■AUSTRALIA
Police probe attack on crops
Police yesterday were investigating a mass poisoning of crops, which is expected to send prices soaring. Detectives probed whether vandals or a competitor with a grudge had put herbicide in sprinklers at a nursery near the city of Cairns, wiping out 16 million tonnes of produce, mostly tomatoes. “It could be a grudge, it could be competition-based ... or it could be an act of vandalism by a couple of young hoons [vandals] — we can’t rule that out either,” Townsville detective Dave Miles said.
■CHINA
Man starts swim to Expo
An 56-year-old man has begun a bid to swim 1,200km down the Yangtze River to visit the World Expo in Shanghai, state media reported yesterday. China Telecom employee Bao Zhengbing began realizing what he said was a childhood dream to swim from his home in Wuhan to Shanghai on Wednesday, the Xinmin Evening News reported on its Web site. “Now at last, I’ll swim all the way to Shanghai, to fulfil my own dream and to see the World Expo,” Bao was quoted as saying in the Shanghai Daily before starting his journey. “When I was 12, I traveled to Shanghai by ship. The beautiful landscapes along the way impressed me so much that I wished one day I could swim along the route and stop wherever I chose,” he said. Bao may however find the river has changed since he was a boy. Experts have warned it is considered “cancerous,” state media said.
■THAILAND
Pianist has left: reports
Acclaimed pianist and conductor Mikhail Vasillievich Pletnev may have left the country days after he was charged with raping a teenage boy, his housekeeper and news reports said yesterday. Pletnev, who was arrested on Monday, left Thailand aboard an Aeroflot flight, Russisan state news agency RIA Novosti said. Another news agency said he was flying to Moscow on an Emirates airliner. His housekeeper in Pattaya said Pletnev left on Wednesday night and was headed for Moscow. Pletnev was released on 300,000 baht (US$9,000) bail following a court appearance on Tuesday and ordered to report to the court every 12 days.
■SOUTH KOREA
Computer virus strikes again
Government and private Web sites have come under cyber-attack a year after a major attack crippled sites domestically and in the US, officials said yesterday. Five Web sites including those of the presidential Blue House and the foreign ministry were attacked on Wednesday but little damage was done, the Korea Communications Commission said. On July 7, last year, the so-called distributed denial-of-service attacks shut down 25 Internet sites for hours. South Korea’s spy chief has reportedly blamed North Korea for last year’s attacks, although US officials reached no conclusion.
■CHINA
Online game ads under fire
Authorities have ordered online game companies to stop promoting their products in ways that Beijing deems “vulgar.” The order from the culture ministry came after several companies featured scantily clad models in their ads, state media said. Auat
thorities at all levels are required to step up inspections in order to make sure Web sites delete unwanted “vulgar” game ads, the ministry said in a notice published on Wednesday on its Web site. Officials must “discover and stop in a timely manner any practice that tramples on the moral bottom line,” it said.
■TURKEY
September referendum set
The Constitutional Court has given the go-ahead for a September referendum on a series of government-backed constitutional reforms by rejecting an opposition request that the measures be canceled. The Court made slight adjustments, however, to two measures that the secular opposition feared would increase the Islamic-oriented government’s sway over the judiciary. The opposition said yesterday that the adjustments made in the ruling late on Wednesday did not go far enough, and has vowed to campaign against the reforms in the referendum. The reforms would increase the number of Constitutional Court justices and members of a council that oversees prosecutors and judges, giving parliament and the president the right to appoint some of them.
■FRANCE
Full-face transplant done
Doctors at the Creteil Henri-Mondor hospital are claiming to have carried out the world’s first successful full-face transplant, Le Parisien/Aujourd’hui said yesterday. The operation was conducted at the end of last month on a 35-year-old man whose face had been deformed by a genetic disorder and constituted “a world first,” the newspaper said. The patient “is doing well. He is walking, he is eating, he is talking,” said Laurent Lantieri, head of reconstructive surgery at the hospital in the Paris suburbs, who carried out the operation. A full-face transplant involves the removal of the entire face from a corpse, including mouth and eyelids, and grafting it onto the patient. “We are the first to have done a full-face transplant including eyelids and tear ducts. I am proud because this has been done in France,” Lantieri said.
