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World News Quick Take

■VIETNAM

Refugees leave for Seoul

Nine North Korean asylum-seekers left the Danish embassy in Hanoi for Seoul yesterday, just hours before the South Korean president was to arrive for a state visit, a diplomatic source said. “The nine North Koreans left the Danish embassy this morning and they are now at Noi Bai International Airport checking in before flying to Singapore and then Seoul,” the Vietnamese diplomatic source said, asking not to be named. A Danish diplomat declined to comment. The South Korean foreign ministry and other agencies also declined, which is their usual position on North Korean refugees. The nine entered the Danish compound on Sept. 24 hoping to reach South Korea.



■PHILIPPINES

Militants seize principal

Muslim militants seized an elementary school principal on a southern island, a regional military spokesman said yesterday. Gabriel Canizares, 36, was seized late on Monday by 12 Abu Sayyaf guerrillas in Patikul on Jolo Island, 1,000km south of Manila, Major David Hontiveros said. Hontiveros said Canizares and several teachers were riding a passenger minibus when gunmen stopped the vehicle in the village of Tanum and forcibly took him hostage. The kidnapping occurred despite intensified military operations against the Abu Sayyaf rebels.



■AUSTRALIA

TV figure sorry for gesture

A TV presenter has apologized to a leading politician after being caught on-air making the “loopy” gesture to suggest he was crazy. ABC News Breakfast co-host Virginia Trioli was shown twirling a finger near her temple after a segment showing footage of Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce. “The senator was very gracious in accepting my apology,” Trioli told the Australian newspaper. Joyce, who was commenting on carbon emissions trading legislation, laughed off the incident. “Maybe I am crazy,” he said, according to the newspaper. “Maybe this isn’t parliament but an asylum. And if I’m not Barnaby, who am I? And then, who is Barnaby? If I am crazy, it would explain a lot about this place.”



■AUSTRALIA

Cat strangler goes to jail

A man who strangled his ex-lover’s cat and pelted her parents’ home with petrol bombs was yesterday jailed for almost 10 years. Paul Maher, 24, began stalking, harassing and threatening his former partner, Lynne Forehan, in August last year after they ended their relationship. He firebombed her parents’ home and, while on bail for breaching a restraining order, broke into Forehan’s North Melbourne apartment and strangled her four-year-old cat, Sox, with a telephone cord. It was a “calculated, callous and terribly cruel act,” judge Felicity Hampel said. Maher, who has a history of mental health problems and drug abuse, also slashed Forehan’s couch and clothes and urinated on her bed.



■AUSTRALIA

No hugs allowed at school

An elementary school has banned hugging and other displays of affection between preteen boys and girls, the principal said yesterday. Students at Largs Bay Primary School in Adelaide were spoken to about “inappropriate behavior” between boyfriends and girlfriends last week, Principal Julie Gale said. “We set strong standards of behavior for our Year 6 and 7 students, who are seen as role models by our younger students,” Gale said, referring to students aged 11 to 13.



■UNITED KINGDOM

Drawing may set record

Christie’s will offer for sale a drawing by Renaissance master Raphael that he used as a study for a figure in a Vatican fresco, and expects it to break the record for an old master drawing sold at auction. Head of a Muse will go under the hammer at the London sale of old masters and 19th century art on Dec. 8 and has been estimated at £12 million to £16 million (US$20 million to US$26 million). The existing record for an old master drawing at auction stands at £8.1 million, including buyer’s premium, for Michelangelo’s The Risen Christ in 2000 and for Leonardo da Vinci’s Horse and Rider in 2001. The Raphael drawing was a study for a figure in Parnassus, one of a series of four frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican commissioned by Pope Julius II and executed between 1508 and 1511. The Dec. 8 auction will also include Rembrandt’s Portrait of a man, half-length, with his arms akimbo, estimated at up to £25 million, and St John the Evangelist by Domenico Zampieri, valued at £7 million to £10 million.



■IRAQ

Car bomb claims four

Four people were killed, including two policemen, and nine injured yesterday in a car bomb blast in Anbar Province, security sources said. The car was parked in the industrial zone in al-Saqalawiya when it exploded, sources added.



