■INDIA
Newborn survives train fall
A newborn baby has escaped unhurt after being delivered in the toilet of a moving train and then falling onto the tracks, reports said yesterday. Rinku Debu Ray, 28, suddenly went into labor late on Tuesday while on board an express train that was passing through the state of West Bengal. The Times of India and Hindustan Times said Ray delivered the baby in the toilet of her carriage and the newborn infant slipped through the discharge chute and onto the tracks below. The distraught Ray immediately jumped from the train, prompting passengers to pull the emergency cord in the belief that she was trying to commit suicide. “We got off the train and started looking for my wife,” husband Bhola Ray, 33, told the Hindustan Times. “After an hour, we found Rinku sitting beside the track with the baby in her lap.” Mother and child reboarded the train and were taken to the nearest station and then to hospital, where doctors pronounced them both in good health.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Maharaja riches on display
The splendor of maharajas is to go on show in London from tomorrow, with thrones, jewels, saris and even motor cars on display. The exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the world’s biggest museum of decorative arts and design, sets out to shed light on the plush lifestyle of the maharajas until the end of colonial rule in 1947. “There has never been an exhibition like this before, showing the spectacular treasures of the courts of the maharajas,” said V and A director Mark Jones. The exhibition, entitled “Maharaja: The Splendour of India’s Royal Courts,” comprises more than 250 objects including three thrones, a silver gilt howdah, gem-encrusted weapons, court paintings, photographs and a Rolls-Royce luxury car.
■AUSTRALIA
‘Racist’ skit prompts outrage
A talent show skit based around late pop star Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5 has backfired after US guest star Harry Connick Jr called for an apology and viewers accused the program of racism. The comedy troupe, who called themselves “Jackson Jive,” painted their faces black and donned black afro wigs in the skit broadcast on Wednesday evening, prompting talent judge Connick to protest and “speak up as an American.” Five members of the group wore white suits and purple shirts, as well as a single jeweled glove favored for a time by Michael Jackson, who died suddenly in June. Another dressed as Jackson himself, with white face paint. “If I knew that was going to be part of the show I definitely wouldn’t have done it,” Connick said after calling a halt to the skit and awarding the six performing members with a zero rating.
■CHINA
Inmates freed in celebration
Thousands of prisoners benefited from last week’s celebrations to mark 60 years of communist rule, with sentences reduced and parole granted by provincial authorities, a human rights group said yesterday. Leaders did not issue any special pardon for the holiday, which saw a carefully choreographed military parade attended by Chinese Communist Party chiefs, the San Francisco-based Dui Hua Foundation said. Instead, the actions were taken by authorities in three provinces, it said, citing state media reports. It was not clear if any of the inmates were political prisoners, such as those arrested for taking part in the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement or prosecuted under broad state security laws.
■SOMALIA
Pirates attack navy vessel
Somali pirates in two skiffs fired on a French navy vessel early on Wednesday after apparently mistaking it for a commercial boat, the French military said. The French ship gave chase and captured five suspected pirates. No one was wounded by the volleys from the Kalashnikov rifles directed at La Somme, a 3,800-tonne refueling ship, French military spokesman Rear Admiral Christophe Prazuck said. La Somme “was probably taken for a commercial ship by the two small skiffs” about 250 nautical miles (460km) off Somalia’s coast, Prazuck said.
■ISRAEL
Minister says no peace soon
The country’s foreign minister says there’s no chance of ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for many years. Avigdor Lieberman says efforts to reach a final peace deal have failed since the first accord between Israel and the Palestinians in 1993. Lieberman says it’s unrealistic to think a long-term agreement on ending the conflict can be reached at this time and that whoever thinks an agreement can be reached soon just doesn’t understand the situation. He says the two sides should instead strive for interim agreements that would create stability and leave the tough issues between the them “to a much later stage.”
