AUSTRALIA
Election candidate disrobes
A candidate running in a state poll stripped off at an electoral commission office yesterday in a bid to highlight the rights of nudists, a report said. Stuart Baanstra disrobed at the central Sydney building before being ushered away by security, carrying a sign saying “nude is not rude,” the AAP news agency reported. Speaking outside the commission room, where he arrived wearing a robe and a bow-tie bearing the Australian flag, Baanstra said he was a nudist and a gay man who “believes in the rights of people to live without clothes.” Baanstra, who is standing as an independent for an upper house seat in the New South Wales State election later this month, made the bold move during a draw to determine the position of candidates on the ballot paper.
AUSTRALIA
Rains bring more misery
Soaking rains have cut roads to a handful of towns in the northeast of the country and added more misery to a region still cleaning up after a massive cyclone. Fresh floodwaters have inundated several homes that were damaged and leaking from the earlier storm, causing authorities to close schools yesterday in at least one affected town. A huge band of monsoon rain hanging over a coastal area south of Cairns has prompted flash-flood warnings from the Bureau of Meteorology in Queensland State. The area was battered by months of deadly floods that began late last year and by a giant cyclone last month. Officials say they are closely monitoring food and other supplies in the towns where roads have been cut.
MALAYSIA
Seven pirates arrested
Authorities have arrested seven Indonesians who allegedly tried to rob a tanker off the south of the country. First Admiral Zulkifli Abu Bakar of the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency says the men, who were armed with axes and bayonets, boarded the Majuro-registered vessel anchored off Johor State before dawn on Wednesday, but the crew, led by a Russian captain, managed to sound the alarm. Patrol boats rushed to the scene within minutes and authorities caught the suspects, confiscating their wooden boat.
SRI LANKA
Tigers training in India: PM
Remnants of Sri Lanka’s defeated Tamil Tiger rebels are undergoing military training in India in a bid to revive their separatist campaign at home, the prime minister said yesterday. D.M. Jayaratne said an unknown number of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) fighters were based at secret camps in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. “We have intelligence reports of three clandestine training centers operated by the LTTE in Tamil Nadu,” the prime minister said in a statement. He said the rebels, who were defeated by Sri Lankan government troops in May 2009, were hoping to relaunch their decades-long fight for an independent homeland. “Their next target is to create small-scale attacks,” Jayaratne said.
MALAYSIA
Tourist city bans birds
Birds cultivated for their edible nests are being banned from the capital of a Malaysian tourist island after the UN cultural agency warned that the business endangers efforts to preserve buildings. The bird breeders voiced fears yesterday that the ban would disrupt the lucrative business that existed for years before Georgetown became a World Heritage Site. The restrictions pose a problem for those who convert old buildings into small farms where sparrow-like swiftlets live.
VATICAN
Jesus not a violent rebel
Pope Benedict XVI has rejected the idea of Jesus as a political revolutionary and insisted that violent revolution must never be carried out in God’s name, in a new book scheduled for release yesterday. Jesus of Nazareth — Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection is the second installment of Benedict’s planned trilogy on Jesus. Already, 1.2 million copies have been printed in seven languages, and reprints of 100,000 more are planned for the Italian editions and 50,000 in German. In the book, Benedict says Jesus never advocated violent revolution, saying “the cruel consequences of religiously motivated violence are only too evident to us all.”
ITALY
Fugitive felled by lasagna
Giancarlo Sabatini avoided police for a decade on the run, but couldn’t resist his wife’s lasagna. Police said Sabatini went into hiding in 2000, shortly after being given a three-year, eight-month prison sentence in a cocaine trafficking case. Acting on a tip, police staked out the homes of Sabatini’s wife and daughter on Tuesday in Rocca Priora, a town near Rome. When they spied the daughter leaving her mother’s house and furtively dashing toward her home bearing a tray of lasagna, police, suspecting a secret guest, burst in and arrested Sabatini. Many Italians prepare lasagna with meat sauce for lunch on the last Tuesday of Carnival. Police said Sabatini came from his hideout in Belgium to celebrate the last day before Lent with his family.
DENMARK
Robber busted by urine
A Swedish bank robber forgot to cover his tracks and left three bottles of urine behind after hiding inside a bank vault in Copenhagen for three days. The 27-year-old man and his accomplice used the bottles to relieve themselves after sneaking into the vault on a Friday in May and remaining there until the bank opened again the following Monday. While inside, the robbers emptied 140 safety deposit boxes of at least US$500,000 in cash and jewelry. However, they forgot to take the urine when they left “so we were able to get their DNA samples from the bottles,” prosecutor Frederik Larsen said on Wednesday. The evidence helped prosecutors win a 21-month prison sentence for the Swede on Tuesday. His accomplice is still at large and the loot hasn’t been recovered.
