■HONG KONG
Maid jailed over blood broth
An Indonesian maid was in jail yesterday awaiting trial for mixing her menstrual blood in a pot of vegetables she was cooking for her employer. Indra Ningsih, 26, allegedly told police she mixed the blood into the meal in a superstitious effort to make her Chinese employer “more amiable and less picky” toward her. Ningsih was arrested on Tuesday and charged at a hearing on Wednesday with administering a poison or other noxious substance with an intent to injure. She was remanded in custody until May 13. Ningsih was arrested after her employer peered through the kitchen door and saw her acting suspiciously as she cooked vegetables for lunch. When the employer checked, she found a blood clot-like substance mixed with the vegetables and a used sanitary napkin in the kitchen bin, a report in the Hong Kong Standard newspaper said.
■JAPAN
Town to auction off schools
A small town with a falling birthrate plans to auction off four primary schools on the Internet, a local official said yesterday. Niikappu, on the northern island of Hokkaido, plans to start the auction next month on the Yahoo Japan online auction site, said Hidenori Tsutsumi, who is in charge of the auction. The farming and fishing town of 11,000 people last year closed seven of its nine schools. Three were turned into a corporate office, a nursing home and a horse-racing center, but the town was unable to find buyers for the others. With no immediate buyers for the other four, the town decided to list the schools on Japan’s largest auction site.
■INDONESIA
Orangutans captured as pets
Orangutans are still being captured for pets in the country, further threatening the survival of the critically endangered great apes, conservationists said yesterday, blaming poor law enforcement. Despite years of legal protection and awareness campaigns, the capture and trade of these apes for pets or local zoos continues to contribute to their decline, said Chris Shepherd, acting director in Southeast Asia for TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network. “Without serious penalties, this illegal trade will continue, and these species will continue to spiral toward extinction,” he said. Shepherd said the animals were generally caught when they are young.
■SWITZERLAND
ICRC talks to hostages
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) says it has spoken for the first time in two weeks with two of its workers being held by Abu Sayyaf militants in the Philippines. The ICRC said staffers in the Philippines talked to kidnapped Swiss worker Andreas Notter and Italian Eugenio Vagni on the phone on Tuesday. Spokeswoman Dorothea Krimitsas said on Wednesday the agency was glad for the contact, but she declined to comment on the content of the phone conversation. The two have been held on Jolo island since January.
■PHILIPPINES
Belgian kills wife, self
A 60-year-old Belgian man killed his 37-year-old Filipina wife and then shot himself in a fit of jealous rage in the northern province of Cagayan, a police officer said yesterday. Constant van Girt allegedly shot dead his wife, Rosaly, during a heated argument inside their house in Iguig town on Wednesday. Senior Inspector Wilfredo Dupaya said Van Girt then shot himself. The couple was rushed to hospital, but the husband was declared dead on arrival and his wife died two hours later.
■SLOVENIA
Bear scares city dwellers
Stand still or play dead, because the beast can outrun, out-jump and out-climb any human: These instructions were broadcast in Ljubljana yesterday morning as the search for a brown bear roaming the city began. The animal had first been sighted at 4am in the central city park. An alert was issued and a search launched after a head-count in the Ljubljana zoo confirmed that both resident bears were safely locked up. Police said the bear probably became lost after crossing from the hilly woodlands across the highway belt encircling the city and warned people to stay away from the area of the sighting. Some 700 brown bears are estimated to live in the former Yugoslavian Alpine-Adriatic republic, which is roughly half the size of Switzerland.
■SAUDI ARABIA
Mercury hoax causes frenzy
Police are investigating the origins of a hoax that had hundreds of people believing that old sewing machines could bring fortune because they contained an elusive — and probably mythical — substance called red mercury. Newspapers on Tuesday published pictures of people proudly posing next to old sewing machines, awaiting prospective buyers at traditional markets.
■UNITED STATES
NASA snubs Colbert win
NASA on Tuesday named its new living quarters on the International Space Station “Tranquility,” denying TV comedian Stephen Colbert his attempt to get the new Node 3 named after himself. Astronaut Sunita Williams, appearing on The Colbert Report on cable TV network Comedy Central, said NASA would name the new module Tranquility instead of Colbert, as he and his fans had demanded after winning an online poll conducted by NASA.