■SAUDI ARABIA
Sex boasts earn jail term
A man whose televised boasts about his sex life outraged the country’s conservatives was sentenced to five years in jail and 1,000 lashes on Wednesday, his lawyer said. Mazen Abdul Jawad was convicted on Shariah law-based charges relating to immoral behavior, Sulaiman al-Jimaie said. Three friends who appeared on the show with him were given two-year terms and 300 lashes each, while a cameraman who helped film the episode was sentenced to two months in jail. Jimaie said they would appeal, insisting that his client was a victim of the Beirut-based LBC satellite TV network, which broadcast the show in which he appeared. He also said his client’s case had been hurt by heavy media coverage that sparked public anger over Abdul Jawad’s behavior. Abdual Jawad was disappointed by the verdict, Jimaie said, “but he is mostly worried about his mother, who is in her 70s and has heart problems.” In July, Abdul Jawad, a divorced father of four, appeared on a show where he talked about having sex at 14 with a neighbor and picking up women using his cellphone’s Bluetooth function.
■MALDIVES
Politics sinks to new low
The nation’s Cabinet will hold a meeting underwater later this month. The country, a collection of atolls and islands in the Indian Ocean, stands less than 2m above sea level, and as climate change causes seas to rise it will probably be the first nation to sink beneath the waves. Under the threat of that looming watery Armageddon, President Mohamed Nasheed has announced plans to hold a Cabinet meeting under the sea, ahead of the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen in December. Ministers clad in wetsuits and shouldering oxygen tanks, will meet about 6m underwater on Oct. 17. They will communicate through hand gestures, said Aminath Shauna, an official from the president’s office. “It is to send a message to the world. The intention is to draw the attention of the world leaders to the issue of global warming and highlight how serious are the threats faced by Maldives as a result,” she said. One minister has already had to pull out: scuba instructors said the education minister was not fit enough to do the dive.
■UNITED STATES
Salazar wants preserves
US Interior Secretary Ken Salazar wants to create wild horse preserves in the midwest and east to protect wild horses and burros that now roam the west of the US. Salazar said his plan would restore the health of wild horse herds and the rangelands that support them. He said the plan would not require killing any wild horses. Interior Department officials had warned that it might be necessary to kill some horses to combat rising costs of maintaining wild horse herds. About 36,000 wild horses and burros roam in 10 western states, nearly half in Nevada. The Bureau of Land Management rounds up thousands of the animals each year, but has had a hard time finding buyers in recent years.
■UNITED STATES
Irving Penn dies aged 92
Influential fashion photographer Irving Penn, known for his elegant, minimalist portraits, died on Wednesday. He was 92. Penn was long associated with Vogue magazine, where he first began working in the 1940s and won renown for his calm, classical compositions. He died at home in New York, said a representative for Pace/MacGill Gallery, which represents Penn’s work. Although he was most famous for photographs of glamorous models — including a black-and-white, nude Gisele Bundchen — he brought the same graceful simplicity and accuracy to pictures of Peruvian peasants or New Guinea tribesmen.
■CANADA
EnCana deadline approaches
Police are urging the public to report any suspicious activity as a pipeline bomber’s deadline approaches for oil and gas development in northeastern British Columbia to cease operations. Six EnCana Corp sites in western Canada have been attacked since last October. The blasts put a spotlight on local concerns over the rapid growth of the industry in the region, particularly projects involving sour gas, which contains the potentially deadly chemical hydrogen sulfide. No one has been injured in any of the explosions. Last July, the bomber sent a letter to a newspaper informing EnCana that they would cease all action against the company for three months and then would resume if the company hadn’t retreated by Sunday.
■UNITED STATES
Fraudster gets seven years
A man who duped the Egyptian government into paying more than US$7 million for a shipment of frozen chicken he never delivered has been sentenced to seven years in prison and fined US$15,000. Alexander Legault, 59, pleaded guilty in July and was sentenced on Wednesday by US District Judge Kurt Engelhardt. Prosecutors say that the Egyptian government agreed to buy 5,000 tonnes of frozen chicken from Legault and wired more than US$7 million to his corporate account, but he created fake documents to make it appear the chicken was aboard a Swedish vessel bound for Egypt.
■UNITED STATES
Endangerer gets two years
An 18-year-old man has been sentenced to two years in prison for his role in an infant’s loss of two toes to rat bites inside a filthy mobile home. Todd Trent pleaded guilty on Monday to child endangering and was sentenced by Pike County Common Pleas Judge Randy Deering. Trent was the boyfriend of the child’s mother when authorities discovered in July that the six-week-old girl had been seriously injured by rats in the family’s mobile home west of Piketon, Ohio. Child endangering charges are still pending against three others, including the mother.
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,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the