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World News Quick Take

■ NEW ZEALAND

Tourist survives accident

German tourist Julia Jahn, 20, kept telling herself she was too young to die as she struggled for five hours to keep her head above water after her kayak became trapped on a river, a newspaper reported on yesterday. “I was thinking I want to survive. I’m still young. I don’t want to die, so I had such a big will to live,” Jahn, from Bavaria, told the Dominion Post as she talked about Friday’s ill-fated kayak trip in the wilderness of the North Island’s Whanganui River. She fought to stay alive as fellow tourist, Jack Marsden-Mayer, 29, from England, unable to free her, paddled his kayak 30.5km down the isolated river to a hiker’s hut with a radio to call police for help. Jahn, suffering hypothermia and slipping in and out of consciousness, was rescued by three local farmers with a jet boat and a rescue helicopter flew her to hospital.



■ CHINA

Subway death toll rises

The final death toll from the collapse of a subway tunnel that was under construction in the east has reached 21, with all hope gone of rescuing 13 missing workers, state media reported. After more than three days of efforts, searchers were unable to find the 13 missing labourers in the silt-filled tunnel in Hangzhou, the official Xinhua news agency said late on Tuesday. It cited rescuers as saying there was “no chance” of finding them alive. “If the workers are trapped in the middle of the mire, it may take two or three days for rescuers to reach them. If they are at the bottom, it’s hard to say when they can be reached,” Xinhua quoted a local official as saying. Eight people have already been confirmed dead in the accident, which happened on Saturday at a construction site for a subway in Hangzhou. Altogether 75m of a tunnel collapsed, creating a huge crater that also trapped 11 vehicles, including at least one bus.



■ INDIA

Police tortured men: group

Police officers allegedly tortured 21 Muslim men during an investigation into a series of bombings in the south, an international rights group said as it called for the officers to be prosecuted. Bomb attacks in Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh state, in May and August last year killed more than 50 people. At the time police blamed Islamic militants and rounded up more than 100 Muslim men. New York-based Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday that while most were released, at least 21 were held for long periods and allegedly tortured while under detention. “The detainees were stripped, hung upside down, severely beaten, subjected to electric shocks, and otherwise ill-treated,” the group said in a statement.



■ PHILIPPINES

Rebels killed in firefight

Two communist rebels were killed yesterday in a firefight with government troops in the east, an army spokesman said. The clash erupted at dawn when soldiers encountered about 20 communist guerrillas while on patrol in the village of San Marcos in Catanduanes Province, 375km southeast of Manila, Lieutenant Colonel Romeo Brawner said. The fighting lasted for almost one hour, resulting in the killing of two communist rebels, Brawner said, adding that no casualty was reported on the army’s side. Brawner said the bodies of the slain guerrillas, two rifles and subversive documents were recovered after the clash. Communist rebels have been fighting the government since the late 1960s, making the movement one of the longest-running leftist insurgencies in Asia.



■ ALBANIA

Group ends hunger strike

A group of lawmakers ended an eight-day hunger strike on Tuesday shortly before parliament approved a new election law, ignoring their demands. The 10 hunger strikers are members of the small parties which they said would suffer under the new law that assigns seats to the 140-seat parliament based more heavily on regional preference. The law passed by 112-1 votes late on Tuesday, with the support of the two largest parties. Small parties said the reforms could exclude them from parliament and attracted several thousand people to a protest outside parliament on Tuesday in favor of the deputies on hunger strike.



■ FRANCE

Paratroopers discharged

The army has discharged three Foreign Legion paratroopers over the death of a fellow soldier after he was kicked, beaten and deprived of water in a training exercise in Africa. An army spokesman says an autopsy found soldier Josef Tvarusko died on May 5 of a heart attack caused by heat stroke after the mistreatment in Djibouti. The spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Bertrand Le Testu, said the legionnaires were discharged on Tuesday after an investigation found they were responsible of “behavior contrary to the values” of the legion and the French army.



■ GERMANY

Rats menace Hamelin

The rats are back in Hamelin, where a legendary Pied Piper once rid the city of both rodents and children. The city confirmed on Tuesday it was battling a rat population explosion in an area of overgrown former garden allotments close to the city center. “It’s like a rubbish dump in there and has developed into a rat refuge,” municipal spokesman Thomas Wahmes said. After a rapid rise in rat numbers this year, the vermin were spreading into a new housing estate nearby. The city’s hands are tied because it does not own the wilderness, where locals used to grow vegetables. Its ownership is legally so tangled that no one can act. Rat poison has been distributed in a ring around the rat-ridden area.



■ IRAN

Kurdish guerrillas killed

Security forces have killed several members of a Kurdish guerrilla group and arrested four in western Iran, local media reported on Tuesday. Members of the Revolutionary Guards killed “a number of mercenary agents” of the PJAK guerrilla group, all of whom were of Turkish nationality, Kermanshah Deputy Governor Hojjatollah Damiyat said. “These individuals were organized and equipped by Israeli and American espionage services,” the deputy governor said, in comments carried by Iran’s Mehr News Agency. It did not say when the clash took place.



■ FRANCE

Syringe attack condemned

The foreign ministry has condemned an attack on a French activist in Moscow who reportedly said she was jabbed in the leg with a syringe. French and Russian newspapers have quoted Carine Clement as saying she was attacked with a syringe containing an unidentified liquid. Ministry spokesman Frederic Desagneaux said it was the third time Clement had been targeted, but did not give further details. The ministry said in a statement on Tuesday that the attack was “unacceptable” and that French authorities have contacted her. Newspaper reports say Clement is a Moscow-based sociologist and activist with a group defending homeowners against abusive developers.





■ UNITED STATES

Hate incidents on the rise

An interracial couple in Pennsylvania woke up to find the remains of a burnt cross in their front garden. A California town saw cars and garages vandalized with swastikas, racist epithets and slogans such as “Go Back to Africa.” Black effigies hung from nooses in an island community in Maine. Students chanted “assassinate Obama” on a schoolbus in Idaho. Barack Obama’s historic election as the US’ first black president has led to a surge of racist incidents across the country, hate-crime monitoring groups and analysts say. Mark Potok, director of the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, said the final weeks of the US election campaign and its aftermath had witnessed “hundreds and hundreds” of hate-related incidents.



■ UNITED STATES

Flamingo takes flight

An Iowa zoo has recaptured a flamingo that flew over a Des Moines neighborhood, a golf course and the entire zoo during a seven-hour freedom flight. Blank Park Zoo workers clipped the adult Chilean flamingo’s wings a second time after it was recaptured. Zoo spokesman Terry Rich says the birds can molt and regrow their feathers, enabling them to fly.



■ UNITED STATES

Man begs for job

After nine months of looking for work, Paul Nawrocki turned to a Depression-era tactic to find a job. Over the past few days the 59-year-old businessman has been walking the sidewalks of midtown Manhattan wearing a suit, a tie and a large signs that reads, “Almost homeless.” Nawrocki, who was laid off from his job at a toy company in February. The sight of a middle-class businessman down on his luck seems to have struck a chord with some New Yorkers. Nawrocki said he’s already landed interviews with recruiters who saw him passing out his resume on the street. Nawrocki, who is married, spent 23 years in the toy industry, mostly as an import operations manager. He made a good salary, “almost six figures,” he said. The company where he worked filed for bankruptcy in August.



■ UNITED STATES

Inmate escapes, returns

Chad Toy’s escape from jail wasn’t what shocked his jailers; it was his plea to be let back in. “When I rang the bell at the jail and told them who I was, they were surprised,” Toy told the Paducah Sun newspaper. Toy, 21, was in a western Kentucky jail awaiting trial on charges stemming from a July home invasion. Officials said he escaped on Monday while on a cleanup detail in the lobby. He bolted after a guard unlocked the front doors to clean an area. But Toy returned that afternoon, wet and covered with grime. He told authorities his sister had told him to surrender. A jailer said he doubts Toy’s account. He thinks the escapee spent his brief liberty hiding beside the Tennessee River.



■ MEXICO

Interpol head arrested

The head of Mexico’s Interpol office has been arrested on suspicion he had contacts with the country’s major drug cartels, the Attorney General’s office said on Tuesday. Ricardo Gutierrez Vargas, the Federal Investigation Agency’s International Police Affairs and Interpol director, was arrested on Sunday as part of “Operation Clean-up,” a government crackdown on corrupt police. Four members of Special Organized Crime Investigation Division, including its intelligence chief, have been arrested, the office said. Investigators said drug cartels were paying some officers between US$150,000 and US$450,000 a month for information.




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