■CHINA
‘Gambling network’ busted
Police in Hangzhou have arrested 11 suspects in an illegal gambling network linked via the Internet to a casino in the Philippines, state media said yesterday. A local businessman, identified only by the surname Li, set up the network after meeting representatives of the unidentified casino during a gambling trip to Macau, the China Daily quoted police as saying. Li paid the casino a deposit of 5 million yuan (US$730,000) to act as its agent in China, allowing customers to see real-time images of the casino and place bets through his account.
■HONG KONG
Tycoon sues over sex pact
A shoe tycoon is suing his mistress because she broke an agreement not to have sex with anyone else, a report said yesterday. Patrick Tang, 66, is demanding his mistress Karen Lee, 39, hand back properties worth HK$10 million (US$1.3 million), the Standard newspaper reported, citing a writ filed with the High Court. Tang, who is married, said Lee had breached the no-sex condition under which he agreed to buy her several properties between 2002 and 2005, the report said. According to the paper, the writ said Lee began an affair with a former Mr Hong Kong, Wong Cheung-fat, 23, in the last few months that made the agreement invalid.
■NEPAL
India offers electricity
India has offered to export electricity to neighboring Nepal, where residents are facing severe power outages, an official said yesterday. A spokesman at Nepal’s Water Resources Ministry said the country had received a proposal from India to export as much as 200 megawatts of electricity. Nepalese receive only eight hours of electricity a day because of low water levels in reservoirs that drive hydroelectric plants.
■HONG KONG
Diva’s mum denied cash
The 85-year-old mother of late Canto-pop diva Anita Mui (梅艷芳) has been stopped from taking HK$800,000 (US$102,000) from her daughter’s estate to finance a round-the-world trip, a media report said yesterday. Tam Mei-kam (覃美金) told Judge Andrew Cheung (張舉能) she felt bored and stressed from last year’s unsuccessful attempt to gain control of her late daughter’s estate and needed to take along nurses, maids and family on the trip, the South China Morning Post said. Rejecting her application, Cheung said Tam’s demand was unreasonable. Mui’s estate, which is valued at about HK$100 million, included HK$3.9 million in cash which is used to pay her mother’s monthly allowance. Tam lost a court battle last year to gain control of Mui’s entire fortune after a judge upheld a will Mui signed shortly before she died of cervical cancer in December 2003 at the age of 40, which left most of her estate in a trust. Mui feared that if she left the estate to her mother it would be squandered.
■BANGLADESH
Bill outlaws begging
The Government has made begging illegal, an official said yesterday. Hundreds of thousands of people depend on begging to survive in a country where 40 percent of the population earn less than US$1 a day. An official, who declined to be named, said that a bill had been passed in parliament this week outlawing begging. “Anyone caught begging will be put in jail for a month. This includes people who pretend to be ill or use a disability to get money,” the official said. A 2005 survey showed that a beggar in the capital Dhaka, home to around 27,000 beggars, earns an average 100 taka (US$1.45) a day.
■IRELAND
Unemployment surges
The unemployment rate surged to 11 percent last month from 10.4 percent in February, official data showed on Wednesday, as the eurozone nation’s recession-hit economy worsens amid a global crisis. The Central Statistics Office said 173,279 extra people had signed on for benefits on the state’s Live Register in the year to last month, the largest annual increase since records began in 1967. The month-on-month increase in the number signing on last month was 16,834. This brought the number of people signing on last month to 371,271, which is also the highest since records began, said an office spokeswoman. Prime Minister Brian Cowen told parliament that a drop in unemployment was unlikely in the short term.
■SWEDEN
Police arrest mother
Police yesterday said they had arrested a woman accused of kidnapping her two children in a custody dispute with their Australian father. The boys, aged nine and 11, were handed over to their father after the woman was arrested overnight, police spokesman Svante Melin said. He said the woman had failed to return the children, who had been living with their father in Australia, after they came to visit her in October. The family’s names were not released because of privacy rules.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Police report severed head
Police said on Wednesday they were investigating the discovery of a severed human head in a field in Leicestershire. It was not clear whether the head, found by a member of the public in Asfordby near Melton Mowbray on Tuesday, was male or female. Detective Superintendent Julia McKechnie said the main priority was to determine the identity of the person involved and that it was too early to confirm whether the discovery was linked to any other criminal investigation. But McKechnie said the force was in contact with their counterparts in Hertfordshire, where a man’s arm and left leg have been discovered in recent weeks.
