spy chief suspended
The president on Monday suspended the head of the nation’s intelligence service amid a scandal over wiretaps on the phones of top officials, including the chief justice of the Supreme Court. A statement from President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s office said Paulo Lacerda was temporarily removed from his post while an investigation takes place. The scandal broke last weekend after the news magazine Veja reported that the head of Supreme Court, members of Congress and officials close to Silva — including his chief of staff and at least one Cabinet official — all had their phones bugged by the intelligence agency.
■COLOMBIA
Communities flee violence
More than 4,400 people were driven from their rural communities or pinned down in their homes on Monday by gunfights among leftist rebels, other armed groups and state security forces, the Red Cross said. The fighting has taken place over recent days in the southwest provinces of Cauca and Narino, which are used by Marxist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary militias to produce and smuggle cocaine to the Pacific coast. “About half of victims affected by the fighting cannot leave their homes to work, get food or access to basic necessities. The other half have been forced from their homes by the fighting,” a Red Cross spokesman said.
■IRAQ
Death toll down 7 percent
The death toll last month was down by about 7 percent from the previous month, with 431 people slain in insurgent and militia attacks across the country, security officials said on Monday. At least 383 civilians, 18 Iraqi soldiers and 30 policemen were killed in last month, figures collected by the interior, defense and health ministries showed. In July, 387 civilians, 45 policemen and 33 soldiers were killed. Also last month, 116 militants were killed and 1,385 arrested in security operations, the officials said. The US military, meanwhile, saw a rise in its death toll, with at least 22 soldiers killed across the country, up from 13 in July.
■UNITED STATES
Online science rap a hit
Who says science doesn’t turn people on? Kate McAlpine is a rising star on YouTube for her rap performance — about high-energy particle physics. Her performance has drawn a half-million views so far on YouTube. The 23-year-old Michigan State University graduate and science writer raps about the Large Hadron Collider, the groundbreaking particle accelerator that has been built in a 27km circular tunnel at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. McAlpine raps that when the collider goes into operation on Sept. 10, “the things that it discovers will rock you in the head.”
Far from the violence ravaging Haiti, a market on the border with the Dominican Republic has maintained a welcome degree of normal everyday life. At the Dajabon border gate, a wave of Haitians press forward, eager to shop at the twice-weekly market about 200km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They are drawn by the market’s offerings — food, clothing, toys and even used appliances — items not always readily available in Haiti. However, with gang violence bad and growing ever worse in Haiti, the Dominican government has reinforced the usual military presence at the border and placed soldiers on alert. While the market continues to
An image of a dancer balancing on the words “China Before Communism” looms over Parisian commuters catching the morning metro, signaling the annual return of Shen Yun, a controversial spectacle of traditional Chinese dance mixed with vehement criticism of Beijing and conservative rhetoric. The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicolored visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an Internet meme. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to “persistent persecution” in
ONLINE VITRIOL: While Mo Yan faces a lawsuit, bottled water company Nongfu Spring and Tsinghua University are being attacked amid a rise in nationalist fervor At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common, but in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valor in cyberspace. Last month, a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan (莫言), accusing him of discrediting the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Wu, who posts online under the pseudonym “Truth-Telling Mao Xinghuo,” is seeking
‘SURPRISES’: The militants claim to have successfully tested a missile capable of reaching Mach 8 and vowed to strike ships heading toward the Cape of Good Hope Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia’s state media reported on Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unidentified official, but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the