VIETNAM
Bank note harms stomach
A man paid the price when he swallowed a polymer bank note, which punctured his stomach, media reports said yesterday. The 29-year-old was in stable condition after surgery on Thursday at a hospital in south central Khanh Hoa Province, according to the Web site of Tuoi Tre newspaper. The patient had suffered from severe intestinal pain for a week after ingesting the 100,000 dong (US$4.76) note for unexplained reasons, the report said.
INDONESIA
Island sale sparks probe
Jakarta is to investigate the illegal sale of 13 islands in the latest of a series of corruption scandals in one of Asia’s most popular tourist destinations, officials said on Thursday. The National Land Agency (BPN) has been accused of giving ownership papers for the islets off Lombok island, near Bali, to a number of individuals and companies, West Lombok administration spokesman Ispan Junaidi said. Junaedi said the islets — diving and snorkeling hotspots with huge coral reefs teeming with marine wildlife —include Gili Renggit, Gili Tangkong and Gili Nanggu, which is dotted with pristine beaches and is known locally as the “Paradise Island.” West Lombok BPN chief Udin Syafrudin denied that his office had issued the ownership certificates. “We’ve never issued that kind of papers. Some may make investment on the islands by building resorts, but not owning the land, and this is not against the law,” he said.
JAPAN
Dolphin season extended
Fishermen in the dolphin-hunting town of Taiji have extended their catch season by one month and this week caught about 60 long-finned pilot whales, a local official said yesterday. Every year the town’s fishermen corral about 2,000 dolphins into a secluded bay, select a few dozen for sale to aquariums and slaughter the rest for meat, a practice long deplored by animal rights campaigners and depicted in Academy Award-winning documentary The Cove. This catch season began in September and was due to end last month. “But we resumed the hunt after the Wakayama government extended its permission by one month until the end of May following a poor catch this year,” a Taiji Fisheries Cooperative official said by telephone. Animal rights activist Scott West of the group Sea Shepherd Conservation Society reported on the catch in a blog post. “The pilot whales in the Cove did not quietly go to their deaths,” he wrote, describing how more than 20 of the animals were killed. “They fought as best they could, churning up the water and dashing on the rocks.”
UNITED KINGDOM
Bombing verdict released
The 52 victims of the London suicide bombings six years ago were unlawfully killed, a coroner formally ruled yesterday. The verdicts, after a five-and-a-half month inquest into the worst peacetime attacks on British soil came as London police chief Paul Stephenson warned that another attack could come at any time. The coroner, Justice Heather Hallett, was also expected to make several recommendations for preventing deaths in any future such incident. The inquest at London’s High Court heard how the victims were killed during an “unimaginably dreadful wave of horror.” Four British Islamists — Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, Shehzad Tanweer, 22, Hasib Hussain, 18, and Jermaine Lindsay, 19 — detonated bombs on three packed underground trains and a bus in the morning rush hour on July 7, 2005. As well as killing themselves and the 52 others, they injured more than 700 people.
UNITED KINGDOM
Two found dead in same jail
Two young people were found dead in their cells within hours of each other in the same Northern Ireland jail, prison authorities said on Thursday. Both had ligatures around their necks and are suspected of having hanged themselves, they added. The Department of Justice said 19-year-old Samuel Carson, who was awaiting trial on a sex charge, was found collapsed in his cell by prison staff at a young offenders center in Belfast just after 5pm on Wednesday. Despite efforts by wardens and paramedics, he could not be revived. About three-and-a-half hours later, 23-year-old Frances McKeown was found collapsed in her cell in the neighboring women’s prison. She too could not be revived.
NORWAY
Museum returns Maori heads
Two Maori heads, one acquired by Norway in the 1930s when racial studies were fashionable, were returned on Thursday to representatives from a New Zealand museum. The University of Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History and the faculty of medicine returned the heads to a Maori delegation charged with preserving New Zealand’s multicultural heritage, a museum official said. At the handover ceremony, the delegation sang a traditional Maori funeral song. Oeivind Fuglerud, head of the museum’s ethnography section, said one head was purchased in the 1930s when the physiological differences between different races was a popular field of research. The origins of the second head are not known.
UNITED STATES
Disease better understood
Cattle infected with foot-and-mouth disease are only contagious for a brief period of time — about half as long as previously thought — according to a study that has been published in the journal Science. The research has implications for all infectious diseases, said one of the report’s authors, Mark Woolhouse of the University of Edinburgh, and raises the possibility that the controversial control measures used to halt the disease’s spread during a British epidemic in 2001 may not have been entirely necessary. “This study shows that what we thought we knew about foot-and-mouth disease is not entirely true,” Woolhouse said. “So what we think we know about human influenza and other infectious pathogens might not be completely accurate either.”
