■AUSTRALIA
Vegemite gets makeover
The iconic vegetable spread Vegemite is getting a makeover. Kraft Foods announced on Sunday that a creamier variation of the product would be on store shelves on July 5 alongside the original, which has been a staple in pantries almost since its invention in 1922. Vegemite — a salty, slightly bitter spread made from brewer’s yeast — is such a part of the lifestyle that it even made mention as a sandwich in the 1980s hit song Down Under by Men at Work. People spread it on toast or crackers, top it with tomatoes or avocados, use it to flavor soups and gravies, pack a jar when traveling and write home for more when living abroad. Kraft decided to make a new product after conducting a census of 300,000 local citizens and New Zealanders to find out how they use Vegemite. The end result is a Vegemite mixed with cream cheese for a smoother, more spreadable consistency. Kraft said the new product was given to 600 homes for testing and came back with overwhelmingly positive results. Kraft touts the still-unnamed product as “the new Vegemite experience.” Just like the original, which was named in a national poll in 1923, the new version will also be named by a public contest. Jars that go on sale next month will carry the label: “Name Me.” The contest is open-ended as Kraft selects the best name for the Vegemite partner.
■CHINA
Hundreds riot over tax
Several hundred furniture makers blocked traffic and overturned police cars yesterday in an eastern city to protest a new tax they said imposes a heavy burden on their businesses. The protest was the latest in recent months by workers and companies worried about government moves to restructure industries or job losses because of the economic crisis. Photographs and video footage posted on Web sites showed crowds in Nankang, Jiangxi Province, filling a street junction, surrounding overturned police cars and spilling over onto a highway and halting traffic.
■PHILIPPINES
Dead voters to be logged
A lawmaker frustrated by rampant electoral fraud has proposed legislation to get the names of the dead off voter rolls. Representative Maria Victoria Sy-Alvarado said yesterday she wanted to make it mandatory for doctors and family members to report deaths to the civil registrar, which has to give the information to the Election Commission so it can update its voter lists. The bill must go through a long legislative process before becoming law. If enacted, government officials or employees would face up to 10 years imprisonment and be disqualified from public office.
■AUSTRALIA
Croc narrowly misses boy
Two schoolboys playing on a riverbank on the west coast had a lucky escape when a 3.5m crocodile picked on their 10-year-old black Labrador instead of them, news reports said yesterday. “It was a heavy dog, at least 40kg, and would be heavier than at least one of the children,” Police Sergeant Mike Wells said of the Sunday attack on the May River near Derby in Western Australia. “The crocodile came out of the water and grabbed the Labrador effortlessly and took it away,” Wells told the West Australian newspaper. The parents were locals and were nearby having a picnic when the crocodile lunged at the dog. “Unfortunately everyone knows there are crocs there but people tend to get complacent,” Wells said.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Bacon boosts cancer cases
A dramatic fall in the consumption of processed meat such as bacon and ham would stop around 3,700 people a year in Britain from developing bowel cancer, scientists said yesterday. Martin Wiseman, scientific and medical adviser to the World Cancer Research Fund, said: “The evidence on processed meat is convincing and our scientists estimate that up to about 3,700 cases of bowel cancer could be prevented every year in the UK if everyone ate less than 70g of processed meat a week, which is roughly the equivalent of three rashers of bacon.” The fund said people should ideally eat no processed meat at all in order to minimize their cancer risk. Bowel cancer is the third most common cancer in the UK. Around 36,500 people are diagnosed with it annually. Half die within five years.
■CROATIA
Giant jeans may set record
A pair of jeans the size of six tennis courts, stitched together from thousands donated for charity, should be recognized by Guinness World Records as the biggest anywhere, organizers said on Sunday. “We’ve made the world’s largest pair of jeans!” the Cockta Jeans Fashion project said on its Web site. “People were bringing in their old jeans ... and sponsors were immediately giving money for humanitarian purposes,” project head Boris Juric told national television. The jeans were put on display in Zagreb on Saturday. They have a leg length of 45m and a total width of 34m and were sewn up in a local factory. For each pair of donated jeans, the project paid US$1.30 to a local association providing therapy to disabled people.
