■NEPEL
Soldiers rescue dolphins
Soldiers rescued three rare dolphins that were stranded in a pond, officials said yesterday. Soldiers and Kosi Tappu Conservation officials caught the dolphins and transported them back home to the Kosi River, government administrator Fanindra Pokhrel said. The dolphins were swept several kilometers to the pond by floodwaters when the banks of the Kosi broke during last year’s monsoon. They were spotted only after the water level dropped. An unknown number of dolphins belonging to an endangered species called Platanista gangetica live in the southern Kosi, which is the country’s largest river.
■PHILIPPINES
Singer’s brother shot dead
Police say a brother of Philippine-born hip-hop singer apl.de.ap of the group Black Eyed Peas has been fatally shot in their northern hometown. Chief Inspector Wilfredo Paulo said Joven Pineda Deala was shot in the head early on Tuesday as he and his girlfriend were eating in his car that was parked outside the woman’s home in Angeles City. He said the gunman and his accomplice escaped on foot. The 21-year-old Deala died on the way to the hospital. Paulo says the attack was apparently without provocation. Deala was a half-brother of apl.de.ap, whose real name is Allan Pineda Lindo. Reports say he will attend his brother’s funeral. No date has been set.
■NEW ZEALAND
Brothers sent to prison
Two brothers convicted of murdering a three-year-old girl who was kicked to death after months of abuse, including being hung and spun on a rotary clothesline and put into a tumble dryer, were sent to prison for a minimum of 17-and-a-half years yesterday, news reports said. Wiremu Curtis, 19, and Michael Curtis, 22, were found guilty late last year of the murder of Nia Glassie, who died from severe brain damage in August 2007, 12 days after being taken to hospital. The girl’s mother, Lisa Kuka, 35, who had been in a relationship with Wiremu Curtis, was sentenced to nine years after being found guilty on two counts of manslaughter for failing to provide the necessities of life and not protecting the child.
■AUSTRALIA
Chicken thief arrested
A thief who used a frozen chicken as a tool to break into a cafe was caught after he cut his wrist and was forced to phone an ambulance, police said yesterday. The man stole the chicken during an earlier break-in at a butcher’s shop at Macksville, but came off second best when he tried to use the frozen bird and some rocks to break into a cafe, slashing open his wrist. The 20-year-old man dialed an emergency 000 number to call an ambulance and was arrested shortly after being treated by paramedics, he said. The man was charged with breaking and entering and was to face a local court in nearby Kempsey later yesterday.
■JAPAN
Foie gras imports banned
Imports of raw foie gras and poultry from France have been suspended after an outbreak of bird flu there, a farm ministry official said yesterday. Tokyo suspended imports of chicks and poultry meat after French officials announced an outbreak of the H5 strain of bird flu at a duck farm in Vendee province. Japan bought 404 tonnes of uncooked foie gras last year. Canned foie gras is not affected by the suspension. Foie gras, literally “fatty liver,” is typically made by forcing metal pipes down the throats of geese and ducks to feed them so their livers expand.
■ITALY
Fake army hard to disband
It is a plot of which Jorge Luis Borges would have been proud: Some of the best military and juridical minds are wrestling with the problem of how to dispose of the unwelcome legacy of tens — perhaps hundreds — of thousands of soldiers who never existed. Though commanded by a real lieutenant general, the so-called Terzo corpo designato d’Armata, headquartered in Padua, was a fiction — a giant Cold War bluff. It was dreamed up in the early 1950s to convince Moscow that NATO’s frontline had solid defense. Successive commanders and their minuscule staffs generated mountains of paperwork to show that any commie troops breaching the Yugoslav border would have to reckon with an entire army corps, up to 300,000-strong, on the flat Venetian hinterland. The army was disbanded in 1972, but archives and barracks have remained clogged with what La Stampa said was “tonnes” of paper. And none of it can be destroyed until they have been declassified. They can only be declassified by the office or unit that created them, which no longer exists.
■LIBERIA
Caterpillars destroy crops
Researchers have identified swarms of mysterious caterpillars that have been devastating crops and polluting water in the country, raising hopes that the problem could be tackled. Researchers on Tuesday said the pests were not army worms, as previously thought, but caterpillars of the moth Achaea Catocaloides. The creatures emerged almost a month ago in the remote Bong, Lofa and Gbarpolu counties and were now threatening the food security of about 350,000 people. Tens of thousands of people have already fled their homes as the caterpillars march across the country.Agriculture experts warned that the worms, which are spreading rapidly and have already been sighted in Guinea, could spread into Ivory Coast and Ghana. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization last week said US$1.2 million was needed to help combat the spreading swarm.