SWEDEN
Police link questioned
The police officer in charge of questioning two women who say they were raped and molested by WikiLeaks frontman Julian Assange is a friend of one of the alleged victims, the Expressen daily reported yesterday. The unnamed officer had exchanged personal messages with one of Assange’s alleged victims over the Internet more than a year before taking statements from her about the claims. The woman officer, who like the alleged victim referred to by a London court as Miss A was active in the Swedish Social Democratic Party, had also continued posting negative comments on Facebook about Assange, and had voiced support for the lawyer representing the two women, Expressen reported. It said the officer in question must have realized as soon as the two women came in to provide statements in August that one of them was her acquaintance and co-party member, but she had not removed herself from the case and had instead gone on to interrogate the second alleged victim.
UNITED STATES
New lupus drug approved
The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved the first new drug to treat lupus in more than 50 years, a milestone that medical experts say could prompt development of other drugs that are even more effective in treating the debilitating immune system disorder. Known as Benlysta, the injectable drug is designed to relieve flare-ups and pain caused by lupus, a potentially fatal ailment in which the body attacks its own tissue and organs. Biotech drugmaker Human Genome Sciences Inc spent 15 years developing Benlysta and will co-market it with GlaxoSmithKline PLC. Experts stress that Benlysta is not a miracle drug: It only worked in 35 percent of North American patients tested and was not effective for patients with the deadliest form of the disease. Additionally, it did not show positive results in African-Americans, who are disproportionately affected by lupus.
UNITED STATES
Students get rude awakening
Chronically tardy and truant students at a Massachusetts high school are getting a rude awakening — a pre-recorded morning wake-up call from their school principal. The so-called “robo-calls” that began on Wednesday are aimed at rousing about 500 students, the worst-offending sleepyheads, from bed and getting them to school on time. “It’s 6:15 and it’s Durfee High School calling,” booms the voice of principal Paul Marshall of B.M.C. Durfee High School in Fall River, according to vice principal Ross Thibault.
UNITED STATES
Rare Frisco pics found
A museum volunteer has unearthed what the Smithsonian Institution believes to be the first — and perhaps only — color photographs of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and fire that nearly leveled the city. The six never-published images were snapped by photography innovator Frederick Eugene Ives several months after the April 1906 “Great Quake,” the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Most were taken from the roof of the hotel where Ives stayed during an October 1906 visit. They were stowed amid other items donated by Ives’ son, Herbert, and discovered in 2009 by National Museum of American History volunteer Anthony Brooks while he was cataloguing the collection. Ives’ work is probably the only true color documentary evidence, Shannon Perich, associate curator of the Smithsonian’s photography history collection, told the Chronicle. She says Ives was one of only a few photographers experimenting with color photography in the early 20th century and that his San Francisco images were meant to be viewed through a 3-D device which never became a commercial success. The pictures are street-level shots of San Francisco’s shattered downtown and rooftop views overlooking kilometers of ruins.
UNITED STATES
Clapton auctions guitars
Eric Clapton’s guitars rocked New York City on Wednesday as an auction of them brought in millions of dollars. A 1948 Gibson L-5P sold for US$82,960, well above its pre-sale estimate of US$20,000 to US$30,000. And a replica of a prized Clapton guitar that duplicates the cigarette burns and belt buckle scratches found on the original sold for US$30,500 at the auction. The sale at Bonhams New York included 75 guitars and 55 amps from the British artist’s collection and brought in US$2.15 million. Proceeds were to benefit a drug and alcohol treatment center Clapton founded in the Caribbean.
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
‘POLITICAL EARTHQUAKE’: Leo Varadkar said he was ‘no longer the best person’ to lead the nation and was stepping down for political, as well as personal, reasons Leo Varadkar on Wednesday announced that he was stepping down as Ireland’s prime minister and leader of the Fine Gael party in the governing coalition, citing “personal and political” reasons. Pundits called the surprise move, just 10 weeks before Ireland holds European Parliament and local elections, a “political earthquake.” A general election has to be held within a year. Irish Deputy Prime Minister Micheal Martin, leader of Fianna Fail, the main coalition partner, said Varadkar’s announcement was “unexpected,” but added that he expected the government to run its full term. An emotional Varadkar, who is in his second stint as prime minister and at
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