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World News Quick Take

■JAPAN

‘Brutal’ murderer to hang

A 52-year-old man was yesterday sentenced to death for murdering seven relatives and neighbors in what the judge called a crime of extraordinary brutality. The Kobe District Court ruled Yasutaka Fujishiro should face the gallows for using a hammer and a knife to kill his 80-year-old aunt, two cousins and four others in 2004. “The brutality was extraordinary,” chief judge Makoto Okada said, public broadcaster NHK reported. Fujishiro was driven by a grudge against his relatives and neighbors when he sneaked into the house of his aunt in a small western city of Kakogawa before dawn. He killed her and her two sons and seriously wounded the wife of one of the sons. He then went to another house in the neighborhood, where he killed the family of four and set fire to the place.



■AUSTRALIA

Cyber-stalker sent to jail

A woman was yesterday sentenced to more than two years in prison for stalking American Idol contestant Diana DeGarmo over the Internet from the opposite side of the world. Tanya Maree Quattrocchi, 23, pleaded guilty earlier this month to four charges of cyber-stalking for hacking into DeGarmo’s MySpace account and intercepting her e-mails and those of her mother, Brenda, and housemate, model Donielle Morris. DeGarmo was the 2004 runner-up in the US television singing contest. The Victoria state County Court sentenced Quattrocchi, of Melbourne, to 26 months in prison.



■HONG KONG

Nine nabbed for ‘clean’ fight

Nine people were arrested after a street brawl involving workers armed with shovels and cleaning equipment, police said yesterday. The group of cleaners and renovation workers began fighting in a row over work issues during a job at a vacant shop in the North Point area on Thursday. Police were called in to break up the fight, which resulted in eight workers being taken to hospital for minor injuries and the arrest of all the workers.



■AUSTRALIA
Scrap coins return home

Damaged coins shipped to China as scrap metal are being spirited back and laundered through vending machines, Sydney police said yesterday. The curious currency swaps came to light when a 26-year-old was spotted feeding heaps of damaged A$2 (US$1.50) coins into shopping center vending machines and retrieving pristine coins by pressing the refund button. The man, who was charged with obtaining a benefit by deception, told police he bought the coins on the black market in China.



■NEW ZEALAND

Parrot snatches passport

Polly wants a passport — and isn’t above stealing one. A brazen parrot, which spotted a Scottish man’s passport in a colored bag in the luggage compartment under a tour bus, nabbed the document and made off into dense bush with it, the Southland Times newspaper reported yesterday. The bird — a parrot of the Kea variety — made its move while the bus was stopped along the highway to Milford Sound on South Island, and the driver was looking through the compartment. “My passport is somewhere out there in Fiordland. The Kea’s probably using it for fraudulent claims or something,” the passport owner, who did not want to be named, told the newspaper. “I’ll never look at a Kea in the same way.”



■INDONESIA

Rescuers search for Afghans

Rescuers searched for survivors yesterday after a wooden boat packed with Afghan migrants sank off the western coast, killing at least nine people and leaving 11 others missing, the navy said. More than a dozen Afghans have been found alive in the Malacca Strait, about 50km from land, a naval officer said.



■AUSTRALIA

Late lottery ticket still valid

A student worried about her parents’ money problems rifled through a pile of her lottery tickets on Thursday and discovered that she had won A$13 million (US$10 million) 10 months ago, a state lottery agency said. The student, living in Perth, received the winning ticket for a draw on July 22 last year as a gift from her father, Western Australia state agency Lotterywest said. She had been unaware that it would have expired after 12 months, it said in a statement.



■VIETNAM

US doubles clean-up fund

The US government has doubled its funding for dealing with the environmental and health consequences of its wartime use of the toxic herbicide Agent Orange, the embassy said yesterday. US President Barack Obama recently signed a bill increasing the funding from US$3 million to US$6 million, embassy officials said. Most of the money is being used in Danang, where US troops used to mix and store Agent Orange at an Air Force base before loading it onto planes. During the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975, the US sprayed more than 75 million liters of Agent Orange and other herbicides across the country.



■CHINA

Retiree wows judges

A 79-year-old retiree in the north has wowed judges of a televised singing contest, state media said yesterday, in an echo of Susan Boyle, a middle-aged woman in the UK who achieved stardom for her voice. Wu Baiwei, the oldest contestant on Happy Girl, the equivalent of Pop Idol, is now one of the top 50 contenders for an eagerly awaited televised final due in July, the China Daily reported.



■IRAN

US blamed for bombing

A top Iranian official yesterday accused the US of hiring the bombers who carried out a devastating attack on a Shiite mosque in the southeastern city of Zahedan, Fars news agency said. “Three people involved with the terrorist incident were arrested,” said Jalal Sayah, deputy governor of Sistan-Baluchistan Province. “According to the information obtained, they were hired by America and the agents of the arrogance.” The suicide attack during Thursday evening prayers at the Shiite Amir al-Momenin mosque killed 23 people and wounded 125 others, officials said.



■AUSTRIA

Temple suspects named

Police on Thursday identified for the first time the six suspects in Sunday’s attack on a Sikh temple in Vienna that killed one and left 17 injured. The six men, all from Punjab or other northern Indian states, had given several names to the police, which is why they could not be identified sooner, police spokesman Michael Takacs said. All six were in custody, although one of them, believed to be the mastermind behind the attack, was still in hospital in an induced coma after a shot to the head, police said. Takacs said two of the men — named only as S. Charnjit, 24, and S. Hardeep, 33 — had come to Austria illegally in 2001 and last year. The other four — S. Jaspal, 34; S. Satwinder, 28; S. Tarsum, 45; and S. Sukhwinder, 28, — were asylum seekers.



■FRANCE

‘Pink Panther’ gets 15 years

A former Montenegrin soldier, believed to be a member of the “Pink Panther” gang of international jewel thieves, was sentenced to 15 years in jail on Thursday for a Saint-Tropez heist. Dusko Martinovic was also fined 150,000 euros (US$210,000) for the robbery in which he and accomplices stole 2 million euros in jewelry. An accomplice, Zvezjdan Begic, who is on the run, was tried in absentia by the court in the town of Draguignan and was given the same sentence as Martinovic.



■GERMANY

Town to use manure power

Lunen will become the first town in the world to be powered by animal waste when it launches a biogas network this year. The town will use cow and horse manure as well as other organic material from local farms to provide cheap and sustainable electricity for its 90,000 residents. Material such as animal slurry and spoiled crops from local farms will be fed into heated tanks, where natural fermentation will break it down into methane and carbon dioxide — the same basic ingredients as natural gas. Peter Kindt, director of Alfagy Ltd, which distributes combined heat and power plants, said the Lunen network could provide between 30 percent and 40 percent of the town’s heat and electricity needs.



■UNITED STATES

Fatal virus in Africa found

Scientists have identified a lethal new virus in Africa that causes bleeding like the dreaded Ebola virus. The “Lujo” virus infected five people in Zambia and South Africa last fall. Four of them died, but a fifth survived, perhaps helped by a medicine recommended by the scientists. Investigators believe the virus spread from person to person through contact with infected body fluids. It’s not clear how the first person became infected, but the bug comes from a family of viruses found in rodents, said Ian Lipkin, a Columbia University epidemiologist involved in the discovery. A paper on the virus by Lipkin and his collaborators was published online on Thursday in PLoS Pathogens.



■BRAZIL

Drug mule caught

A South African woman hiding nearly 1kg of cocaine in her body was arrested as she went to check in for a flight to Rio de Janeiro with a connection to Europe, officials said on Thursday. X-rays confirmed that the woman had capsules containing the drug in her stomach, vagina and rectum. They were removed by surgery, police said. Officers were alerted to the suspect by an anonymous tip-off before she turned up in Sao Paulo’s domestic airport for the Rio flight. She was to have flown out to Madrid and Istanbul. The woman faces international drug trafficking charges and could be sentenced to 15 years in prison if convicted.



■MEXICO

Teenagers go missing

Two teenage girls have gone missing in Ciudad Juarez, authorities said on Thursday, making a total of 14 missing females this year in the border city where hundreds of young women were killed in the 1990s. One 17-year-old girl went missing on Tuesday after taking a bus in the city center, and another 16-year-old girl was last seen on May 24, local justice officials said on Thursday. Non-governmental organization Our Daughters Return Home said that the girls were slim with black hair, with the same profile as most of the women assassinated in the 1990s. “The situation is very worrying and serious due to what happened barely more than five years ago,” said Marilu Garcia, from the organization.



■HONDURAS

Strong quake kills six

A powerful earthquake toppled dozens of homes in Honduras and Belize early on Thursday, killing at least six people and injuring 40 as terrified residents spilled from their homes across much of Central America. The magnitude-7.1 quake struck at 2:24am off the Caribbean coast of Honduras, 130km northeast of the beach town of La Ceiba, the US Geological Survey in Golden, Colorado, said. “People were running for the door,” Alfredo Cedeno said from the reception desk at the Gran Hotel Paris in La Ceiba. “You could really feel it and you could see it — the water came out of the pool.”



■UNITED STATES

Toddler kills brother

A three-year-old girl accidentally shot dead her two-year-old brother after the children found a loaded handgun in their home in California, police said on Thursday. A police spokesman in Bakersfield, 177km north of Los Angeles, said the tragic incident occurred on Wednesday afternoon. The incident occurred after the girl found a .45 caliber semi-automatic handgun under her parents’ bed. The boy was rushed to hospital following the shooting but died from a gunshot wound to the chest. “I don’t know that there’s another word to describe it — it’s just a tragedy,” Sergeant Greg Terry of the Bakersfield Police Department said.



■UNITED STATES

Obama bobbleheads stopped

President Barack Obama bobbleheads that are supposed to be given away at a minor-league baseball game apparently haven’t gotten the nod from customs officials. The West Virginia Power Class A baseball team said Thursday that 1,000 of the figures have been held up at a Customs and Border Protection warehouse in Los Angeles since May 20. A Customs spokeswoman in Los Angeles said she didn’t have more information on why they were stalled. The bobbleheads are a likeness of Obama in his high school basketball uniform and are part of today’s theme of fitness and healthy lifestyles.
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