■CHINA
Spy museum: Chinese only
A new spy museum exhibits guns disguised as lipstick, hollowed-out coins used to conceal documents and maps hidden as a deck of cards. What you won’t find there, however, are foreigners. A sign outside the Jiangsu National Security Education Museum in a park in Nanjing states that only Chinese citizens are allowed inside, a policy designed to keep the communist regime’s cloak and dagger methods secret — no matter how timeworn they may be. “We don’t want such sensitive spy information to be exposed to foreigners, so they are not allowed to enter,” a spokeswoman for the museum, who would only give her surname as Qian, said by telephone. “Most of the people we turn away are pretty understanding since this is not your average museum,” she added.
■JAPAN
Cyber ‘swine flu’ suspected
The National Institute of Infectious Diseases yesterday warned that a “swine flu computer virus” has been spreading on the Internet in recent days. The institute said on its Web site that a suspicious Japanese-language e-mail message with an attached file called “information on swine flu” had been circulating in cyberspace. The institute did not say what kind of malware was hidden inside the file or what harm it might do. The e-mail, originating from senders in the “@yahoo.co.jp” domain, seemed to be sent to random Internet users, the institute said. “It is obviously a suspicious message falsely identifying itself,” it said.
■JAPAN
Mom hid corpse for years
A Japanese woman has been arrested on suspicion of hiding the body of her four-year-old son in a refrigerator for nearly two years, police said yesterday. Miyuki Otsuka, 33, turned herself in to police in western Hyogo Prefecture on Wednesday, and police later found a decomposed body in a plastic bag in her fridge, a police spokesman said. “We believe it was the body of her son,” who was aged four in 2007, the official said, adding that police were conducting a DNA test. Her husband, who was the child’s stepfather, 34-year-old truck driver Ryu Otsuka, was also arrested.
■MALAYSIA
McCurry beats McDonald’s
After an almost eight-year legal battle, an appeals court overruled a 2006 decision, saying that a local curry house did not infringe on the McDonald’s trademark by using the prefix “Mc.” The US fast-food giant argued that McCurry — a local eatery whose menu features delights such as murukku and fish head curry — had illegally made use of its trademark. “No way we infringed McDonald’s trademark,” McCurry owner Kanages Suppiah said after the ruling. “We have nothing synonymous with them.”
■PAKISTAN
Gun attacks in south kill 26
A slew of gun attacks in Karachi killed at least 26 people, officials said yesterday. Ethnic tension was the suspected spark for the gun attacks on Wednesday in the southern city. Much of the tension has been between the Pashtun population, who dominate the country’s militant-infested northwest, and ethnic Urdu-speakers, who are descendants of migrants from India. The latter are in large part represented by the political party that runs the city, the Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM). The city was largely crippled on Wednesday after two MQM activists were gunned down by unknown shooters, sparking street violence. Paramilitary rangers roamed the city’s trouble spots yesterday, as officials said the death toll hit 26.
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