AUSTRALIA
Croc travels free in hold
A baggage handler had a nasty surprise when he opened the cargo door of a Qantas passenger flight to find a crocodile roaming loose in the hold, the airline said yesterday. The reptile, reported to be a relatively small specimen, managed to escape its transport container during a flight from Brisbane to Melbourne last week, a Qantas spokesman said. “The animal was quickly and safely secured when the aircraft arrived in Melbourne,” the spokesman added. The crocodile was being transported as freight by cargo firm Australian Air Express. Qantas said it was investigating whether the animal had been in the right container and properly loaded.
CHINA
Homeowner killed in protest
Police in Liaoning Province shot and killed a homeowner who set himself on fire while trying to protect his property from a demolition crew, an official and state media said yesterday. Wang Shujie, 36, set himself ablaze after seeing his father shot and wounded, and started toward a policeman, who opened fire, according to the China Daily. The father had tried to wrestle the policeman’s gun from him after he fired warning shots into the air as the protest in Panjin began to get restive, the newspaper said. A local government official in Panjin confirmed Friday’s killing, but refused to go into details pending an inquiry. However, the People’s Daily said on its microblog a preliminary investigation concluded the policeman’s actions were justified. Government-backed land grabs have become China’s most volatile social problem as officials and developers seek to cash in on the nation’s property boom, sometimes forcing people out of their homes without proper compensation.
JAPAN
Envoy sent to Beijing
Tokyo sent its top foreign affairs bureaucrat to China yesterday for a two-day visit, in a move aimed at cooling the diplomatic temperature in a territorial dispute, officials said. Vice Foreign Minister Chikao Kawai, the most senior unelected man in the ministry, was to meet his Chinese counterpart “to discuss a wide range of bilateral issues based on the current situation,” a ministry official said. The announcement came a day after China said it was postponing long-planned events marking the 40th anniversary of ties and as the Japanese coastguard said three Chinese government ships were in waters around the disputed Senkaku Islands, known in Taiwan and China as the Diaoyutais (釣魚台)
VIETNAM
Three bloggers jailed
A court in Ho Chih Min city yesterday jailed three bloggers for “anti-state propaganda” after a trial of just a few hours. High-profile blogger Nguyen Van Hai, alias Dieu Cay, was sentenced to 12 years in prison and policewoman-turned-dissident Ta Phong Tan was given 10 years. “Their crimes were especially serious with clear intention against the state,” Court President Nguyen Phi Long said, adding that “they must be seriously punished.” Phan Thanh Hai, the only one of the trio to plead guilty, was handed a four-year term. All of the defendants will also have to serve between three and five years under house arrest after they complete their prison sentences. “They abused the popularity of the Internet to post articles which undermined and blackened [Vietnam’s] leaders, criticizing the [Communist] party [and] destroying people’s trust in the state,” Long said.
TURKEY
Sex doll mistaken for body
Rescue workers retrieved an inflatable sex doll from the Black Sea after police were notified by panicked residents who mistook it for a woman’s body floating offshore, Milliyet newspaper reported on Sunday. Police cordoned off a wide stretch of beach in northern Samsun province and sent a team of divers into the water to rescue what appeared to be a drowning woman, it said. The team quickly discovered it was in fact a blow-up doll, which they deflated before throwing it in the garbage, the daily said. It was not clear where the blow-up doll had come from.
AUSTRALIA
Irish woman goes missing
Australian homicide detectives on Monday took over an investigation into the disappearance of a young Irish woman in Melbourne after her handbag was found in a nearby street. Jill Meagher, who works for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), was last seen at about 1:30am on Saturday when she left friends at a bar to walk the short distance home. She never made it. “We take on these cases of a suspicious nature where a person goes missing when there’s a possibility that they may have been met with foul play,” Detective Inspector John Potter said.
UNITED STATES
Boys flee detention center
Six teenage boys escaped from a juvenile detention center in Washington state after knocking out a female staff member, but all were captured a few hours later early on Sunday in nearby woods, authorities said. The King County Sheriff’s department said it received word of the escape at about 11:30pm on Saturday from Echo Glen Children’s Center in Snoqualmie, about 40km east of Seattle. The six males were serving time for offenses including assault, possession of firearms and burglary, West said. Law officers on the ground with search dogs and in the air combed the area on the outskirts of Snoqualmie before a helicopter crew spotted the escapees in woods near the center using thermal-imaging equipment, according to West.
SAUDI ARABIA
Dozens protest detention
Dozens of Saudis protested at a prison in Qassim near the capital, Riyadh, on Sunday against the detention of their relatives in the Gulf kingdom, where demonstrations are banned, protesters and a rights activist said. Police restricted the protesters to a cordoned off area for six hours, they said. Demonstrations are rare in Saudi Arabia which escaped last year’s Arab Spring unrest but has faced criticism for its human rights record. Activists say thousands of people are held without charge in the kingdom and human rights groups have accused the government of using its campaign against Islamist militants to imprison political dissidents.
BELARUS
Parliament seats assigned
Authorities in Belarus say that all but one of the 110 seats in parliament have been assigned after elections that critics of the vote say were tainted by improbably high turnout figures. Central Elections Commission chairman Lidiya Yermoshina said yesterday that only official turnout tallies would be considered, and downplayed assessments by independent observers. Yermoshina reported a preliminary turnout figure of 74.3 percent. Parliamentary elections were held on Sunday without the main opposition parties, which boycotted the vote to protest the detention of political prisoners and opportunities for election fraud.
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
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