■THAILAND
Muslim civilians shot dead
Suspected separatist militants have shot dead five Muslim civilians in the restive south, police said yesterday. Gunmen entered the home of a 51-year-old man and shot him dead late on Friday in Yala province, one of three troubled provinces in the far south. Police said the man had been working as a government informant. Two other men, aged 18 and 34, were also shot and killed in neighboring Pattani province, while a 61-year-old man was killed in a drive-by shooting as he traveled to Friday prayers at a local mosque. A 31-year-old farmer was also shot dead in an ambush in Narathiwat province as he returned home from work.
■NEW ZEALAND
Family reunited after years
An illegal Indian immigrant for the last 23 years has been reunited with his wife and son after finally getting permission to stay, the New Zealand Herald reported yesterday. “I thought I would be going to my grave without ever seeing them again,” Abdul Jalil Patel, 58, told the newspaper, as his wife Amina, 55, and son Salman, 24, flew into Auckland airport on Friday. Patel emigrated to New Zealand in 1986, but his first immigration consultant misplaced his passport and failed to submit his residency application, making him an illegal alien. A string of immigration blunders followed and he worked illegally over the years. “I didn’t know I was breaking the law, I just knew I had to earn some money to survive,” he told the paper. A new consultant made a last-ditch appeal to the immigration minister in September and he was granted permanent residence, which allowed his wife and son to join him.
■HONG KONG
Bruce Lee museum planned
Plans to build a museum dedicated to the life of fabled kung fu actor Bruce Lee are moving ahead with proposals for an international design competition, the South China Morning Post said yesterday. The project involves the restoration of Lee’s former house in the Kowloon Tong district of Hong Kong, plus the possibility of building an adjacent cinema and library, the newspaper said. The competition has been agreed upon after talks between the government and the two-story villa’s owner, Yu Panglin, who has agreed to donate the property, which is valued at HK$100 million (US$12.8 million). The actor spent the last years of his life there before dying in 1973 at the age of 32.
■NEW ZEALAND
Ex-model works at abattoir
Nina Schubert, 25, a German fashion model who strutted the catwalk in London, Paris, Milan and New York for six years, is working at local abattoir, the Taranaki Daily News said. “I need to learn a trade. I only know modeling,” she told the newspaper. The 1.8m, long-legged, blue-eyed blonde who has been pictured in swimsuits in the world’s leading fashion magazines, said it was hard, strenuous, physical work. “We sort boned-out meat that comes down on the conveyor hot and still pulsating,” she said. “I’ve shown some skill and they’re going to give me some knife training for a trimming job.” She told the paper she did her last modeling job early last year and quit when she woke up one day and realized it was an unhealthy lifestyle. She moved to New Zealand in November and is now living in the small North Island town of Hawera with a distant relative and completed her first triathlon a week ago.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Charity cool on adoption
Save the Children yesterday stressed that the best place for a child was with their family in their home country, as US pop queen Madonna prepares to adopt a second Malawian child. The British-based charity urged celebrities to ensure that all other options had been exhausted before taking a child out of a foreign orphanage. “If [a] celebrity really wants to help children in poor countries, they should support charities ... to improve the quality of children’s lives in their own countries and communities,” Save the Children spokesman Dominic Nutt said in a statement.
■GUYANA
Former president dies
US-born former president of Guyana Janet Rosenberg-Jagan died yesterday at the country’s state-run Georgetown Public Hospital, officials said. She was 88. The Chicago-born Rosenberg-Jagan was president of the South American country from 1997 to 1999 when she resigned due to ill health. Authorities said Rosenberg-Jagan died of an abdominal aneurism, just over five hours after she was admitted to hospital complaining of severe abdominal pains. Rosenberg moved to Guyana in 1943 at the age of 23 with her husband, Cheddi Jagan, a descendant of Indian indentured laborers, and helped form the country’s first mass-based political party in 1950.
■CYPRUS
‘Oldest’ temple unearthed
An Italian archeologist says she has discovered a temple that is about 4,000 years old. The find at the Pyrgos-Mavroraki site close to the southern city of Limassol predates any other discoveries in the country by about 1,000 years, archaeologist Maria Rosaria Belgiorno said. “This is the first evidence of religion in Cyprus at the beginning of the second millennium BC,” she was quoted as telling the Cyprus Weekly newspaper. The Cyprus Antiquities Department said further examination would be required before the find could be verified. Belgiorno said she had found the outline of a triangular-shaped temple, comprised of two rooms, on the site. It was probably destroyed in an earthquake and abandoned in 1800BC.
