■AUSTRALIA
Police probe family deaths
Police were investigating the death of a young mother who crashed her car shortly after her baby was shot dead and her partner was critically injured. The infant was found in a pool of blood by a neighbor after the father, 36, staggered out of their home in Gracemere with a gunshot wound to his stomach, witnesses said. “A man went in there and found the little fella on the floor,” said Jodiee Bennett, who lives across the street. “They thought he had hit his head on the tiles, but apparently that was one of the gunshot wounds that the baby copped in the head.” The mother died in hospital after smashing her car into a tree about 10km from the house. A small handgun was found in the vehicle.
■NEW ZEALAND
Fish ‘talk’ to each other
University of Auckland marine scientist Shahriman Ghazali says fish can “talk” to each other. Fish communicate with noises including grunts, chirps and pops, Ghazali told the New Zealand Herald in a story published yesterday. “All fish can hear, but not all can make sound — pops and other sounds made by vibrating their swim bladder, a muscle they can contract,” he said. Fish are believed to communicate with each other to attract mates, scare off predators or orient themselves.
■JAPAN
Foreign resident count falls
The number of foreign residents fell for the first time in nearly half a century last year as a severe recession hit jobs in the auto and other industrial sectors, government data shows. A total of 2.186 million people were listed as foreign residents at the end of last year, down 1.4 percent from a year earlier, ending a rising streak for the 47 consecutive years since 1962, the justice ministry said.
■GAZA STRIP
Hamas rounds up spies
A Hamas security official said security forces are rounding up suspected collaborators with Israel. He said so far five people have been arrested in overnight raids. He said suspects will go to trial and that no mercy will be shown to those who spy on other Palestinians. He spoke yesterday on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the arrests. In April, the Hamas government executed two accused collaborators. It was the first time the death penalty had been carried out in Gaza since the Islamic militant Hamas violently seized power there in June 2007.
■ITALY
Money snarls traffic
Money may make the world go round, but in this case it brought highway traffic to a halt. A truck carrying some 2 million euros (US$2.5 million) in coins overturned in the south, unloading its contents onto the highway and leading motorists to hit the breaks and dig in. Police in Foggia, where the accident occurred on Monday, said on Tuesday it was impossible to establish how much money had been stolen, as many of the 1-euro and 2-euro coins remained in piles on the highway. However, motorists acting quickly before police arrived made off with at least 10,000 euros. Police said the truck’s driver and one passenger suffered minor injuries.
■CANADA
Pop signer N Korea-bound?
An online contest to decide where pop star Justin Bieber should go on tour next has been hijacked by a Web prank group that has been encouraging voters to send him to North Korea. With just a few hours left to vote, North Korea was the top vote-getter on Tuesday in the “My World Tour” contest with more than 625,000 votes, followed by Israel with 608,000 votes and Poland with 513,073 votes. The BBC said the campaign to garner votes for an unlikely tour to notoriously isolated North Korea by the 16-year-old singing sensation was launched by users of the Internet bulletin board 4chan. Users of 4chan have carried out a number of stunts in the past involving Bieber and previous 4chan pranks include getting the founder of the site, Christopher Poole, on to Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people.
■IRAN
Swiss official summoned
Tehran has summoned the Swiss charge d’affaires to protest the “abduction” of a nuclear scientist by US intelligence agents, a report on the state television Web site said yesterday. The Swiss mission in Tehran handles US interests as Washington has had no diplomatic ties with Iran for more than 30 years. “The Swiss charge d’affaires [Georg Steiner] was summoned on Tuesday following the release of new documents relating to the abduction of Shahram Amiri by American security forces,” the report said, quoting a foreign ministry statement. Iran’s foreign ministry said on Sunday it had presented to the Swiss embassy “evidence” that Amiri, who has been missing since last year, was abducted by the CIA.
■ISRAEL
Father seeks Turkey’s help
The father of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas more than four years ago, called for Turkey’s help in pressuring the Islamist militant group to release him, Milliyet newspaper said. Noam Shalit, in an interview with Milliyet editor Cinar Oskay at a benefit concert in Kfar Aza, Israel, suggested Turkey’s relations with Hamas could be used to pressure the organization to release his son, Milliyet said. Gilad Shalit has been held since June 2006, when he was captured in a raid.
■UNITED STATES
Lindsay Lohan going to jail
A judge sentenced Lindsay Lohan on Tuesday to 90 days in jail and an inpatient rehab program after finding the actress had violated her probation in a 2007 drug case by failing to attend alcohol education classes. The actress burst into tears after the ruling. Superior Court Judge Marsha Revel issued the sentence after listening to testimony from employees of an alcohol treatment program that Lohan had been ordered to attend. Lohan had missed seven classes since December, which led to the judge’s harsh rebuke moments after the Mean Girls star offered a tearful apology. “I did do everything I was told to do and did the best I could to balance jobs and showing up,” Lohan told the judge. “It wasn’t vacation, it wasn’t some sort of a joke.”
■PERU
Jailed rebels may wed
Jailed for life, Shining Path guerrilla leaders Abimael Guzman and Elena Yparraguirre can get married, albeit by proxy, since for security reasons neither can be moved from their jails, the justice minister said on Tuesday. “We’ve already told the couple the wedding has to be carried out by proxy for security reasons. We’re waiting for their decision,” Peruvian Justice Minister Victor Garcia told reporters. Arrested in 1992 and convicted of murder and leading the Shining Path guerrillas, who are blamed for more than 70,000 deaths in the country from 1980 to 2000, group founder Guzman, 75, and Yparraguirre, 65, were sentenced to life in prison in 1992. Held in separate prisons — he in a naval base in Callao, she in a women’s prison in Lima — the couple had been requesting permission to marry for some time.
■COLOMBIA
Twelve leftist rebels killed
Armed forces killed 12 leftist guerrillas on Tuesday in an early morning raid on rebels in a northwestern mountainous region of the Andean nation, President Alvaro Uribe said. Rebels continue to stage attacks in Latin America’s No. 4 oil producer, but violence is down after a US-backed military offensive under Uribe pushed illegal armed groups into remote regions of the country. “Today at four in the morning after a great action by intelligence and the Colombian air forces, 12 bandits were killed and six captured,” Uribe told reporters.
■MEXICO
Gay weddings popular
Mexico City has seen 271 gay and lesbian couples get married since it enacted the first law in Latin America explicitly allowing same-sex marriages. The city government says there have been 142 marriages between men and 129 between women in the four months since the law went took effect on March 4. The government said on Tuesday that 18 foreigners were among those married, and the rest were Mexican citizens.
■UNITED STATES
Guns stolen from security
Four guns went missing and were believed to have been stolen from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security detail after American Airlines lost luggage containing the weapons, NBC reported. It said the Glock 9mm guns had been placed in checked baggage — as security protocol dictates — at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport and were supposed to be placed on a flight to Washington for Israeli agents assigned to Netanyahu, who was meeting US President Barack Obama on Tuesday. However, workers mistakenly sent the luggage to Los Angeles where it was learned the guns were missing, and police said they believe they were stolen.
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