JAPAN
Gun surprises teacher
Police have arrested a man after a teacher in his son’s school shot a chair in the staffroom with the father’s revolver, officials and reports said yesterday. Staff at the junior high school in Shime confiscated the weapon from the boy on Wednesday last week, believing it to be a dummy, and kept it in the communal office. The unidentified teacher, who reportedly thought the gun was a fake, fired it at the furniture on Saturday, broadcaster NHK and Kyodo News said. Officers arrested the boy’s father on suspicion of possessing a revolver and several bullets in violation of the Firearms and Swords Control Law, a police spokesman said.
AUSTRALIA
Man bitten by tiger
A man was rushed to hospital yesterday after being bitten on the neck by a tiger at Australia Zoo, run by the family of late “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin. The man, believed to be a trainer at the zoo north of Brisbane, was in a serious condition. Reports said the man was found with two puncture wounds to his neck and was breathing and conscious. The Australia Zoo is a 40-hectare facility on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast made popular by Irwin, who starred in the hugely successful wildlife documentary series The Crocodile Hunter.
CHINA
Roof collapse kills nine
A roof collapse probably caused by a blizzard has killed nine people at a food processing factory, state media and an official said yesterday. The nine people were killed during the lunchtime collapse at the plant in Mudanjiang City in Heilongjiang Province on Monday, Xinhua news agency reported. Citing emergency officials, Xinhua said the collapse probably was caused by blizzards. A man from the local emergency response office confirmed the report, and said the plant was a food processing factory. He declined to identify himself, as is common with Chinese officials. Xinhua said local authorities are preparing to carry out a safety check across the city following heavy snowfall. Snow has closed roads and led to flight cancelations in the northeast this week.
CHINA
Phone thief returns numbers
A thief painstakingly wrote out 11 pages of telephone numbers from a stolen iPhone and sent them to the owner, Xinhua said on Monday. The pickpocket is believed to have taken the Apple handset from Zou Bin when they shared a taxi, Xinhua said. Zou had nearly 1,000 contact numbers in the device and with no backup copy — like millions of other people around the world — he was more concerned about losing the data than the telephone itself, it added. “I know you are the man who sat beside me. I can assure you that I will find you,” he said in a text message to the thief. “Look through the contact numbers in my mobile and you will know what trade I am in... Send me back the phone to the address below if you are sensible.” The tone of the message was unmistakably threatening — Zou works in the pub industry, which is widely held to have links with gangs. Days later he received a parcel containing his SIM card and 11 pages of handwritten contact numbers, Xinhua said, adding that he was “fossilized” by the result — a Chinese colloquialism for astonished. “It would take a while to write from one to 1,000, let alone names and a whole string of digits. I suppose [the thief’s] hand is swelling,” Zou was quoted as saying.
SLOVAKIA
Pensioner opens zoo
A pensioner has opened a zoo like no other: One filled with dozens of abandoned stuffed animals. Tibor Marko, a 70-year-old retired construction worker and grandfather, told reporters the idea behind his inanimate menagerie sprang from his own reluctance to dispose of his adult children’s teddy bears. Then, “about a year-and-a-half ago, a friend gave me an old teddy bear and several other animals, and told me to do something with them. That’s when I thought the old toys could bring joy to other children,” he said. “The first animals got stolen, but now all the neighbors bring me their old toys and my wife helps me arrange them,” he said at the garden where they also tend the flowers. The zoo — which has no cages, fences, entry fees or closing hours — has been a hit with neighbors young and old. “I come here often with my two-year-old daughter, she likes to play with the animals a lot,” local resident Maria said.
MEXICO
More corpses found
The number of bodies found in 22 clandestine graves in the west of the country has risen to 42, after five more corpses were found over the weekend. Many of the bodies have been found bound or gagged. Some showed signs of torture, according to a federal prosecutor who spoke on Monday on condition of anonymity. The graves are in La Barca, in a remote area by Lake Chapala, which is popular among tourists and US retirees. Local police officers who confessed to working with a drug cartel led agents to the mass graves last week near the border between Jalisco and Michoacan states. The area is the site of a turf war between the Knights Templar and the New Generation cartels.
SOUTH AFRICA
Uranium is from abroad
A kilogram of uranium seized as it was allegedly being sold likely originated from a nuclear enrichment plant outside the continent, the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation (NECSA) said on Monday. The agency, which tested the material, confirmed that the substance was unenriched uranium and added it likely came from somewhere where enrichment is taking place. “Yes, it is uranium and the tests suggest that it must have come from a country that is dealing with some uranium enrichment at the moment, very, very unlikely [in] Africa,” NECSA spokesman Elliot Mulane said. China, Iran, Japan, North Korea and the US are among more than a dozen countries involved in uranium enrichment. Two men in their early 20s were arrested in possession of the uranium while allegedly trying to sell it in Durban on Nov. 14, officials said.
YEMEN
Gunmen kill instructor
Gunmen on a motorbike shot dead a Belarussian military instructor in the capital yesterday, a police source said. The source said two instructors, who worked with the army, were shot as they left a hotel where they were staying in the southern part of the capital. Dubai-based al-Arabiya TV reported that one adviser was killed and another was wounded in the attack. “Two citizens of Belarus working in Yemen on private contracts were attacked near the entrance of the Amsterdam hotel in central Sana’a,” Russian embassy spokesman Nikolai Lyagushin told Interfax. “One of them was killed and the other seriously injured.” A spokesman for the Belarussian foreign ministry in Minsk said officials were still checking the Russian embassy’s report.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.