INDIA
Sleepy pilot caused crash
A sleepy pilot who approached the runway at the wrong angle and ignored warning signs was to blame for a passenger plane crash in the south in May that claimed 158 lives, reports said yesterday. A Court of Inquiry probe concluded the Air India pilot, Zlatko Glusica, from Serbia, was asleep for much of the three-hour flight and was “disorientated” when the plane started to descend, the Hindustan Times reported. The low-cost Air India Express plane flying from Dubai to the city of Mangalore overshot the runway, plunged into a gorge and burst into flames. Eight people survived the inferno. The official crash report, which has not been released publicly, was submitted to the civil aviation ministry on Tuesday. Voice recordings picked up the co-pilot saying: “We don’t have runway left,” seconds before the disaster.
PHILIPPINES
Sniffer dog attacks shopper
A dog deployed at a shopping mall to sniff out terrorists has attacked and mauled a woman customer, authorities said yesterday. The Manila shopper, who was with her child, told local television stations she was hospitalized with bite wounds between her eyes, across the bridge of her nose, and on her forehead when set upon by the Belgian Malinois. Police officer Paulo Ortega told GMA network that the woman sought and got permission from the bomb-sniffing dog’s handler to pet the animal last weekend. “According to the handler, the dog allowed the woman to touch it, but when she sat down to continue the petting, that’s when it bit her on the face.” The victim’s child was unharmed. It was not known if the dog was put down. The canine unit involved was owned by a private security firm contracted by the mall operator.
SOUTH KOREA
Chopsticks not a weapon
An appeals court ruled yesterday that metal chopsticks are not a weapon, even though they were used to threaten the victim in a robbery and rape case. A 50-year-old man, identified only by his surname, Koo, was charged with raping and robbing a woman five years earlier. Koo threatened to poke her in the eye with a metal chopstick. “Metal chopsticks are in common use in everyday life, and although they may become dangerous objects depending on their means of application, it is difficult to regard them as weapons,” the Seoul High Court said in a ruling. It upheld a lower court ruling that a weapon is “a tool that can inflict harm on a person’s body or life by its nature.” The court upheld a seven-year jail sentence passed by the lower court for rape and robbery. State prosecutors had appealed saying Koo should have been charged with armed robbery.
CAMBODIA
Mine kills 14 people
Fourteen people, including a one-year-old girl, were killed after their vehicle hit an old anti-tank mine in the northwest, police said yesterday. The child and 11 other passengers were killed instantly in Tuesday’s blast in the province of Battambang, said Buth Sambo, police chief of Banan district. One person died on the way to the hospital and another yesterday morning, he said. “It is a tragedy that 14 people from five families were all killed,” he said. The group was returning from a day’s work at a chili farm when the driver decided to take a shortcut through a field and set off the anti-tank mine. The total number of casualties from unexploded ordnance recorded between 1979 and last month stands at 63,754.
SPAIN
Doctors plan leg transplant
Doctors are looking for a suitable match from a dead donor to carry out the world’s first leg transplant, the health ministry said on Tuesday. The ministry’s transplant commission in May last year authorized Valencia’s Hospital de la Fe to carry out the procedure, which will involve both legs, a spokeswoman said. If successful, the operation would be the first leg transplant in the world, she said, and could offer hope to millions of amputees and injured war veterans. “They are looking for a suitable donor. We still don’t know the date, it could be in two months or six months, it all depends on when an adequate donor is found,” the spokeswoman said. The recipient will be an unidentified man who had both legs amputated above the knee after an accident. He faces life in a wheelchair because prosthetic limbs are not suitable for him.
ISRAEL
Harry Potter is dead
Not the bespectacled teenage wizard created by author J.K. Rowling. This deceased Potter was a British soldier killed in 1939, and his grave is helping draw tourists to the backwater town of Ramle. Ramle does not keep numbers on how many tourists flock to the grave in the town’s British military cemetery, but tour guides and the municipality say the tombstone has become a popular attraction, largely for domestic travelers. “There is no connection with the Harry Potter we know from literature, but the name sells, the name is marketable,” said Ron Peled, a tour guide who said he has brought dozens of groups to the grave. Private Harry Potter was born near Birmingham, England, and joined the British military in 1938. According to his regiment’s Web site, he arrived in British mandate Palestine later that year, where he was killed in battle with an armed band in 1939. He was 18. The tombstone says, incorrectly, that he died at 19 — a result of him having lied about his age so he could enlist.