■EGYPT
Toddler contracts bird flu
An toddler has contracted bird flu, the 61st recorded case since the first outbreak of the disease in the country in 2006, state-news agency MENA reported on Wednesday. The two-year-old was taken to hospital with a fever on Monday in Beheira governate, MENA quoted health ministry spokesman Abdel Rahman Shahin as saying. He had been exposed to dead fowl thought to have been infected with the virus. Twenty-three people have died of bird flu in the country. Most of the victims have been young girls or women, who are generally in charge of looking after poultry.
■SWEDEN
Gays allowed to marry
The country will allow homosexuals to legally marry from next month after parliament on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly in favor of the move. The change in the law, which currently allows gay couples to register unions but not formal marriage, comes into force on May 1 under the timetable set out in the bill. Scandinavian countries, known for their liberal attitudes towards gays and lesbians, were among the first countries in Europe to grant same-sex partners the same rights as married couples. Stockholm gave same-sex couples the right to form a union via registered partnerships in the mid-1990s and made it legal for them to adopt in 2002. The passage of the bill was widely expected and the final tally was 261 votes in favor of the bill and 22 opposed.
■UNITED STATES
Alaska sues BP over spill
Separate state and federal civil lawsuits were filed against BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc over two spills at the nation’s largest oil field in 2006. The lawsuits were filed two years after the company pleaded guilty to federal violations of the Clean Water Act for one of the spills and agreed to pay a US$20 million fine. The federal government filed its lawsuit on Tuesday in a District Court in Anchorage, Alaska, alleging violations of federal clean air and water laws for the spills at Prudhoe Bay, on Alaska’s North Slope. It asks the court to order BP Alaska to take actions to prevent spills in the future and impose stiff penalties.
■UNITED STATES
Conficker harder to detect
The Conficker worm’s April 1 trigger date came and went without the bedeviling computer virus causing any mischief, but security specialists warned that the threat was far from over. Conficker did just what the “white hats” tracking it expected — it evolved to make itself harder to exterminate and its masters tougher to find. “There are still millions of personal computers out there that are, unknown to their owners, at risk of being controlled in the future by persons unknown,” said Trend Micro threat researcher Paul Ferguson. A task force assembled by Microsoft has been working to stamp out the worm, referred to as Conficker or DownAdUp, and the US software colossus has placed a bounty of US$250,000 on the heads of those responsible for the threat. “It is pretty sophisticated and state-of-the-art,” Ferguson said. “It definitely looks like the puppet masters are located in Eastern Europe.” The worm was programmed to modify itself on Wednesday to become harder to stop and began doing that when infected machines got cues. The malicious software evolved from East to West, beginning in the time zones first to greet April Fools’ Day. Conficker had been programmed to reach out to 250 Web sites daily to download commands from its masters, they said, but on Wednesday it began generating daily lists of 50,000 Web sites and reaching randomly to 500 of those.
■UNITED STATES
Shop finds two-nosed rabbit
It’s no April Fools joke. A baby bunny really does have two noses. A pet shop worker found the nosey bunny in a delivery of six-week-old dwarf rabbits that arrived at the Milford, Connecticut, store last week. Both noses have two nostrils. The owner of the Purr-Fect Pets shop said he had never seen anything like it in 25 years in the business. He said the bunny eats, drinks and hops around like the rest of the litter. Beardsley Zoo director Gregg Dancho said the deformity could be the result of too much inbreeding or the parents’ exposure to pesticides or poisons.
■CANADA
Police arrest ‘Ganja Granny’
Police said a 71-year-old woman has pleaded guilty to drug smuggling charges after customs officials found 3.6kg of marijuana hidden in her luggage at a Jamaican airport. Montego Bay Police Constable Ulet Lewis-Green on Wednesday identified the woman as Margueritta Lancaster-Reid of Ontario. Authorities did not disclose a hometown for the “ganja granny.” Lewis-Green said the elderly woman pleaded guilty on Tuesday to concealing the marijuana in her luggage at Donald Sangster International Airport. The Jamaica Observer said she told police officers it was “herbs” when the drug stash was found last Saturday.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
SUPERFAN: The Japanese PM played keyboard in a Deep Purple tribute band in middle school and then switched to drums at university, she told the British rock band Legendary British rock band Deep Purple yesterday made Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s day with a brief visit to their high-profile superfan as they returned to the nation they first toured more than half a century ago. Takaichi’s reputation as an amateur drummer, and a fan of hard rock and heavy metal has been well documented, and she has referred to Deep Purple as one of her favorite bands along with the likes of Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden. “You are my god,” a giddy Takaichi said in English to Deep Purple drummer Ian Paice, presenting him with a set of made-in-Japan
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