■ITALY
L’Aquila protesters in fracas
Protesters from the region struck by a powerful quake last year have clashed with police near the prime minister’s office in Rome. Hundreds of people staged a demonstration on Wednesday to demand help from the government for the reconstruction of L’Aquila and other places damaged by the quake. The small clashes took place when some of the demonstrators tried to break a police barrier just a few blocks from the prime minister’s office, according to Italian news reports. The ANSA news agency said two protesters were injured.
■IRAN
US called a ‘dictatorship’
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the US was a “dictatorship” and is trying to control world affairs. Ahmadinejad made the comments on Wednesday night during a speech at the Iranian embassy in Ajuba, Nigeria. He is in Nigeria for a D8 summit of developing nations. The US is “the self-proclaimed leader, and everybody should know that a self-proclaimed leadership is [a] dictatorship. I am going to say, on behalf of you, that the years of dictatorship are over,” he said.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Roman coins discovered
Treasure hunter Dave Crisp found a hoard of about 52,000 Roman coins, one of the largest such finds ever in Britain, in a field in southwestern England in April. The British Museum and the Portable Antiquities Scheme announced the find yesterday. The coins were buried in a large jar about 30cm deep and weighed about 160kg in all. They include hundreds of coins bearing the image of Marcus Aurelius Carausius, who seized power in Britain and northern France in the late third century and proclaimed himself emperor Some of the coins are already on display at the British Museum.
■UNITED STATES
Conrad Black seeks bail
Jailed former newspaper magnate Conrad Black is seeking bail now that the US Supreme Court has kicked his 2007 fraud conviction back to a lower court. Black’s lawyers filed the motion on Tuesday in Chicago, where he was convicted in federal court of three counts of mail fraud and one count of obstruction of justice. Last month, the Supreme Court weakened the “honest services” law that was central to Black’s fraud conviction, and the justices left it up to a lower court to decide whether the conviction should be overturned. Black’s lawyers argue that he should be released pending that decision.
■PERU
Activist’s expulsion halted
A judge halted the expulsion on Wednesday of a British religious activist accused by the government of inciting unrest among indigenous groups protesting environmental damage to the Amazon rain forest. Paul McAuley will be allowed to stay in the country while his challenge to the government’s revocation of his residency is considered, his lawyer said. The judge could take two to three months to rule on the appeal, he said. McAuley, 62, is a lay activist with the La Salle Christian Brothers who has worked in Peru for two decades. Both the Roman Catholic Church and human and indigenous rights groups led by Amnesty International backed McAuley in his challenge to the expulsion order. In the order issued last week, Peru’s government said it was revoking McAuley’s residency because he was engaged in activities “that put in risk the security of the state.” McAuley and environmentalists oppose President Alan Garcia’s moves to open up the Amazon to unprecedented mining and oil exploration and drilling.
■CHILE
Anti-crime plan unveiled
Riding in a fake funeral procession with a hearse decorated with flower sprays and farewell messages, 280 police officers slipped into the crowded La Legua slum in plain daylight, a theatrical undercover job that suggests a whole new approach to crime-fighting under conservative President Sebastian Pinera. They nabbed 27 drug suspects and seized 2.7kg of cocaine without any trouble from residents. The president was rolling out part of his crime-fighting plan yesterday in a package of proposals to Congress. They will include an additional US$4.5 million in funding this year alone to install video cameras and alarms in known crime areas and to reclaim public squares and playgrounds, an Interior Ministry official said. The plan also envisions more police raids in 100 neighborhoods considered dangerous, and the continued presence of additional officers — for up to three years if necessary — to crack down on robberies and illegal sales of drugs and alcohol, Public Safety Director Jorge Nazer said. Another key aspect of Pinera’s plan is the Centaur Squad — a special unit of 125 officers to enter critical neighborhoods in force. The squad takes its name from the Greek mythological creature — part horse and part human — that Pinera said represents strength and reason.
■UNITED STATES
Fire damages historic church
A fire has erupted at a historic New York City church. Firefighters say the blaze was reported on Wednesday night at the Baptist Temple church in Brooklyn. The church was built in the 1890s and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1995 for its architectural and engineering significance. Firefighters say the flames didn’t spread beyond the church and a cause of the fire hasn’t been determined.
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
‘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
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