■ UNITED STATES
Governor to visit China
Hawaiian Governor Linda Lingle says she’ll likely travel to China in her final months of office to foster relations with tourism and government officials. In her final address as governor before the Hawaii Tourism Conference, Lingle said on Tuesday she is committed to getting direct flights between Honolulu and China. Lingle has visited China four times as governor, the latest in June.
■ INDONESIA
Tiger kills teen
A teenager was killed by an endangered Sumatran tiger as he worked on a rubber plantation on Sumatra, an official said on Tuesday. Riau Province conservation agency head Danis Woro said 18-year-old Ahmad Rafi died after being mauled in the Rokan Hilir district on Monday. “This is the first tiger attack in Riau this year,” Woro said. “The area used to be a tiger habitat, but now it has become a plantation area.” Human-animal conflicts are a growing problem in the archipelago as forests are destroyed for timber or to make way for palm oil, forcing animals such as tigers and elephants into closer contact with people. There are fewer than 400 Sumatran tigers left in the wild, the environmental group WWF said.
■ CHINA
Beijing exercising again
Thousands of workers across Beijing have started exercising twice a day to music on the radio, as the capital resumes mandatory calisthenics after a three-year break, state media said yesterday. The radio exercise sessions resumed on Monday and authorities hope as many as 4 million workers will perform the routines broadcast twice a day. The group calisthenics started in 1951, but were stopped in the lead-up to the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008 due to programming demands, the reports said. The Beijing Federation of Trade Unions wants the eight-minute exercise program to be mandatory for all state-owned companies in the capital by next year and for 60 percent of workers across the city to participate.
■ AUSTRALIA
Exotic jobs lure Britons
The state of South Australia is using exotic jobs like koala catcher, shark tagger and even beer taster to try to lure young, bored British workers to head down under for some adventure and maybe a new life. The South Australian government has launched a campaign to encourage 18 to 30-year-old Britons to come on a working-holiday visa with the chance of getting their dream role. Other jobs advertised include a shark personality profiler at Port Lincoln, a fairy penguin home remodeler on Kangaroo Island, and a “roo poo” harvester.
■ SOUTH KOREA
Typhoon kills three
Torrential rain brought by the approach of Typhoon Dianmu has left three people dead and grounded dozens of flights in South Korea, the National Emergency Management agency said yesterday. Two hikers drowned as they crossed a swollen stream in northwestern Seoul where 120mm of rain fell in the space of three hours late on Tuesday, the agency said. A driver died after his taxi was caught in a flooded waterway in Mapo district in western Seoul. Some 130 homes were flooded nationwide, 74 flights were canceled and 91 ferry trips suspended, the agency said. In addition to the confirmed deaths, Yonhap news agency said a local TV journalist died in the southern port city of Busan on Wednesday, a day after he fell into the sea while reporting on the typhoon from a pier.
■ GERMANY
Police rescue cat
A cat home alone in the Bavarian city of Bayreuth apparently turned on the vacuum cleaner, frightened itself half to death and wound up being attended to by emergency services. Police said a neighbor heard the cat’s cries — not to mention a vacuum left running for hours — and feared there had been a terrible accident. The fire service sped to the scene on Monday evening, but found only the cat and the machine. A police statement on Tuesday said the emergency call wasn’t entirely in vain, though, because “at least the cat could be calmed down.”
■ FRANCE
Police drop height limit
The government has ended restrictions barring people under 1.6m from joining the police force. The country imposed minimum height requirements for police centuries ago, raising them over the decades as the average size of Frenchmen rose, but the rules have come to be seen as discriminatory.
■ SWEDEN
Berry pickers protest
About 120 seasonal berry pickers from Vietnam staged two demonstrations against their working conditions on Tuesday, days after a similar protest by Chinese workers, officials said. In one of the demonstrations, some 70 berry pickers locked six of their team leaders in a room at the former school where they were living. The six were freed and police are looking for those responsible, Hans-Aake Hedin of the Dalarna County police said. In the other demonstration, about 50 Vietnamese workers marched from their living quarters and staged a sit-down protest along a road in the northern town of Nordmaling, Magnus Haglund of the local municipality said. “I don’t know what they want, they have had little contact with the municipality,” Haglund said. “Those who represent their living quarters and have agreements with the berry company and the staffing company in Vietnam have tried to convince them to return [to work] to solve the conflict.”