IRAQ
Book fair hailed a success
The first book fair in 20 years concluded on Thursday, with organizers and attendees hailing it as a return for the violence-wracked country to the global literary scene. The two-week exhibition featured more than 200 publishing houses from 32 countries displaying about 37,000 books at a massive conference hall in Mansur, west Baghdad, the event’s organizers said. “Baghdad has regained its place on the world’s cultural map,” said Safira Naji, a member of the organizing committee.
GABON
Opponent accused of treason
The government accused prominent opposition leader Andre Mba Obame of high treason on Thursday after he declared himself president and claimed inspiration from power struggles in Tunisia and Ivory Coast. The move by President Ali Bongo Odimba to clamp down on his chief political rival could raise tensions, after Mba Obame supporters took to the streets in violent protests earlier this year. Parliament on Thursday removed Mba Obame’s immunity to allow the state prosecutor to pursue treason charges against him, in a vote shunned by opposition members.
CANADA
Ignatieff returns to academia
Michael Ignatieff, who stepped down as leader of the Liberal Party after a crushing defeat, has taken a position at the University of Toronto. John Fraser, the master of Massey College said on Thursday that Ignatieff would return to academic life as a senior resident. Ignatieff is a former Harvard professor and one of the nation’s leading public intellectuals. Prime Minister Stephen Harper handed the opposition Liberals a crushing defeat in Monday’s election where they came in third behind the traditionally weaker New Democratic Party.
PHILIPPINES
Bike found a world away
A motorcycle that cost US$80,000 and was stolen from a condominium parking lot in Houston, Texas, last year from Hollywood screenwriter Skip Woods has been recovered in the southern Philippines, officials said on Thursday. The custom-made chopper was found on Tuesday by police in Cagayan de Oro City, regional director for the National Bureau of Investigation Jose Justo Yap said. Woods, a collector of custom-made vehicles, wrote the screenplay for Swordfish, Hitman and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Police are looking for a Filipino who was selling the motorcycle online, Mijares said.
UNITED STATES
Rescuers help whales
Marine mammal rescuers are responding to a mass stranding of pilot whales off the lower Florida Keys. Marine Mammal Conservancy chairman Art Cooper said on Thursday evening that at least 15 pilot whales are stranded in three separate areas in shallow Gulf of Mexico waters near Cudjoe Key. The US Coast Guard, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and MMC also are helping. Cooper says responders are trying to gather the whales and move them to one location. He says it is not known why the whales became stranded.
VENEZUELA
Last prison hostage released
Inmates at a prison near Caracas freed the prison director and 14 other hostages on Thursday and ended an eight-day standoff over conditions at the jail. The prisoners released the last of their hostages after talks led to an agreement by government officials to provide medical services, set up a library and remove a national prisons administrator from his post. Deputy Interior Minister Edwin Rojas confirmed that officials had complied with one key demand: removing a national prisons administrator and opening an investigation into accusations he was involved in corruption.
UNITED STATES
War loot portal launched
Cultural treasures looted by the Nazis often passed through many pairs of hands in multiple countries once they were recovered by the Allies after World War II. Meticulous records were kept, but those are spread among a variety of different archives. Now, they can all be accessed through a single Web site. On Thursday, the US National Archives announced the launch of an online portal that provides access to digitized records of looted items. While officials stressed that the database is a work in progress, it represents a milestone in a 15-year effort to improve cooperation among the many institutions that house such records. Eleven institutions in seven countries have agreed to participate in the database. Officials said they believe the database will be primarily of interest to scholars, but it will be accessible to anyone who wants to trace what happened to a lost family treasure.
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
‘DELUSIONAL’: Targeting the families of Hamas’ leaders would not push the group to change its position or to give up its demands for Palestinians, Ismail Haniyeh said Israeli aircraft on Wednesday killed three sons of Hamas’ top political leader in the Gaza Strip, striking high-stakes targets at a time when Israel is holding delicate ceasefire negotiations with the militant group. Hamas said four of the leader’s grandchildren were also killed. Ismail Haniyeh’s sons are among the highest-profile figures to be killed in the war so far. Israel said they were Hamas operatives, and Haniyeh accused Israel of acting in “the spirit of revenge and murder.” The deaths threatened to strain the internationally mediated ceasefire talks, which appeared to gain steam in recent days even as the sides remain far
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