SINGAPORE
Maid attack details emerge
An Indonesian maid was allegedly raped twice by a neighbor, who then cut and strangled her before throwing her out of the window of a second-story apartment, media reports said on Tuesday. The maid, who was 26 at the time of the alleged attack, survived the ordeal despite suffering serious injuries, the High Court heard in proceedings reported by the Straits Times daily. The identities of the victim and the accused — a 44-year-old former security guard — were not published on court orders. The newspaper said the incident took place in September 2009, when the maid stepped outside the apartment where she worked to reach the circuit box located outside after the electricity tripped. The accused, who lived in the opposite flat, then pushed her into the empty apartment and forced himself on her before cutting her with a pair of scissors and strangling her with a piece of string, the court heard. Police found the woman lying at the foot of her housing block, seriously injured, but alive.
CHINA
Bear bile farm opens doors
A traditional Chinese medicine company at the heart of an angry Internet campaign accusing it of violating animal welfare opened one of its controversial bear bile farms to journalists yesterday. Bear bile has long been used to treat various health problems, despite skepticism about its effectiveness and outrage over the bile extraction process, which animal rights group say is excruciatingly painful for bears. The Guizhentang pharmaceutical company in Fujian Province last year announced plans to raise millions of dollars through a stock exchange listing in order to increase production of the bile. However, the announcement sparked a noisy Internet campaign against the listing that brought into question the medical effectiveness of the bile and the cruel manner in which it is extracted from living bears.
MALAYSIA
Sex education book pulled
The government has ordered bookstores to stop selling a children’s sex education book by a British author over concerns it could “corrupt people’s minds” in the conservative Muslim-majority country. The Home Ministry said in a statement on Tuesday that bookstores were no longer allowed to sell Where did I come from? by Peter Mayle pending a review. The ministry did not specify how long the review would take or how many copies were in circulation. The illustrated book aims to help parents explain to children such topics as sex, conception and birth, according to a book preview on online retailer Amazon.
JAPAN
Snow fears grip parents
A city on the subtropical island of Okinawa was forced to cancel a traditional snow event for kids after parents said the snow shipped from the northeast might be radioactive, officials said yesterday. The city of Naha had planned the annual event for today with the Maritime Self-Defence Force’s aircraft group, which carried more than 600km of snow from northern Aomori Prefecture. However, dozens of parents, who have fled from the disaster-hit region to the southern island in fear of radioactive contamination from the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, demanded the event be canceled. Soldiers from the aircraft group make the annual trip to Aomori — about 360km from Fukushima — for training and for the past 18 years they have taken with them Okinawa sugarcane while returning to the south with snow.
GERMANY
Suspected neo-Nazi charged
Prosecutors said on Tuesday they had charged the lead singer of a suspected neo-Nazi band who wrote a song about a series of racist murders thought to have been carried out by far-right extremists. Authorities in the northwestern city of Osnabrueck said they had charged the 42-year-old lead singer of the band Gigi and the Brown Town Musicians with incitement to racial hatred. Prosecutors are also investigating two other songs on a CD entitled Adolf Hitler Lives. One calls for all Turks in Germany to be deported to Istanbul, and the other denies any Jews died in the Auschwitz concentration camp. So far, only the singer, who has not been named by authorities, is under suspicion because he wrote the lyrics. Germans have been shocked at the recent discovery of a small far-right group believed to be responsible for the unsolved murders of eight men of Turkish origin and a Greek between 2000 and 2006, as well as a German policewoman in 2007. The killings had long been called the “kebab murders” because some of the victims ran snack shops.
GERMANY
Thieves steal Rhino horns
A gang of four has carried out an “unbelievably audacious” theft of rhino horns worth about 50,000 euros (US$66,200), German police said on Tuesday, the latest in what appears to be a spate of similar robberies. As two of the suspected thieves distracted staff at a museum in Offenburg, the other two clambered on a display case, removed a rhino head from a wall and smashed off the horns with hammers, police said. “Then everything happened in the blink of an eye,” police said in a statement. “The two men stuffed the horns into a bag and left the museum. At the same time, the other two lost interest in their chat with staff members and followed their accomplices.” The rhino head was left behind during the suspected robbery, which happened on Saturday.
