SOUTH KOREA
Man on stabbing spree
A man wielding a box-cutter stabbed or cut eight people at a subway station just outside of Seoul after a teenager confronted him for spitting at him, police said yesterday. Police arrested a man running away from the station in Uijeongbu, which is home to US and South Korean military bases, the officers said. Such attacks are rare in the country. Police identified the suspect as a 39-year-old man surnamed Yoo. He began wielding a box cutter at an 18-year-old man surnamed Park inside the train when the victim confronted Yoo for spitting at him, police said.
INDONESIA
Earthquake kills three
A powerful 6.3 magnitude earthquake that shook the eastern island of Sulawesi has killed at least three people and seriously injured a dozen others, an official said yesterday. The quake struck on Saturday evening near the mountainous districts of Parigi Moutong and Sigi in Central Sulawesi province, where panicked residents ran from their homes into the streets as the ground shook violently for around 15 seconds. The US Geological Survey said the quake struck at a depth of around 20km, 56km southeast of the provincial capital Palu, where residents also felt the tremor and ran from their homes.
CHINA
Local crowned Miss World
A 23-year-old music lover who wants to work with the poor, was crowned Miss World 2012 at a ceremony in Inner Mongolia, pageant organizers said on Saturday. Wearing a sparkling blue gown, Yu Wenxia waved to the audience in the Dongsheng Stadium in Ordos, located in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Organizers said Yu beat out 115 contestants, a record, in the highly publicized annual international beauty pageant. China also won the Miss World title in 2007, when model Zhang Zilin took the crown. Sophie Moulds, a 19-year-old business student from Wales, took second place. Jessica Kahawaty, 23, a law student from Australia, was third.
PAKISTAN
US planes fire missiles
Intelligence officials say missiles fired from unmanned US spy planes have hit two vehicles near the Afghan border, killing at least seven militants. Three intelligence officials said the strike yesterday came in the Mana area of North Waziristan. The officials say the area is dominated by Hafiz Gul Bahadur, a commander whose forces often target US troops in Afghanistan, but they did not know whether his men were targeted.
JAPAN
Bacteria kills six people
Six people have died after eating pickles contaminated with E. coli bacteria, officials said yesterday. A total of 103 others have been made ill after eating the same lightly pickled Chinese cabbage produced last month by a company in the city of Sapporo, according to health bulletins issued by the local government. Of the dead, five were elderly people who ate the pickles at nursing homes in Sapporo and in another city on Hokkaido Island. A four-year-old girl died on Aug. 11, five days after developing symptoms of E. coli poisoning, an official at Sapporo’s public health center said. Two women in their 90s died on Thursday in the city of Ebetsu, about 10 days after they were hospitalized with symptoms of food poisoning after eating the pickles at nursing homes.
SWEDEN
Jews march against hate
Several hundred Jews and their supporters marched in the southern city of Malmo on Saturday to bring attention to intolerance and anti-Semitic attacks in the Nordic country. Malmo, which has a large immigrant Muslim community, saw a surge in hate crimes against Jews after Israel’s invasion of Gaza in 2009. Some of those participating in the Saturday walk wore the traditional kippa cap that Jewish men traditionally wear. The march passed without incident, and Willy Silberstein of the Swedish Committee Against Anti-Semitism, which organized the event, described it as a success. “It was impressive. There was much more people than we expected,” he said, adding that most of the participants were not Jewish.
MAURITANIA
Man kills kids to save money
A man has slit the throats of his four children to avoid the expense of buying them new clothes for the Muslim holiday Eid-al-fitr, sources close to the family said on Friday. The murders took place in Arafat, a suburb of the capital, Nouakchott, where the man, a public sector nurse in his forties, lived with his family. Sources close to the family, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the man had waited for his wife to leave their home on Thursday night, before slitting the throats of his two sons and two daughters. The eldest was 12 and the youngest less than a year old. One of the sources said that upon her return, the mother found her husband smiling and he said to her: “I have gotten rid of your concerns about buying clothes for the children for the holiday.”
FINLAND
Offbeat contests held
A teenager won a mobile phone throwing contest on Saturday by hurling his old Nokia phone 101.46m. The annual contest is one of many offbeat events, such as wife-carrying, that are held in the summer, when normally reserved Finns like to celebrate the warmer weather with silliness and outdoor sport. Ere Karjalainen, who beat about 50 contestants, including some who had traveled from England and India, said he had practiced only once and prepared mainly “by drinking.”
GERMANY
Rightists mock Mohammed
Members of a small far-right group have displayed caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed during demonstrations outside mosques in Berlin, but officials say their protests have gone peacefully. Saturday’s demonstrations by the Pro Deutschland group — held under the slogan “Islam does not belong in Germany — stop Islamization” — followed a failed attempt by three mosques to get display of the caricatures prohibited. A court ruled they were protected by laws allowing artistic free expression. Police said a group of up to 70 supporters of Pro Deutschland took part, while several hundred counter-demonstrators protested against them.
RUSSIA
Bomb kills six police
Six policemen died in the volatile Caucasus region of Ingushetia early yesterday after a bomb went off at the funeral of their colleague, news agencies reported. “As the policemen entered the yard of the house where the funeral was taking place, a powerful blast went off. As a result of the explosion, six policemen died on the spot and there are many wounded,” a spokesman for the regional Investigative Committee told the Interfax news agency.
BRAZIL
Man survives impalement
A 24-year-old construction worker survived a 1.8m metal bar falling from above and piercing his head, doctors said on Friday. Luiz Alexandre Essinger, chief of staff at Rio de Janeiro’s Miguel Couto Hospital, said doctors successfully withdrew the iron bar from Eduardo Leite’s skull during a five-hour surgery. He said Leite was conscious when he arrived at the hospital and told him what had happened. He said Leite was lucid and showed no negative consequences after the operation. The bar fell from the fifth floor of a building under construction, went through Leite’s hard hat, entered the back of his skull and exited between his eyes, Essinger said, adding: “It really was a miracle” that Leite survived. Ruy Monteiro, the hospital’s head of neurosurgery, told the Globo TV network that Leite escaped by just a few centimeters from losing one eye and becoming paralyzed on the left side of his body. He said the bar entered a “non-eloquent” area of the brain — an area that does not have a specific, major known function.
LIBYA
Bombs mar end of Ramadan
Twin car bomb blasts killed two people at dawn yesterday in the capital, security officials said, blaming loyalists of former leader Muammar Qaddafi for the attacks. Tripoli security chief Colonel Mahmud al-Sherif told media the bombs were detonated by remote control and struck near a military academy and the Ministry of the Interior. “They were two car bombs detonated by remote control,” Sherif said, adding that four people were also wounded. The attacks struck on the first day of the Muslim Eid al-Fitr festival that ends the fasting month of Ramadan. The first car bomb blew up at 6am near a military academy on Omar al-Mokhtar Avenue — a main Tripoli thoroughfare that was closed briefly to traffic — and the second near the interior ministry.
UNITED STATES
Obamas to visit Sikh victims
First Lady Michelle Obama will visit relatives of the victims of the Sikh temple shooting in Wisconsin on Thursday, a White House official said. Police blame the Aug. 5 shooting, which killed six people and wounded three, on Wade Michael Page, a 40-year-old former US Army specialist. Page, who killed himself with a gunshot wound to the head, was associated with neo-Nazi groups and the authorities are treating the incident as a case of domestic terrorism. President Barack Obama will visit the Milwaukee suburb of Oak Creek to “meet with immediate family of victims and immediate family of the seriously injured,” a White House official told media on Saturday. US investigators are yet to establish a motive for the killings, but they are looking into Page’s links with white supremacist groups.
UNITED STATES
New spider family found
A team of amateur cave explorers and arachnologists has found a new family of spiders in caves and old-growth redwood forests in Oregon and California, researchers said on Friday. Entomologists at the California Academy of Sciences said the spider, named Trogloaptor — or “cave robber” — for its lethal front claws, had such unique evolutionary features that it represented not just a new genus or species, but also a new family of spiders. The study, published in the journal ZooKeys, noted that finding a new, previously unknown family was rare. “If such a large and bizarre spider could have gone undetected for so long, who knows what else may lurk undiscovered in this remarkable part of the world,” the study added.
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