■INDIA
Chimp takes revenge
A chimpanzee in Kolkata zoo took revenge on visitors by hurling stones at them, injuring a mother and her six-year-old daughter, newspapers reported yesterday. Babu, a male chimpanzee, was being teased by the packed Sunday afternoon crowds when he hit Mithu Mondal, 30, and her daughter Nikita. “Some of the visitors threw pieces of bricks at a chimpanzee named Babu. He became furious and retaliated by throwing stones at them,” S.K Chowdhury, the director of the zoo, told the Calcutta Telegraph. The two victims were taken to hospital and released after treatment.
■JAPAN
Nobel winner to ‘bury medal’
Nobel physics laureate Toshihide Maskawa said yesterday he planned to bury his medal in the ground as the camera-shy professor returned from the ceremony in Sweden. Maskawa made his first-ever foreign trip to collect the prize. He said he had never gone to conferences abroad as he was petrified about speaking English. Asked by reporters on his return to Japan what he would do with the medal, Maskawa said in an apparent joke: “Well, I’ll dig a hole and bury it below.”
■PHILIPPINES
Businessman kidnapped
Muslim extremists have abducted a Filipino-Chinese businessman in the latest in a rash of abductions in the area, police said on Monday. Peter Go, 28, was closing his electronics store on Jolo island late on Saturday when four armed men accosted him, disarmed his security guard and fled in a waiting van, regional police chief Senior Superintendent Julasirim Kasim said. Police pursued the kidnappers but lost them in the town of Indanan, a known haunt of the Abu Sayyaf, a Muslim extremist linked to the al-Qaeda terror network. Both the military and police said the abduction was the work of the Abu Sayyaf.
■SOUTH KOREA
Lee will give away wealth
President Lee Myung-bak said yesterday he is still committed to giving away almost all his personal wealth to encourage the underprivileged to overcome deepening economic difficulties. Lee, in his regular radio address, also said he will continue donating his entire monthly presidential salary of 14 million won (US$10,332) to low-income households for the rest of his five-year term. The former business executive also gave all his salary to poor people when he was mayor of Seoul in 2002-2006. During his election campaign last year, Lee vowed to give away his personal fortune — except for a retirement home — to the needy. He was the richest among the 11 election candidates, according to government figures.
■ GERMANY
Stabbing suspects arrested
Police have arrested two suspects over the stabbing of the Passau police chief and are investigating several other people active in the neo-Nazi scene, prosecutors said yesterday. Alois Mannichl, 52, was seriously injured when he was stabbed in front of his home on Saturday. Police said the attacker made threats with language used by far-right supporters. The stabbing of Mannichal, who had taken a firm stand against far-right supporters in recent years, shocked the country. “This is an escalation of violence to a level we haven’t seen in the right-wing extremist scene ... in decades,” Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said.
■SWEDEN
Sex offender site probed
A government watchdog is investigating a Web site that publishes the names of convicted sex offenders for potential breach of privacy, an official said on Sunday. Data Inspection Board lawyer Jonas Agnvall said the board opened the investigation after receiving complaints about the site and will assess whether the publication has been done with a journalistic purpose or not. By law, material published with a journalistic purpose is excluded from the law that protects personal information. The Web site posts addresses, court documents, dates of birth and photos of convicted rapists.
■EYGPT
Bus crash kills 57
A bus packed with passengers traveling along a narrow road in the south plunged into an irrigation canal, killing 57 people early on Sunday morning. Minya Governor Ahmed Diaa said the bus, with at least 70 passengers on board, swerved to avoid an oncoming pickup truck. It was one of the worst road accidents in recent months, and a prosecution team was at the scene investigating.
■FRANCE
Escapee given 17 years
A court yesterday sentenced Antonio “Nino” Ferrara to 17 years in prison for a spectacular 2003 jailbreak involving automatic weapons and explosives. Ferrara, 35, a notorious armored car robber, was sprung from Fresnes prison outside Paris in a military-style raid by fellow gang members. One of his former lawyers, Karim Achoui, was sentenced to seven years in prison for complicity. A prison guard was given a 12-year term for abetting the escape, and 12 others received terms ranging from suspended sentences to 11 years in jail.
■RUSSIA
Five fetuses found
The remains of five fetuses were found on Sunday in a garbage disposal in northeastern Moscow, news agencies reported, quoting police sources. Two fetuses were 28 weeks old, two more were aged 24 weeks and one was 14 weeks old, sources quoted by RIA Novosti said. Experts suggested that the fetuses were dumped by an underground abortion clinic. Abortions are legal until the 12th week of pregnancy.
■FRANCE
New boss for guide
The Michelin Guide France has for the first time chosen a woman, Josiane Caspar, a 38-year-old German, to head the culinary guidebook starting early next month, Michelin announced on Sunday. “A German who speaks four languages fluently, Josiane Caspar is also the first foreigner to take over the management of Michelin Guide France,” a company spokeswoman said. Caspar was previously in charge of the Michelin guides for Germany, Switzerland and Austria.
■ UNITED STATES
Fort Dix plot trial to close
Jurors were to hear final arguments yesterday in the trial of five men charged with plotting to kill soldiers at New Jersey’s Fort Dix Army base. The jury of eight women and four men heard 26 days of testimony, much of it featuring a pair of government informants who taped numerous conversations with the men. Prosecutors claim the men, all foreign-born Muslims living in southern New Jersey, were jihadist sympathizers eager to mount an attack on US soil. Defense lawyers said the men talked tough but had no real intention of killing anyone and that the informants tried to goad their clients into saying things they didn’t really mean. No attack was carried out.
■IRAQ
Seven in family killed
Gunmen killed seven people from a single family, members of the minority Yazidi sect, when they stormed into their home yesterday, police said. Police said a woman, her husband and the couple’s adult children were shot dead in the attack, which took place after midnight in the town of Sinjar, west of Mosul, a city around 390km north of Baghdad. Violence has declined sharply in the last year, but ethnically and religiously mixed Mosul remains the country’s most violent city, with car bombs, roadside blasts and shootings still taking place on a regular basis. The US military describes Mosul as al-Qaeda’s last major urban haven. The attack is not the first time Yazidis, who are part of a pre-Islamic religious sect and live in the north and Syria, have been targeted.
■UNITED STATES
Two dead in bank bombing
Two police officers were killed and two people were injured by a bomb that exploded at a bank in the western US state of Oregon, authorities confirmed. The fatalities included a bomb disposal expert and a police chief who died after a suspicious package exploded at a branch of the West Coast Bank in Woodburn, 48km south of Portland, on Friday. The bomb also seriously injured a 46-year-old police chief and a female bank employee, Oregon State Police said in a statement. No individual or group has claimed responsibility for the bombing and authorities have issued a US$35,000 reward for information leading to the capture of those responsible.
■HAITI
IDB to double Haiti aid
The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) will double its aid next year to help the Caribbean nation upgrade its crumbling infrastructure and broaden social programs, the bank’s chief announced on Sunday. IDB president Luis Alberto Moreno, in comments at the National Palace in Port-au-Prince, said the bank would double its grants to US$100 million next year to help the country’s government with a raft of vital investments. IDB’s announcement comes a few months after some 800 people were confirmed dead after four devastating storms hit Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country.
■UNITED STATES
Palin’s church holds service
Members of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s church gathered in high spirits at a middle school on Sunday, two days after their building was badly damaged by a fire authorities are investigating as arson. Palin, the former Republican vice presidential candidate, did not attend services on Sunday because she was in Juneau preparing to propose a state budget, said her spokesman, Bill McAllister.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
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