■UNITED STATES
Dentist sued for tool misuse
A Florida dentist is being sued for allegedly dropping tools down the throat of an elderly patient — twice. Relatives of 90-year-old Charles Gaal recently filed the suit in circuit court accusing Wesley Meyers of negligence. An answering message at Meyers’ office in Winter Park said on Saturday that he was on vacation. He did not reply to a message from reporters seeking comment. The lawsuit says the doctor dropped an “implant screwdriver tool” in 2006 and a “mini-wrench” in 2007. The suit also says Gaal underwent several medical procedures to remove the tools but never fully recovered. He died in 2007.
■UNITED STATES
Gay penguins break up
After six years together, the relationship between a pair of gay male penguins at San Francisco zoo is apparently over, with Harry leaving Pepper for another penguin — Linda. The Los Angeles Times reported on Friday that the relationship between Harry and Pepper, who lived side-by-side, protecting eggs abandoned by other penguins, came to a shocking end when Harry moved into a neighboring nest with recently widowed Linda. The development has sparked a variety of reactions in the blogosphere, where Linda has been called a “home wrecker” who “lives for her own happiness, no matter who gets hurt.”
■UNITED STATES
Birthday card thief jailed
A Northern California postal worker has been sentenced to five months in federal prison for stealing money from children’s birthday cards. Twenty-nine-year-old Dean Hudson, of East Linda, was ordered to serve five months of home detention after his release from prison. He also must pay nearly US$3,000 in restitution. Hudson pleaded guilty in May to opening mail at the US Postal Service facility in Olivehurst and taking money that was included in children’s birthday cards.
■UNITED STATES
Space commode backs up
The bathroom lines at the already crowded space shuttle and space station complex got a lot longer on Sunday because of a flooded toilet. One of two commodes aboard the international space station broke down, right in the middle of complicated robotic work being conducted by the two crews. The pump separator apparently flooded. Mission Control advised the astronauts to hang an “out of service” sign on the toilet until it could be fixed. In the meantime, the six space station residents had to get in line to use their one good toilet.
■UNITED STATES
Authorities launch probe
Authorities on Sunday expressed sadness over the deaths of two employees of a security company and the wounding of two others in a helicopter crash in Iraq, and said an investigation had been launched. Xe Consulting is the new name for the controversial private military security firm Blackwater, which renamed itself after the Iraq government banned it in January over killings in a Baghdad square on Sept. 16, 2007.
■UNITED STATES
Frank McCourt dies
Frank McCourt, the Irish-American author best known for his dark depiction in Angela’s Ashes of a childhood in 1930s Ireland has died in New York, the New York Times reported on Sunday. The cause of death was metastatic melanoma, according to Susan Moldow, executive vice president and publisher of Scribner, McCourt’s publisher.
■GERMANY
Hitler enemies honored
Leaders on Monday will honor the plotters of a celebrated army attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler, 65 years after they were executed. In ceremonies marking the 65th anniversary of the July 20, 1944, coup attempt, officials will lay wreaths at the Bendlerblock building, now the Defense Ministry, where Colonel Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg and three others were executed shortly after their plan to kill Hitler with a briefcase bomb failed. There will also be an hour of commemoration at the Berlin Ploetzensee Memorial Center for the victims of the Nazis.
■IRAN
UK embassy staffer freed
Tehran on Sunday released on bail a British embassy staffer who was among a group of nine arrested following disturbances after the hotly disputed June 12 presidential election, his lawyer said. “He just got released. He is fine and seems not to be having any problem,” the lawyer, Abdolsamad Khoramshahi, said by telephone from the precincts of Evin prison, where Hossein Rassam was held. “Bail of 1 billion rials [US$100,000] has been paid” to free Rassam, the lawyer said. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband welcomed the release but reiterated his insistence that the detention of the embassy staffers was “completely unjustified.” Rassam was arrested on June 27, along with eight other staffers, who have since been released.
