■ MYANMAR
Tycoon gets jail for ‘ice’
Prominent business tycoon Maung Weik — known to be close to the head of the country’s junta — was sentenced to 15 years in prison on drug trafficking charges in a Yangon court last week, legal sources said on Monday. Weik, 35, who owns Mg Weik and Family Company — one of the country’s largest real estate and trading firms — was arrested last May during a charity trip to the Irrawaddy Delta to help victims of cyclone Nargis. Weik is known to have close ties to Senior General Than Shwe, who heads Myanmar’s ruling junta. He was charged with involvement in trading methamphetamine tablets, called “ice” on the local market. According to charges brought by the government in July, Weik had been buying ice tablets from Peter Too Huat Haw, a Malaysian, since 2003.
■ NEW ZEALAND
Thief plastered on billboards
A thief caught on camera stealing expensive equipment picked the wrong target if wanted to keep a low profile: a billboard company that has plastered his image around the country’s largest city seeking his capture. The unidentified thief was photographed by a suspicious onlooker as he uncoupled 15 electrical transformers used to boost the lighting on a billboard in Auckland. The photographer knew the pillaged sign belonged to Mark Venter, who runs OTW Advertising, one of the country’s oldest billboard companies. So when the photographer offered pictures of the thief in action it cost Venter nothing to mount the images on four city billboards with the inscription: “Who is this Thief? Reward $500.”
■ AUSTRALIA
Gallery uncovers portrait
A rare portrait of Italian Renaissance noblewoman Lucrezia Borgia has been uncovered in a gallery, art conservators said yesterday, ending a 43-year mystery over the painting. The finding comes after several years of detective work by National Gallery of Victoria conservator Carl Villis, who identified the subject and artist behind the work, titled Portrait of a Youth, and painted around 1520. Villis said the painting, bought by the gallery in 1965, was by Renaissance artist Dosso Dossi and was a portrait of Lucrezia Borgia, overturning a century of opinion that the painting was of a young man because the subject was holding a dagger. “What was previously a portrait of an unknown sitter by an unidentified artist, now seems likely to be one of the most significant portraits surviving from the Renaissance,” gallery director Gerard Vaughan said yesterday.
■ CHINA
Falun Gong member jailed
The wife of a man who died in police custody ahead of the Beijing Olympics was sentenced to prison yesterday for supporting the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual group, her lawyer said. A Beijing court jailed Xu Na (許娜) for three years for “using a heretical organization to undermine the implementation of the law,” lawyer Cheng Hai (程海) said, referring to Falun Gong, which was banned in 1999. “During her trial Xu plead not guilty and cited the freedom of religious belief guaranteed by [China’s] Constitution,” Cheng said. “We will appeal the verdict.” Xu and her husband, Yu Zhou (於宙), were detained at a roadside police check point ahead of the Beijing Olympics when authorities discovered they had material published by Falun Gong, according to Cheng. Xu was convicted of possessing and intending to distribute 53 documents and eight computer disks of Falun Gong material, he said.
■ UKRAINE
Blast kills five scavengers
Five people scavenging illegally were killed in an explosion that engulfed a disused pit, officials said on Monday. The emergencies ministry said the five were engaged in “unauthorized gathering of coal and metals” in a mine in eastern Luhansk region when the blast occurred on Sunday.
■ SOMALIA
Pirates hijack Yemeni ship
Somali pirates have hijacked a Yemeni cargo ship in the Gulf of Aden, a regional maritime group said yesterday, a day after sources said the gang holding a Saudi Arabian supertanker were demanding a US$15 million ransom. Andrew Mwangura, coordinator of the Kenya-based East African Seafarers’ Assistance Program, identified the Yemeni vessel as the MV Amani. Few other details were immediately available. “We were just informed the Amani had been taken,” Mwangura said from Mombasa. “But it had been out of contact for about four days, so it is not known exactly when it was seized.”
■ BRAZIL
Mob attacks offices
About 3,000 people attacked government offices to protest a crackdown on illegal Amazon logging, the government said on Monday, prompting the environment minister to call for federal troops. The protests began on Sunday evening in the town of Paragominas in northern Para state after environment officials seized about 400m³ of illegally cut wood, the environmental agency Ibama said on its Web site. The protesters opened fire on a garage where vehicles belonging to the environment agency were parked, stole trucks with confiscated logs and tried to invade a hotel where government agents were staying, Ibama said. Environment Minister Carlos Minc said the government would not back down from efforts to enforce rules aimed at preventing illegal logging that has destroyed swathes of the world’s largest rain forest.
■ UNITED STATES
Last spacewalk completed
US astronauts Steve Bowen and Shane Kimbrough on Monday finished the fourth and last spacewalk of the shuttle Endeavour’s mission at the International Space Station (ISS), completing all the tasks and repairs required of them, NASA said. The “home improvement” mission at the orbiting station will be extended by one day with the Endeavour’s return to Florida set for Sunday, a NASA spokesman at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, said. The two astronauts finished cleaning, lubricating and replacing eleven of twelve ball bearings of a rotation device on one of the ISS’s three double solar antenna arrays, or Solar Alpha Rotary Joint, which was stuck. They also installed a camera on one of the ISS’s truss segments and a GPS on the Japanese Kibo laboratory module.
■ RUSSIA
Three killed in blast
Three people, including a child, were killed yesterday when a car blew up near a metro station in Saint Petersburg, local officials said, adding that a grenade may have caused the blast. The car that exploded was a Russian Lada Priora, said Andrey Alybayev, spokesman for the local branch of the emergencies ministry, said, without giving further details. A security source, who was not named, told the RIA Novosti agency however that the car was being used as an unlicensed private taxi of the type that are common in Russia. The Interfax agency also quoted a security source as saying that the cause of the blast could be one of the passengers was carrying an explosive material, likely to have been a grenade.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion