■NEW ZEALAND
Napoleon’s hair auctioned
A lock of hair cut from Napoleon Bonaparte’s head after he died has sold for US$13,000 at an auction. Extra phone lines were installed for the sale to cope with an expected rush of international buyers seeking to snip up the hair cut from the head of the former French emperor a day after his death in 1821 while he was in exile on the island of St Helena. The circle of hair was part of a collection brought to the country in 1864 by Denzil Ibbetson, a British commissary officer and artist. Ibbetson served on St Helena during the six years that Napoleon was held on the island after being defeated at the Battle of Waterloo.
■AUSTRALIA
Pedophile priest jailed
A Catholic priest was sentenced yesterday to almost 20 years in jail for child sex attacks which the judge said were sadistic and went unpunished for many years. John Sidney Denham, 67, was sentenced to 19 years and 10 months after pleading guilty to a range of charges, including multiple counts of indecent assault against boys aged five to 16. Judge Helen Syme told a Sydney court that many of Denham’s 25 victims were left terrified by the attacks they endured at schools in Sydney and elsewhere in New South Wales between 1968 and 1986. “The indecent assaults involved multiple children, often significant planning, were frequently sadistic and overall persistent, objectively serious, criminal courses of conduct,” Syme said.
■THAILAND
Five killed in restive south
Suspected Muslim insurgents detonated a roadside bomb and shot at security forces on an evening patrol, killing five people, police said yesterday. The suspects stole four rifles before fleeing on Thursday evening in the Rue So district of Narathiwat, said police Captain Pairat Kiatcharoensiri. Killed were a soldier, two security rangers, a village security guard and a village official. More than 4,000 people have been killed in Thailand’s three southernmost provinces since an Islamist insurgency erupted in 2004.
■SOUTH KOREA
Internet addict kills mother
A court yesterday sentenced an Internet addict to 20 years in prison for killing his mother after she criticized his online gaming habit. The 22-year-old was arrested in February on charges of clubbing his 53-year-old mother to death at her home. Prosecutors had sought the death sentence. In March, a 32-year-old man died after playing on the Internet for five days with few breaks. A similar incident was reported involving a 28-year-old man in 2005. In May, a 41-year-old man was sentenced to two years in jail after he and his wife left their daughter to die while raising a “virtual child” on the Internet. Official data estimates the highly wired nation has 2 million Web addicts, or almost one in 10 online users.
■AUSTRALIA
Qantas executives return
Australian airline Qantas yesterday welcomed the return of two executives who had been unable to leave Vietnam amid an investigation into multimillion-dollar fuel-hedging losses. Daniela Marsilli and Tristan Freeman, formerly employed by Qantas budget offshoot Jetstar Pacific, arrived back in Australia on Thursday — some six months after Vietnamese officials refused their bid to leave. “That followed the successful conclusion of the investigation by Vietnamese authorities,” spokeswoman Olivia Wirth said. “The case is now closed.”
■GERMANY
Man arrested over ringtone
A German man who had a speech by Adolf Hitler as his ringtone and a picture of the Nazi dictator in front of a swastika on his mobile phone could face up to three years in jail, police said on Thursday. Authorities seized the 54-year-old’s phone at Harburg station on Tuesday, near the northern city of Hamburg, after fellow train passengers, shocked by the sound of Hitler’s voice, alerted police. “It was an original speech by Adolf Hitler which ended with the phrase ‘Sieg Heil,’” police spokesman Ruediger Carstens said. The public display of Nazi symbols like the swastika has been banned in Germany since the end of World War II.
■FINLAND
Broadband service a right
On Thursday Helsinki became the first country in the world to make broadband Internet access a basic right, ensuring a high-speed connection is available to all Finns, a government official said. “Today the universal service obligation concerning Internet access of 1 Megabit per second has entered into force,” Olli-Pekka Rantala of the communications networks unit at the Ministry of Transport and Communications said. “It is our understanding that we have become the first in the world to have made broadband a basic right,” he said. The tech-savvy Nordic country amended its communications market act last year to make sufficient Internet access a universal service, like telephone and postal services.