■ GERMANY
Wulff bread habit panned
President Christian Wulff’s preference for bread and baked goods made in distant Hanover has got the newly elected head of state into hot water. The media and opposition politicians have criticized Wulff for importing the bakery specialties from 300km away to Berlin, calling it a waste of taxpayer money and a poor example as far as his carbon footprint is concerned.
■ TURKEY
Flight attendants grounded
Turkish Airlines has grounded 28 flight attendants for being overweight and given them six months to slim down or face reassignment, a newspaper said on Saturday. The employees, 13 of whom are women, are on unpaid leave until they lose weight, Haber Turk daily said, citing a statement from the state-run airlines. All of them previously had been warned to shape up, it said.
■ RUSSIA
Android phones infected
Mobile security firm Lookout on Tuesday warned that a booby-trapped Movie Player application is infecting Android phones in the country with a virus that sends costly text messages. Kaspersky Lab discovered the malicious “Trojan” code hidden in a media player application people are enticed to download onto smartphones. “The new malicious program penetrates smartphones running Android in the guise of a harmless media player application,” Kaspersky said in a blog post.
■ UNITED STATES
McNuggets cause tantrum
A security video from a McDonald’s shows a woman punching two restaurant employees and smashing a drive-thru window because she couldn’t get Chicken McNuggets. The tantrum caught on tape in Toledo, Ohio, earlier this year shows the customer reaching through the drive-thru window, slugging one worker and then another. She then grabs a bottle out of her car and tosses it through the glass window before speeding off. It happened early on New Year’s Day. Police say Melodi Dushane was angry that McNuggets weren’t being served because it was breakfast time. Dushane says she was drunk at the time.
■UNITED STATES
Farmer waters pot plants
Authorities say a southern Idaho farmer unknowingly watered and fertilized more than 300 marijuana plants while tending to his corn fields. The Jerome County sheriff’s office says the farmer found the plot of pot growing between his tall, green stalks of unripened corn early on Monday and called authorities. The sheriff’s office says the 314 low-grade marijuana plants are valued at US$628,000 and would have been ready for plucking in the next month or so — just before the corn harvest. A detective says the pot was started from seed and relocated to the field, a common way marijuana growers hide their plants.
■ UNITED STATES
Man marinates live cat
Police in Buffalo, New York, say a traffic stop led to animal cruelty charges after they found a live cat “marinating” in oil and peppers in the trunk of a car. Buffalo police say officers heard the cat meowing when they stopped 51-year-old Gary Korkuc to ticket him for running a stop sign on Sunday night. They say they checked the trunk and found four-year-old Navarro in a cage, his fur covered with oil, crushed red peppers and chili peppers, according to the Buffalo News. Police say Korkuc told them he did it because Navarro was ill-tempered. Korkuc was charged with cruelty and released; his telephone number isn’t listed. Police say he told them he was going to cook Navarro. Korkuc also told officers a number of things that didn’t make sense, including that his neutered male cat was pregnant.
■ UNITED STATES
Pandas sent to China
The San Diego Zoo will send two giant panda sisters to a reserve in China to help in the effort to save the critically endangered species. The zoo says Su Lin and Zhen Zhen will leave later this summer, and Monday will be the last day zoo visitors can see the two pandas. Giant pandas are on a research loan to the zoo from China to study the species. As part of the loan, China decides where the zoo-born pandas will go after their third birthday.
■ UNITED STATES
Former senator dies in crash
US Federal investigators say the plane carrying former Senator Ted Stevens crashed into a mountain with such force that it left a 90m gash on the slope. National Transportation Safety Board chairwoman Deborah Hersman provided new details about the Monday crash in a rugged section of Alaska. She said the group had left a lodge for a salmon fishing camp and crashed about 15 minutes later. A doctor and two emergency medical technician’s were flown to the scene three hours later and tended to the injured during a damp and chilly night. Hersman said the 1957 plane was overhauled in 2005 and flown by a pilot with 29,000 hours of flight time.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not