■GERMANY
Man crushed in garbage
A man sleeping in a dumpster was seriously injured on Friday after being crushed in the jaws of a waste collection truck, police said. As workers in the northwestern town of Paderborn were emptying the four-wheel bin into the crusher at the back of their vehicle they heard cries and immediately hit the emergency stop button. Medics attended to the man while firemen and a technician worked at switching off the hydraulics on the crusher so that its huge metal jaws could be manually prized apart. The 31-year-old was described as in critical condition.
■GERMANY
DNA mix-up ends search
Investigators’ search for a mysterious suspected killer has ended with an embarrassing discovery: identical DNA traces common to dozens of crime scenes stemmed from contaminated cotton swabs. The DNA had been found at the scenes of about 40 crimes over recent years in Germany, Austria and France, ranging from restaurant break-ins to the shooting of a policewoman. The common DNA prompted police to search for a woman German media called the “phantom killer.” However, officials said on Friday they had determined that the DNA came from an innocent woman at an unidentified Bavarian packaging company involved in producing the cotton swabs used to collect evidence.
■CHILE
Obama wants fresh start
US President Barack Obama wants a fresh start with Latin America and is ready to talk about any issue, US Vice President Joe Biden told Argentine President Cristina Fernandez on Friday. Meeting Fernandez as a group of center-left leaders gathered in the Chilean coastal resort of Vina del Mar ahead of this week’s G20 summit in London, Biden promised relations with Latin America would improve, Argentine Foreign Minister Jorge Taiana said. Relations between Washington and many countries in Latin America cooled under Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, as the US foreign policy focus turned toward the Middle East and the “war” on terrorism, and several South American governments shifted to the left. “[Biden] highlighted that the United States’ traditional approach regarding Latin America had changed, and is going to change,” Taiana said.
■VENEZUELA
Iranian minister visits
The foreign ministers of Venezuela and Iran met on Friday to discuss bilateral relations in preparation for an upcoming visit to Iran by President Hugo Chavez. Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Iran’s Manouchehr Mottaki “have achieved sustained progress in integrating joint industrial and financial projects,” said Rodolfo Sanz, president of a joint technical Venezuelan-Iranian cooperation commission. “We are ready to launch a joint Iranian-Venezuelan bank,” he said. “We also plan to create a bilateral investment fund.” Chavez is expected to travel to Iran following an Arab-Latin American summit that will take place in Doha on Tuesday.
■UNITED STATES
Bobcat walks into a bar
A bobcat attacked three people in a community in central Arizona, including two men who were bitten when the animal wandered inside a bar. Officers called to the Chapparal Bar in Cottonwood arrived to find the bobcat in the parking lot, where they shot and killed it, KVRD-FM radio reported. Tests were ordered to determine if the animal was rabid. It wasn’t clear how seriously the victims had been wounded.
■UNITED STATES
No sense of smell, no job
A court in Pennsylvania said a township could discharge a police officer because he lost his sense of smell in an off-duty motorcycle accident. The appeals court ruling issued on Thursday upheld Collier Township’s decision to honorably discharge David Agostino. The township near Pittsburgh said his lack of smell created a safety hazard. It said officers need to be able to detect drugs, alcohol, hazardous materials and natural gas leaks. Agostino said was able to perform the job and a sense of smell isn’t tested as part of the physical examination required to become a police officer.
■UNITED STATES
Kosher tequila planned
A New York businessman is launching a kosher tequila in time for Cinco de Mayo. Martin Silver said Agave 99 would be on the market in time for the holiday, which celebrates Mexico’s defeat of French forces on May 5, 1862. Silver, president of Long Island-based Star Industries, said he wants to satisfy the craze for high-end tequila with one that observant Jews can drink. Silver said a half million cases of the 99-proof kosher tequila were being produced at a Mexican plant using methods certified by a rabbi. It will retail for US$41.95 a bottle.
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
Nauru has started selling passports to fund climate action, but is so far struggling to attract new citizens to the low-lying, largely barren island in the Pacific Ocean. Nauru, one of the world’s smallest nations, has a novel plan to fund its fight against climate change by selling so-called “Golden Passports.” Selling for US$105,000 each, Nauru plans to drum up more than US$5 million in the first year of the “climate resilience citizenship” program. Almost six months after the scheme opened in February, Nauru has so far approved just six applications — covering two families and four individuals. Despite the slow start —
YELLOW SHIRTS: Many protesters were associated with pro-royalist groups that had previously supported the ouster of Paetongtarn’s father, Thaksin, in 2006 Protesters rallied on Saturday in the Thai capital to demand the resignation of court-suspended Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra and in support of the armed forces following a violent border dispute with Cambodia that killed more than three dozen people and displaced more than 260,000. Gathered at Bangkok’s Victory Monument despite soaring temperatures, many sang patriotic songs and listened to speeches denouncing Paetongtarn and her father, former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and voiced their backing of the country’s army, which has always retained substantial power in the Southeast Asian country. Police said there were about 2,000 protesters by mid-afternoon, although
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