■GERMANY
Egypt fights for Nefertiti
Egypt will soon provide evidence that the 3,400-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti was taken illegally out of the country by Germany, Egyptian antiquities chief Zahi Hawass said on Sunday. “We are still gathering information, but I expect we will shortly have enough to place a formal request to the Berlin Museum for the return of the bust,” Hawass told the Tagesspiegel in an interview. The fabled bust of Nefertiti, renowned as one of history’s great beauties, was brought to Berlin in 1913, a year after German archeologist Ludwig Borchardt unearthed it on the banks of the Nile. Cairo began demanding the statue in the 1930s.
■IRAQ
Forest burned in air strikes
More than 125 hectares of forest were burned in the past month as a result of Turkish bombardment, a senior official in autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan said on Sunday. The official said that an emergency team of firemen and border and forest guards had been formed to extinguish the fires in the Kurdish province of Dohuk. “More than 500 dhonam [125 hectares] of forest was burned as a result of Turkish bombardment this month,” said Najat Sufi Hariri, the planning director in Kurdistan’s agriculture ministry. Aided by US intelligence, Turkish jets have been bombing hideouts of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in northern Iraq since December 2007.
■SIERRA LEONE
Hoses used to fight cobras
Power hoses and AK-47 assault rifles have succeeded where snake-charmers failed by removing 400 cobras and vipers that overran a police station. Authorities in the southern district of Bo called in police, army and fire fighters after the snakes scared away police officers and residents reporting crimes.
■FRANCE
Face transplant patient dies
A man who underwent the world’s first face and double-hand transplant in April after being disfigured in an accident has died, hospital officials said on Monday. The man, in his 30s, died of cardiac arrest while undergoing a follow-up operation on June 8, said Laurent Lantieri, the surgeon who performed the groundbreaking transplant near Paris. “He developed a facial infection a few weeks after his operation, and during an operation to try to tackle the infection he suffered cardiac arrest,” Lantieri told RTL radio. He said the man’s death was linked to a heart problem, not to the transplant itself. Surgeons had replaced the patient’s entire face above the lips, including the scalp, nose, ears and forehead, in a 30-hour operation involving a 40-person medical team of more than 40. Worldwide, there have been five other face transplants to date, three of them in France, but it was the first time a transplant of both hands and the face had been completed in one go.
■UNITED STATES
CIA chief criticizes Cheney
Former vice president Dick Cheney’s criticism of the Obama administration’s handling of security matters suggests he wants the US to be attacked, CIA Director Leon Panetta said. “I think he smells some blood in the water on the national security issue,” Panetta told The New Yorker magazine for next Monday’s edition. “It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that’s dangerous politics.” Cheney has said that President Barack Obama is making the US less safe by banning the controversial methods and planning to close Guantanamo Bay. Asked whether he agreed with the intelligence chief, US Vice President Joe Biden told NBC’s Meet the Press that he would not question Cheney’s motives. However, he added: “Dick Cheney’s judgment about how to secure America is faulty. I think our judgment is correct.”
■UNITED STATES
Obama kin inks book deal
A memoir by George Obama, the president’s half brother and a resident of Huruma, Kenya, will be published by Simon & Schuster in January. George Obama, 27, shares the same father with his half sibling. He is the youngest of the senior Obama’s seven children and was born six months before his father died. The book will be written with author-journalist Damien Lewis and tell of George Obama’s fall into crime and poverty as a teenager and his eventual embrace of community organizing and of advocacy for the poor, an identification so strong that he chooses to live among them. “Even had George Obama not been our president’s half brother, his story is moving and inspirational,” David Rosenthal, Simon Schuster publisher and executive vice president, said in a statement on Sunday.
■UNITED STATES
Scouts receive Parton badge
Country singer Dolly Parton delighted hundreds of Tennessee Girl Scouts when she made a surprise entrance at a ceremony to present them with a patch created in her honor. Parton appeared on stage at the Pines Theater in Pigeon Forge, where 400 Girl Scouts were receiving the new “Coat of Many Colors” badge. It is named for Parton and her 1971 song of the same name. The badge requires Scouts to help others, then design a collage of what makes them special. “A person can make money, but money can’t make a person,” she told the girls. Parton is a lifetime member of the Girl Scouts.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
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