■UNITED KINGDOM
‘Big Lunch’ festival held
Tens of thousands of people came together for outdoor lunch parties up and down the country on Sunday, celebrating the first ever “Big Lunch” festival, an effort to build community spirit. From Liverpool in the northwest, where about 5,000 people sat down to eat, to dozens of sites across London and as far away as Barbados, organizers said up to 2 million people joined the party. “People have really come out and said ‘sod it’ to all the bad news that’s going on and decided just to have a nice lunch with their neighbors,” said Rhona Hurcombe, a spokeswoman for the festival and the organizer of a lunch in London. The Big Lunch aims to get neighbors talking amid evidence from researchers that society is becoming ever more fractured and isolated.
■RUSSIA
Bus crash leaves eight dead
News agencies are reporting that a bus carrying 47 people swerved off a road in Siberia and overturned, killing eight people, including a child, and wounding at least 38. Officials told the agencies that yesterday morning’s accident occurred not far from Tomsk. They said the driver, who survived, was either having a conversation on his mobile phone or had fallen asleep at the wheel.
■IRAQ
Car bomb kills three
Three people were killed, including two policemen, in a car bomb in Ramadi yesterday, the second attack there in a week, security and medical officials said. Four other people were wounded, including two policemen, in the bombing near the provincial government headquarters in the center of the city. Ramadi is the capital of the western province of Anbar, a one-time bastion of the Sunni insurgency that has seen a sharp drop-off in violence over the past 18 months as local tribes allied with US-led forces. Last week, six people were killed in a suicide car bombing near a mosque in Ramadi. Yesterday’s attack comes just three weeks after US troops withdrew from urban centers.
■PHILIPPINES
Soldier killed in blast
A militiaman was killed yesterday and eight were injured in two separate explosions in the southern Philippines, military and police officials said. The first blast was caused by a homemade bomb planted outside an army encampment in North Upi town in Maguindanao province, said Major Randolph Cabangbang, a regional army spokesman. Cabangbang said militiaman Erol Roberts was killed in the explosion, which occurred while he was inspecting the bag where the bomb was placed. Hours later, eight people were wounded when a hand grenade exploded in front of a busy grocery in nearby Cotabato City, police Senior Inspector Alexander Sarabia said. Soldiers who were manning a nearby checkpoint took into custody one of the suspects.
■VIETNAM
US student arrested
Local authorities have arrested a US student, who is a member the Democratic Party of Vietnam (DPV), while traveling to the country with a nonprofit humanitarian group to do charity work, a party official confirmed yesterday. “This arrest is unlawful,” Nguyen Si Binh, chairman of the US-based DPV, said by telephone. The DPV said on its Web site that Vo Tan Huan, 26, a Vietnamese-American student of pharmacy at the University of Tennessee, traveled with Project Vietnam, a US-based nonprofit humanitarian group, to do charity work at Children’s Hospital II and was arrested in Ho Chi Minh City last Tuesday. The DPV has called on the US State Department to request the government of Vietnam immediately intervene and release Huan.
■VIETNAM
Swine flu closes school
An official says a school in the south has closed after 26 teachers and students tested positive for swine flu. Tuong Nguyen Su, head of personnel at Ngo Thoi Nhiem High School in Ho Chi Minh City, says 24 students and two teachers have the virus. Su said the school would remain closed for at least a week. He said more than 100 students and about 40 teachers were quarantined there.
■SOUTH KOREA
Hospital switched babies
A court has ordered a hospital to pay a mother 70 million won (US$56,000) in damages after it mistakenly gave her the wrong baby 16 years ago. The unidentified woman gave birth at the hospital in Guri, a satellite city west of Seoul, in 1992 but a nurse mistook another baby for her own daughter. The mother began suspecting the child was not her own last July when her blood type turned out to be type A. She and her husband were both type B. A genetic test proved the daughter was biologically unrelated. Judge Lee Joon-Ho, in a ruling on Sunday quoted by local media yesterday, said the hospital failed to take adequate care of the newborn babies and return each one to the right parents. The biological daughter has not yet been located, the reports said.
■CHINA
Hundreds flee toxic leak
More than 1,000 people fled their homes and businesses and four factory workers were sent to the hospital after a chemical leak at a shoe factory in Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province over the weekend, a report on the Wenzhou government Web site said yesterday. Twenty tonnes of the chemical styrene leaked from containers on Sunday at Hongchang Shoe Materials Co Ltd, it said. The four workers had nose, eye and throat irritation after coming into contact with the carcinogenic liquid chemical used to make rubber and plastic, the report said.
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