GREECE
Rightists harass Muslims
Dozens of far-right activists and local residents threw eggs and taunted hundreds of Muslim immigrants as they gathered to pray in a central square for Eid al-Adha surrounded by a protective cordon of riot police. The country, which has become the main immigrant gateway to the EU, has a growing Muslim community and tensions between locals and incomers have run high in some Athens areas such as Attiki square, the scene of Tuesday’s incident. Athens’ Muslim community is without an official mosque and prayers are usually held at cultural centers or community halls or private apartments around the city. The Muslim community there is estimated at about 1 million, in a country where most people are Greek Orthodox Christians. While the Muslims prayed, some locals shouted obscenities from their balconies and waved national flags. Leaflets that depicted pigs — an animal Muslims consider unclean — were scattered across the square.
FRANCE
Sarkozy’s son in fashion
President Nicolas Sarkozy’s oldest son will be featured in the next collection of German fashion designer Philippe Plein, his Swiss-based company said in a statement on Tuesday. Musician Pierre Sarkozy will model Plein’s spring-summer 2011 collection in the French Riviera town of Saint-Tropez, the statement said, confirming a report in France’s L’express.fr Web site. The campaign includes photos of blond-haired Sarkozy clad in a dark jacket, open-necked white shirt and loosely knotted tie modeling Plein’s clothes aboard a sailboat.
CHILE
Olivia, miner sing a duet
Singer Olivia Newton-John had a very special guest join her on stage during a concert in Santiago: Edison Pena, the rescued miner with a passion for Elvis Presley songs. Pena often broke out in song to keep up the spirits of the miners trapped underground — and it turns out he can also sing duets. He joined Newton-John in singing Summer Nights from the musical Grease and got a big ovation. Pena met Newton-John on a local talk show the night before and she asked him to join her on stage Monday night before 10,000 fans. Pena says “being on stage was incredible.”
UNITED STATES
Dollywood wins award
Dolly Parton said on Tuesday that winning the 2010 Applause Award for her theme park, Dollywood, is like winning “the Oscar of the business.” “I’m just honored and proud,” she said in a telephone interview. “I’m excited that this is our 25th anniversary for Dollywood, that we won it this year, and that I had a chance to be here.” Parton accepted the award in person in Orlando at an amusement park trade show, IAAPA Attractions Expo 2010, hosted by the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions. The Applause Award has been given out every other year since 1980 to honor a park whose “management, operations and creative accomplishments have inspired the industry with their foresight, originality and sound business development,” according to a statement from Liseberg park in Gothenburg, Sweden. The winner is decided by a board of governors chaired by Liseberg CEO Mats Wedin. Parton said that although country music “has allowed so many of my dreams to come true, you don’t have to be a country music fan to come to the park ... There’s something for everyone.”
UNITED STATES
Transgender judge elected
A 49-year-old California patent lawyer has been elected the nation’s first openly transgender trial judge. Alameda County elections officials say Victoria Kolakowski beat prosecutor John Creighton 51 to 48 percent — a margin of nearly 10,000 votes — in the Nov. 2 election to fill the vacancy in California’s Superior Court. Kolakowski had been leading since election night, but outstanding absentee and provisional ballots made the race too close to call until Monday. The Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund has said she is the first openly transgender trial court judge in the country. Kolakowski spent the past three years as an administrative law judge settling energy contract and environmental compliance disputes for the California Public Utilities Commission. She underwent gender reassignment surgery in 1991.
UNITED STATES
Crist to pardon Morrison
Outgoing Florida Governor Charlie Crist is looking to pardon long-dead rocker Jim Morrison, who was convicted of exposing himself at a raucous 1969 concert in Miami. Morrison was lead singer for top 1960s rock band The Doors and a Florida native. He was appealing the indecent exposure and profanity conviction when he died in 1971 in a Paris bathtub at age 27. Crist told the St Petersburg Times on Tuesday that the more he looked into what happened that night, the more he thought it was right to seek a pardon. Morrison was fined and sentenced to six months in jail but never served that time. A message left by The Associated Press with Crist’s spokesman wasn’t immediately returned. Crist, a Republican-turned-independent, lost his bid for a senate seat earlier this month.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of