■SOMALIA

Pirates capture Chinese ship

Pirates operating 700 nautical miles (1,300km) from the Somali shore captured a Chinese bulk carrier on Monday in a raid highlighting their determination to outfox foreign naval patrols in the Indian Ocean. The vessel, carrying 25 Chinese crew, was hijacked 550 nautical miles northeast of the Seychelles, according to the EU’s counter-piracy force, which is tracking the ship from the air. “It was last reported heading toward the Somali coast,” EU force spokesman John Harbor said. Pirates are holding at least six vessels in Somali waters. Attacks are expected to rise as the seas become calmer after the summer monsoon season. A drop in winds north of the Seychelles has seen pirates concentrating there in recent weeks, seizing ships from Taiwan, Spain and Singapore.



■UNITED KINGDOM

Death column sparks rage

Britain’s press watchdog says it has received a record 21,000 complaints about a newspaper column on the death of Boyzone singer Stephen Gately after critics used Twitter to brand the article homophobic and insensitive. Gately died on Oct. 10, aged 33, while vacationing on the Spanish island of Mallorca. An autopsy found he had died of natural causes from pulmonary edema. Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir wrote in a column on Friday that Gately’s death was “not, by any yardstick, a natural one” and said he died in “sleazy” circumstances. Anger at the column swept social networking site Twitter soon after Moir’s piece appeared on the paper’s Web site. Actor Stephen Fry urged his 860,000 Twitter followers to contact the Press Complaints Commission. Other prominent Tweeters followed suit, and provided links to the commission’s Web site. Moir defended her article, claiming suggestions of homophobia were “mischievous” and suggesting the backlash was a “heavily orchestrated Internet campaign.” The commission said on Monday it would write to the newspaper seeking a response before deciding whether to take further action.



■URUGUAY

Court overrules amnesty law

The Supreme Court has ruled that a law protecting military officers from prosecution for dictatorship-era human rights abuses is unconstitutional, a prosecutor said on Monday. The ruling, which comes days before a nationwide referendum on whether to scrap the amnesty law, applies to an investigation into the death of Nibia Sabalsagaray, who died in 1974 apparently after being tortured. Uruguayans, who go to the polls for a presidential election on Sunday, will also vote in a referendum on whether to annul the law, which grants military officers amnesty from prosecution for rights abuses allegedly committed during the 1973-1985 dictatorship. The amnesty law will be scrapped if 50 percent of voters support its annulment.



■UNITED STATES

OnStar halts stolen SUV

Police in California say General Motors’ OnStar communications system stopped a dangerous high-speed chase and helped them capture a carjacking suspect by disabling a stolen sport utility vehicle. OnStar officials say the incident early on Sunday in Visalia was the first time the system had been used to halt a chase. Police say it all began when a man used a sawed-off shotgun to take a Chevrolet Tahoe from two men in a parking lot. Police contacted OnStar, which found the Tahoe by using a global positioning system. Two officers spotted the SUV but the driver sped off. That’s when OnStar operators sent a signal that slowed the Tahoe to a halt. The surprised thief ran off but was quickly captured.



■UNITED STATES

‘Dr. No’ actor dies aged 91

Joseph Wiseman, the actor most widely known for playing the title character in Dr. No, the first feature film about James Bond, died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 91. His daughter, Martha Graham Wiseman, confirmed the death, saying her father had recently been in declining health. Released in 1962, Dr. No starred Sean Connery and Ursula Andress and featured Wiseman as Dr Julius No, the sinister scientist who was Bond’s first big-screen adversary. Wiseman’s other film credits include Detective Story (1951); Viva Zapata! (1952); The Unforgiven (1960) and The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968). Wiseman was born in Montreal on May 15, 1918, and moved to the US with his family when he was a boy.



■UNITED STATES

Octuplets doctor expelled

The doctor who gave fertility treatments to octuplets mom Nadya Suleman has been expelled from a professional organization. Michael Kamrava was kicked out of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine last month, group spokesman Sean Tipton said on Monday. Tipton said Kamrava had violated the group’s standards. He declined to provide details but said Kamrava was not expelled because of his work with any single patient. Suleman told RadarOnline.com she believed Kamrava was a good doctor who always warned her about the risks of multiple births and that she felt bad about his expulsion.



■MEXICO

Garcia Marquez spied on

Police opened a file on Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1982 as “pro-Cuban and pro-Soviet” and a “propaganda agent” of Cuba, according to files published by Mexican daily El Universal on Monday. The newspaper reported that the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude among many other works had been spied on by Mexico from the mid-1960s to at least the 1980s. Colombian-born Garcia Marquez settled in Mexico in the early 1960s.
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