■IRAN
Scientists clone goat
Scientists have cloned a goat and plan future experiments they hope will lead to a treatment for stroke patients, the leader of the research said on Wednesday. The female goat, named Hana, was born early on Wednesday in Isfahan, said Mohammed Hossein Nasr e Isfahani, head of the Royan Research Institute. “With the birth of Hana, Iran is among five countries in the world cloning a baby goat,” Isfahani said. In 2006 the country became the first in the Middle East to announce it had cloned a sheep. Two-and-a-half years later, that animal is healthy, the institute said. The effort is part of the country’s quest to become a regional powerhouse in advanced science and technology by 2025. In particular, it is striving for achievements in medicine and aerospace and nuclear technology. Cloning sheep and other animals could lead to advances in medical research, including using cloned animals to produce human antibodies against diseases, Isfahani said. He said his institute’s main aim in cloning the goat is to produce medicine to be used to treat people who have had strokes.
■GERMANY
Modified corn to be banned
The government will ban cultivation and sale of genetically modified corn, Agriculture Minister Ilse Aigner said on Tuesday. The ban affects US biotech company Monsanto’s MON 810 corn, which may no longer be sown for this summer’s harvest, Aigner told a news conference. MON 810 corn is the only genetically modified crop approved by the EU for commercial use.
■UNITED STATES
YouTube orchestra debuts
The world’s first orchestra founded online, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, had its much-applauded debut on Wednesday evening at New York’s Carnegie Hall. The audience cheered the orchestra of 96 musicians from 13 countries, who never met before and auditioned online with a clip on the Internet video sharing site YouTube. After only three days of rehearsals with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, the orchestra performed a broad program, including works by Bach, Mozart, Brahms and Tchaikovsky, as well as contemporary music. A highlight of the world premiere was the Internet symphony No. 1 Eroica by Chinese composer Tan Dun (譚盾).
■UNITED STATES
Department reins in NSA
The Justice Department has reined in electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA) after finding the agency had improperly accessed phone calls and e-mails. The problems were discovered during a review of the intelligence activities, the Justice Department said in a statement on Wednesday night. The New York Times, which first reported the matter on its Web site, said the NSA had been improperly intercepting communications by Americans. In its statement, the Justice Department said it has taken “comprehensive steps to correct the situation and bring the program into compliance.” The Justice Department did not elaborate on what problems it found. Once corrective measures were taken, Attorney General Eric Holder sought authorization for renewing the surveillance program, officials said.
■UNITED STATES
California satellite energy
Californians could soon be powering their homes, and no doubt their hot tubs, from a space-based solar electricity program. The plan by the state’s massive energy company PG&E calls for the generation of 200 megawatts over 15 years to be collected by space-based solar arrays and beamed down to earth via radio frequency. PG&E hopes to have the system running by 2016 and is seeking permission from regulators to contract with a company called Solaren to put the system in place. Experts say that harnessing solar power in space has advantages over terrestrial systems since solar energy can be harvested around the clock and is never obscured by clouds or bad weather. Solaren’s solar-power satellite would consist of mirror arrays up to several kilometers wide that would focus sunlight onto photoelectric cells. The electrical power would be converted into a microwave beam directed toward Earth, where it would be converted back into electricity. The company said the system could generate roughly 1.2 gigawatts to 4.8 gigawatts of power at a price comparable to that of other renewable energy sources.
■GERMANY
US sergeant sentenced
A US Army master sergeant convicted of murder in the 2007 killings of four bound and blindfolded Iraqis was to be sentenced yesterday and could receive life in prison without parole. Master Sergeant John Hatley was convicted of premeditated murder and conspiracy in the execution-style killings. But the jury of eight officers and noncommissioned officers on Wednesday found him not guilty of obstruction of justice in the incident and not guilty of premeditated murder in the January 2007 death of an Iraqi insurgent. Hatley faces a possible sentence of life in prison, but is likely to receive parole and a lesser sentence. He could also see his punishment reduced further through an appeal or other future Army clemency.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema