■PHILIPPINES
Swine flu cases rise to 21
Health Secretary Francisco Duque says tests have confirmed five new swine flu cases, raising the total to 21. Duque said two of the new cases confirmed yesterday include guests at a wedding attended by two Taiwanese who fell sick after returning to Taiwan earlier this month. The three others all returned from travel to the US. Duque said seven of the 21 cases had tested negative in repeat tests, and three of them have been discharged from a hospital while four others were to be sent home yesterday. Twenty of the cases are Filipinos, and one is a 13-year-old foreign boy.
■IRAQ
Market bombing kills four
A police official said a bomb exploded at a Baghdad fruit and vegetable market, killing four people and wounding 14. The official said the blast occurred shortly before 8am yesterday at the Rasheed market in the southern district of Dora. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information to the media. The same market was the scene of a car bombing last month that killed 15 people and wounded nearly 50.
■NEPAL
Strike shuts down capital
Supporters of an ethnic rights group stopped vehicles and closed down markets in Kathmandu yesterday, demanding that the city be turned into an autonomous state. They blocked off main intersections of the city, stopping vehicles and forcing shopkeepers to close their doors. Streets were mostly deserted, while government workers were forced to walk to their offices. The committee demanded that Kathmandu be declared an autonomous state for the Newa ethnic group and that their language be recognized as one of the official languages. Police said there were reports of minor violence yesterday morning by supporters enforcing the strike, but no major incidents were reported.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Last ‘Titanic’ survivor dies
The last survivor of the 1912 sinking of the Titanic, Millvina Dean, has died in a nursing home in England at the age of 97, the Titanic International Society said yesterday. Dean was just nine weeks old when her family sold a pub they owned in London to travel on the maiden voyage of the passenger liner and begin a new life in Wichita, Kansas, where her father Bertram hoped to open a tobacco shop. Her father was one of the 1,517 people who died after the supposedly unsinkable ship hit an iceberg in the Atlantic and sank. Dean, who was wrapped in a sack to protect her from the cold and lowered into a lifeboat, was the youngest of the 706 Titanic survivors. Her mother Georgetta and two-year-old brother Bertram also survived, dying in 1975 and 1992 respectively. Dean, who never married, said she had no memory of the disaster but was told of the event at the age of eight when her mother was about to remarry.
■EGYPT
Reluctant groom protests
A man cut off his penis on Sunday in protest at his parents’ choice of bride, a police official said. The 25-year-old laborer from the village of Sheikh Eissa in the south was taken to hospital in stable condition, the official said, adding that the man had also mutilated his testicles. “He was in love with a woman but his parents rejected her and told him to marry another woman he didn’t want. He took a knife and cut off his penis in his room.” Doctors were unable to reattach the severed member, the official said.
■UNITED STATES
Octuplet mom signs deal
The Southern California woman who gave birth to the world’s longest-surviving set of octuplets has signed a deal to star in a reality TV series, her lawyer said on Sunday. Nadya Suleman, who gave birth to the six boys and two girls in January and also has six other children, agreed to be filmed for a proposed TV show by Eyeworks, a Netherlands-based production company, attorney Jeff Czech said. The company hasn’t yet sold the show to any TV network, he said.
■EL SALVADOR
Funes appoints wife
President-elect Mauricio Funes has appointed his wife and a former Marxist guerrilla to Cabinet posts just hours before starting his five-year term. Funes, the first president from the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, has named first lady Vanda Pignato as minister of social inclusion. Funes announced late on Sunday that former FMLN guerrilla leader and Vice President Salvador Sanchez Ceren would be education minister and Hugo Martinez would be foreign minister. The FMLN fought to overthrow US-backed governments in the 1980s.
■CHILE
Grannies charged with drugs
They did not fit the typical drug dealer profile: two elderly grandmothers, one of them bedridden, living beside a police academy on a leafy suburban street. But authorities say Maria Valdebenito, 80, and Giselle Gilbert, 72, ran a profitable drugs business from their home in Providencia, a suburb in the capital, Santiago. They have been charged with drug trafficking after a police raid at the weekend netted almost 2kg of cocaine, cocaine paste and £45,000 (US$74,000) in cash. Because of their age and Valdebenito’s infirmity, they have been placed under house arrest.
■UNITED STATES
Israeli official to mend rift
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak was to try to heal a growing rift with his country’s main ally over the Middle East peace process when he was to start talks with top officials yesterday. Barak is likely to devote a lot of time to easing tensions, although the talks were originally planned to focus on bilateral defense ties and Washington-led international efforts to halt Iran’s nuclear drive, an aide said. During the three-day trip, he is expected to meet Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, National Security Adviser James Jones and President Barack Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Taxi drivers are grumpiest
Taxi drivers are Britain’s grumpiest workers, a survey showed yesterday, while secretaries are the happiest. The gloomy prospect of ferrying around strangers every day makes taxi drivers laugh less than any other profession, the survey of 4,000 workers showed. Drivers cited traffic jams, the rising cost of petrol, drunken passengers and frisky couples as reasons not to be cheerful. Fitness instructors could lighten up too, with just 0.9 percent of them saying they enjoy a giggle in the gym. Those in recruitment could also do with a good dose of humor, the survey said, as just 3.8 percent laughed regularly during the working day. By contrast, 53.5 percent of secretaries said they laughed on a regular basis during a working day, with a quarter of those surveyed confessing that most of their amusement comes from watching the stressful lives of their disgruntled bosses.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.