POLAND
Legal action threatens award
Few would confuse the glitz of the Academy Awards with a ceremony held by a folk arts society in Poland, but Hollywood does not want anyone else handing out Oscars. So the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is demanding that Poland’s Association of Folk Artists stop giving out what it calls the “People’s Oskar.” Waldemar Majcher of the Association of Folk Artists said on Monday the dispute is the result of a misunderstanding, but he also questioned Hollywood’s demand. Majcher said the “People’s Oskar” was named after Oskar Kolberg, a 19th-century Polish ethnographer who wrote about 10,000 Polish folk songs. Still remembered and respected in Poland, Kolberg died in 1890. Last week, Majcher said, he received a letter from Polish lawyers representing the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences protesting the use of the name “Oscar” in its Polish spelling “Oskar.”
DENMARK
Soldier jailed for overdosing
A soldier was on Tuesday sentenced to two months in prison after he overdosed on headache tablets in a bid to be sent home from Afghanistan, military lawyer Ida Pedersen said. The 32-year-old soldier, whose name was not given and who had been stationed for “three or four months” in the southern Afghan province of Helmand, “was charged with dereliction of duty,” Pedersen said. On May 24 last year, “he swallowed pills so he could be sent home,” she said. The plan worked, since the pills made him sick and he was sent back to Denmark, but military police alerted the high command to the ploy.
UNITED STATES
Obama croons the blues
The president just couldn’t say no: Mick Jagger held out a microphone almost by way of command, and soon Barack Obama was belting out the blues with the best of them. The East Room of the White House was transformed into an intimate blues club on Tuesday night for a concert featuring blues all-stars of the past, present and future — and the president himself. The surprise performance by Obama came at the end of the playlist when the blues ensemble was singing Sweet Home Chicago, the blues anthem of Obama’s hometown. Buddy Guy prodded the president, saying he’d heard that the president sang part of an Al Green tune recently, adding: “You gotta keep it up.” Then Jagger handed over the mic, and Obama seemed compelled to comply. “Come on, baby don’t you want to go,” the president sang out twice, handing the mic to B.B. King momentarily, and then taking it back to tack on “Sweet Home Chicago” at the end.
UNITED STATES
Three times for break-up
A man angry that his girlfriend was trying to break up with him struck her with his car and repeatedly backed over her body, prosecutors in New Jersey said on Tuesday in charging him with murder. Charles Ann had been dating 25-year-old Aena Hong for about a year, and the pair had a tumultuous relationship, Bergen County prosecutor John Molinelli said. Witnesses told police they saw a woman on foot arguing with the driver of a 2011 Hyundai Sonata on Monday evening. The car drove away from the woman, turned around, rapidly accelerated and struck her as she was crossing an intersection, witnesses said. The driver put the car in reverse and ran over the woman’s body three times, investigators said. Police found the car, registered to Ann, a few hours later. The 26-year-old Ann was arrested on Tuesday morning at a friend’s apartment in New York. Ann immigrated from South Korea in 2009 and is a naturalized US citizen, authorities said. He was carrying a large amount of cash and his passport when he was arrested, leading investigators to believe that he might have been preparing to flee the country.
UNITED STATES
Author convicted of scams
An author of a fantasy trilogy has pleaded guilty in a scheme to bilk women he met through a dating site out of millions of dollars. Federal prosecutors in Atlanta, Georgia, said Mitchell Gross pleaded guilty on Tuesday to wire fraud and money-laundering. The 61-year-old was charged last year with scamming a Florida real estate agent he met through an online Jewish dating site into investing about US$3 million in a sham company that he secretly controlled. They said he used some of the money to repay another woman whom he had bilked out of at least US$1.4 million. Gross’ work includes a suspense story called Circle of Lies. Gross is to be sentenced on May 14.
UNITED STATES
Air force helps with treasure
Two cargo planes are flying to MacDill Air Force Base in Florida later this week to pick up a vast shipwreck treasure that Spain wrested away from deep-sea explorers. MacDill officials said in a statement that the air force is cooperating with the Spanish government in the transfer of the 15.42 tonnes of silver coins and other artifacts. Officials won’t say exactly when the transfer will happen. Spain won the treasure from Tampa-based Odyssey Marine Exploration after a protracted court battle.
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