■AUSTRIA
Woman jailed over tickets
A woman has begun a 500-day jail sentence for ignoring parking tickets and failing to pay a cumulative fine of around 24,000 euros (US$30,860), police said on Tuesday. They said the 38-year-old civil servant from the southern city of Graz was jailed after ignoring 700 attempts by local authorities to notify her of the fines over a two-year period. “Of course we have had people ignore three, four, five or even 10 reminders, but 700 ... that is unheard of,” police official Herbert Mattersdorfer said. A police spokesman said that under the law, the woman could only spend 42 days at a time in jail for this offense, so her term would be split into several stints behind bars.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Teenager killed in sledging
A teenage girl was killed after suffering serious injuries in a sledging accident, police said on yesterday. Francesca Anobile, 16, of Sheffield, was one of four teenage girls involved in the crash at Rother Valley Country Park on Tuesday afternoon. She was airlifted to hospital but died hours later, South Yorkshire police said. Another of the teenagers, Nikki Burns, 16, is being treated for injuries in hospital. There were no details of her condition. Media reports said the girls had been using an improvised metal sledge made out of the roof of a car. The sledge crashed through a barbed wire fence before hitting another fence at the bottom of a hill, the reports said.
■UNITED STATES
Sasha, Malia dolls ‘retired’
Hoping to buy a pair of those Sasha and Malia dolls? You’re out of luck. And the White House couldn’t be happier. White House officials were very, very pleased on Tuesday after learning that the company that makes Beanie Babies had decided to stop selling its Sweet Sasha and Marvelous Malia dolls. A spokeswoman for first lady Michelle Obama had protested that the dolls were inappropriately using “young, private citizens for marketing purposes,” even though the company, Ty Inc, insisted that the dolls were not intended to depict the Obama girls, Malia, 10, and Sasha, seven. On Tuesday, the company’s Web site included pictures of the two dolls beneath a red sign that read “Retired.”
■UNITED STATES
Snakes on the run captured
A 7m, 60kg python can run, but it can’t hide. The orange reticulated python, the world’s longest snake species, and a second python escaped from a terrarium inside their owner’s home in San Luis Obispo, California, on Sunday night. Police quickly warned residents that the snakes, though domesticated, were large enough to make meals of young children or pets. But both were captured in the neighborhood by Monday afternoon. The smaller python was spotted under the owner’s porch. The big snake was found basking in the sun in a backyard several blocks away. No injuries were reported. Police said the snakes’ owner would not be cited.
■UNITED STATES
Man jailed for wife’s nudies
A Maryland man is going to prison for posting nude photos of his former wife on the Internet. Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said Thomas Gillen, of Hagerstown has been sentenced to between two and five years in prison. The prosecutor says Gillen had pleaded guilty to identity theft and criminal contempt. Brown said Gillen admitted to creating an Internet account in his former wife’s name and used it to contact men and engage in racy conversations. Gillen also sent them nude photos of her and posted some online. The district attorney said Gillen admitted that he impersonated his former wife on the Internet 1,577 times between November 2007 and last July.
■UNITED STATES
Washing machine kills child
A four-year-old Californian girl who climbed into a washing machine died after her 15-month-old brother turned it on by accident, sheriff’s officials said on Tuesday. Orange County, California, sheriff’s and coroner’s investigators said the girl died from blunt force trauma after being thrown around inside the front-loading machine for about two minutes. Sheriff’s spokesman Jim Amormino said the controls to the machine were about 51cm off the ground, close enough for the boy to reach.
■CANADA
Pedestrians killed by plows
Three pedestrians were killed when they were hit by snow removal trucks in two separate accidents in Montreal on Tuesday, police said. The collisions occurred hours apart and involved contractors clearing snow for the city in different neighborhoods. One of the trucks struck a couple in their 70s crossing at a street corner in the city’s south end. The man was “crushed under the wheels” and pronounced dead at the scene while the woman was rushed to hospital, but died later, ambulance service spokesman Bart Panarello said. The second accident involved a collision at another street corner some 10km away. A 40-year-old man died at the scene.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not