■ AUSTRIA
‘Miss Muffets’ needed
University researchers are on the look-out for girls who recoil at the sight of spiders as part of their work into how fear affects the processes of the brain. “The researchers are looking for girls aged between eight and 13 years who are fearful of spiders and or who feel sick at the sight of them,” the University of Graz said on its Web site. The girls will be shown pictures of the eight-legged crawlers and their brainwaves will be registered. They will also undergo free fear therapy with specialists. Researchers hope the results will help develop successful phobia treatments.
■IRAN
Iran frees Nobel aide
Tehran has freed from jail an aide to Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi who was arrested before the anniversary of last year’s disputed presidential election, an opposition Web site reported yesterday. “I spoke to her just now. She told me she is out of the [prison] gate,” Kaleme.com, the Web site of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, quoted Narges Mohammadi’s husband Taghi Rahmani as saying. The mother of two’s arrest had been reported by the Defenders of Human Rights Center, which is chaired by Ebadi, on June 11, one day before the first anniversary of the presidential poll.
■IRAN
President to visit Nigeria
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will visit Nigeria this weekend as the West African nation assumes the rotating presidency of the UN security council, a diplomat said on Thursday. Ahmadinejad’s visit comes after he made similar trips to Uganda and Zimbabwe in April, as the pariah Middle Eastern nation attempts to garner support against stronger UN sanctions over its nuclear program. Khosrow Rezazadeh, Iran’s ambassador to Nigeria, on Thursday confirmed the planned visit, but declined to offer further details. Nigeria took over the presidency of the UN security council on Thursday.
■UNITED STATES
New ‘Spider-Man’ chosen
Little-known British actor Andrew Garfield will be the star of the next film based on web-slinging superhero Spider-Man, it was announced on Thursday. Garfield, 26, steps into the void vacated by Tobey Maguire, the star of the first three films in the franchise which have grossed nearly US$2.5 billion worldwide since 2002. Garfield’s previous credits include Terry Gilliam’s quirky The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and the British indie film Boy A. He also had a starring role in this year’s film based on the rise of Facebook, The Social Network. Maguire dropped out amid rumors of creative differences with director Sam Raimi, who headed the first three films and Sony Pictures Entertainment over the script. The new film is to be directed by Marc Webb, who received plaudits for the low-budget hit 500 Days of Summer last year.
■UNITED STATES
Gitmo inmate to stand trial
Tanzanian Ahmed Khalfan Ghailiani, the first Guantanamo prisoner transferred to the US mainland, is not suffering from mental stress and is fit to stand trial in New York in September, a judge said on Thursday. Charged in the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Ghailiani was arrested in 2004 and held in secret prisons by the CIA before being transferred to the US naval facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Defense lawyers said that Ghailiani suffers from post traumatic stress disorder after five years of detention at Guantanamo, but federal court judge Lewis Kaplan ruled Ghailiani was not suffering “any mental disease or defect” and was fit to stand trial.
■ECUADOR
Media watchdog planned
A congressional committee approved a bill on Thursday that would set up a media watchdog to ensure print and broadcast journalists produce “truthful, reasonable” stories. The proposal is backed by lawmakers aligned with President Rafael Correa. The bill now goes to the full 124-member Congress for debate. According to the bill, the panel will aim to ensure that mass communication is “truthful, reasonable, in proper context and based on multiple sources,” but the seven-member watchdog panel would not have the power to punish journalists who fall short of those standards. The president would appoint two committee members. Backers of the proposal say it would help raise media standards. Others say it could pressure journalists to censor themselves. Jose Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, said some of the provisions of the bill “undermine its own stated purpose of guaranteeing freedom of expression.”
■UNITED STATES
Kidnap victim gets US$20m
A woman held captive for nearly two decades by a rapist out on parole will receive US$20 million from the state of California for her ordeal, during which she bore two children to the man whom officials were supposedly monitoring. Lawmakers approved the settlement on Thursday for Jaycee Dugard, now 30 and her two daughters, who resurfaced in August last year after being held by a suspect identified by authorities as Phillip Garrido. “It is compensation for three people for the rest of their lives who have been horribly damaged over a period of 17 or 18 years,” mediator Daniel Weinstein said. Dugard and her daughters, ages 12 and 15, filed claims in February, saying parole agents with the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation began supervising Garrido in 1999 but did not discover them.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese