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World News Quick Take

■AUSTRALIA

Pregnancy does not befuddle

Pregnancy has long been blamed for addling women’s minds, but new research found this idea may be nothing more than an old wives’ tale. A study by the Australian National University’s center for mental health research found no evidence to suggest that impending motherhood affects a woman’s cognitive ability. The research is based on interviews with 2,500 women aged between 20 and 24 first undertaken in 1999 and again in 2003 and last year. It found that the 76 women who were pregnant during the second or third interviews scored no differently on logic and memory tests than previously.



■THAILAND

Alleged arms dealer in court

Alleged Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout appeared in a Bangkok court yesterday for extradition hearings that could send him to the US to face terrorism charges. Thailand’s criminal court must decide whether there is enough evidence to extradite him to the US, where he could face life in prison. Bout has been held at a maximum-security prison outside Bangkok since his arrest on March 6. During an undercover operation, Bout allegedly agreed to supply surface-to-air missiles to US anti-drug agents posing as rebels from Colombia’s Marxist FARC group, which Washington considers a terrorist organization.



■INDIA

Drug briefs theory wins case

A man escaped a possible death sentence for drug trafficking after his lawyer told a court it was impossible to walk with a stash of heroin in his underpants, a newspaper reported yesterday. Mumbai police alleged Dhirendra Kamdar was carrying 2kg of the drug in four 500g packets in his underwear when they picked him up as he walked from a guest house to get a taxi to the city’s airport. But Kamdar’s lawyer Ayaz Khan said it was impossible for anyone to walk 1km with such an amount of drugs in his underwear, the Daily News and Analysis newspaper said. Khan demonstrated his theory to the judge using four bags filled with sugar, and Kamdar was acquitted on lack of evidence.



■MALDIVES

Run-off vote set for Oct. 29

The nation’s first-ever democratic presidential election will be decided in a run-off on Oct. 29, after the first round failed to deliver a clear winner, officials said yesterday The run-off date is well outside the 10-day limit laid down by the nation’s election law. The head-to-head vote will pit Asia’s longest serving leader, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, against his most outspoken critic and former political prisoner Mohamed “Anni” Nasheed. During Wednesday’s first round, Gayoom polled 40.63 percent of the vote, while Nasheed secured 25.09 percent.



■JAPAN

Smoke at nuclear site

Smoke was detected yesterday at a nuclear power complex that suffered a major accident a decade ago, but the operator said there was no release of radioactivity. The smoke was found at a solid waste facility at the Tokaimura plant northeast of Tokyo in a room where metal waste is burned, said Masataka Sekine, a spokesman for operator Japan Atomic Power Co. Sekine said the smoke never left the room and nobody was injured. The reactors are in another part of the plant and the facility continued operating, he said. In 1999, an uncontrolled nuclear reaction occurred at the fuel reprocessing center in Tokaimura, a rural area 110km northeast of Tokyo. Two workers were killed and about 700 people were exposed to radiation.



■JAPAN

Public ready for opposition

A majority of voters are ready to give the opposition a chance to run Japan, where the Liberal Democratic Party has dominated for most of the past 50 years, a poll by Yomiuri Shimbun said yesterday. The opposition is pressing Prime Minister Taro Aso to call elections as soon as possible, hoping for a landmark victory. Fifty-eight percent of voters said they were ready at least to give a chance to the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan, against 38 percent who are not, a poll of 1,787 voters showed. But asked whether they were completely convinced of the party’s capability to be in power, 46 percent said yes, compared with 67 percent when asked the same question about the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.



■PAKISTAN

Bus crash kills 25 people

Twenty-five people, most of them students, were killed and more than 48 injured yesterday when a bus and a tractor-trailer collided in central Punjab province, police said. The accident happened near the town of Lodhran, about 375km southwest of the provincial capital Lahore. The bus transporting around 100 people, including schoolchildren, rolled over several times after plowing into a truck loaded with fertilizer. Lodhran police chief Khurram Ali said the casualty toll was high because the bus was carrying passengers beyond its capacity and many people had climbed up on to the vehicle’s roof.



■HONG KONG

English skills slipping: poll

Eleven years after British rule ended, only one in seven Hong Kong people consider that they speak good English, according to a survey released yesterday. More than 40 percent of people in the territory described their level of English as below average or worse, while 15 percent described it as good and only 3 percent said it was excellent. The survey, which involved interviews with more than 1,000 people aged 15 to 64 in February, was conducted by an English language education company that trained interpreters for the Beijing Olympics.



■UNITED STATES

Tin Pan Alley for sale

Tin Pan Alley, New York, the home of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and other great American songwriters, is up for sale. Five buildings on West 28th Street in Manhattan’s Chelsea district are being offered as a group for US$44 million. A listing on real estate Web site Loopnet recommends that the buildings be torn down and a high-rise take their place. Preservationists and tenants are not happy. Historic Districts Council executive director Simeon Bankoff said: “These buildings are incredibly significant to the development of New York City. They helped launch the careers of songwriters and musicians who are still popular today.” Tin Pan Alley housed a concentration of music publishers and songwriters from the 1890s to the 1950s.



■MEXICO

Hurricane Norbert weakens

Hurricane Norbert weakened to a Category 1 hurricane late on Thursday, but was still forecast to strike Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula at hurricane strength, forecasters said. Early yesterday, Norbert was packing winds near 150kph as it churned north-northwest in the Pacific Ocean west of Mexico, with landfall forecast for early today, the US National Hurricane Center, based in Miami, Florida, said. The Mexican State of Baja California prepared evacuation shelters as Norbert churned toward the narrow strip of western Mexico on Thursday. “All precautions are in place ... we have prepared temporary shelters,” Jose Gajon, director of Baja California state rescue services, told national radio. “We’ll decide today [Thursday] if we’ll evacuate families to secure sites.”



■CANADA

Canadian Forces jet crashes

A pilot and military photographer on a routine training mission as part of the Snowbirds, the Canadian military’s precision flying team, were killed when their jet crashed on Thursday near a base in Moose Jaw, Saskwatchewan. The pair, whose names have not been released, were taking pictures of three other aircraft also in the air when the jet crashed about 1.5km northwest of the base, said Colonel Paul Keddy, commander of Canadian Forces Base Moose. “We’ve had a tragic afternoon,’’ Keddy said.



■UNITED STATES

Charity sues government

An Ohio-based charity that the US government says is linked to Hamas is demanding that officials unfreeze its assets. Attorneys for Kindhearts for Charitable Humanitarian Development sued on Thursday in federal court in Toledo. The charity says the government has not given it a chance to defend itself. The Treasury Department in 2006 ordered US banks to freeze the charity’s assets. The government says it was funneling money to organizations affiliated with the militant Islamic group Hamas. Kindhearts denies any terrorist connections.



■PUERTO RICO

Four-year-old shoots himself

A four-year-old boy accidentally killed himself with his police-officer mother’s gun as she dropped her children off at school in San Juan, police said on Thursday. The gun apparently fell between the two front seats of the car as the mother leaned over to comb her daughter’s hair. The 35-year-old mother is a sergeant with the San Juan police department and her statement will be taken in more detail when she is ready, Commissioner Hilton Cordero said. Her autistic son, Jeremy Marcano, got out of his booster seat, picked up the gun and shot himself in the face, Commander Jose Marrero Rivera said.


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