■Malaysia
Burglar foils own heist
A Malaysian burglar foiled his own armed robbery of a house when he accidentally shot himself yesterday, a local news agency reported. Wounded and shocked, the bumbling criminal attempted to flee the scene but left his gun behind, said Taiping district police chief from the northern Perak state Ahmad Katran Askandar. The gun discharge set off the home's alarm system in the pre-dawn incident yesterday, he said. Police found the injured man, who claimed he was involved in a road accident, lying along a major road and immediately brought him to a nearby hospital.
■ The Philippines
Ceasefire begins
A 10-day ceasefire declared by Muslim separatist guerrillas took effect yesterday in the southern Philippines, but the government said troops would keep pursuing rebels blamed for recent attacks. The Moro Islamic Liberation Front announced the ceasefire last Wednesday but demanded that the government withdraw troops from guerrilla areas and cancel arrest warrants for rebel leaders. The rebels plan to extend the ceasefire if the demands are met in 10 days. Otherwise, they will resume fighting, rebel spokesman Eid Kabalu said.
■ Nepal
Opposition plans protests
Nepal's main opposition parties planned their biggest protests in months yesterday to pressure the king for political reform, on the second anniversary of a palace massacre that brought him to power. The Himalayan nation has been racked by eight months of sometimes violent protests since King Gyanendra assumed executive powers and replaced the then prime minister with loyalist Lokendra Bahadur Chand in a row over the timing of an election. Faced with mounting opposition, Chand quit on Friday. "We want the king to appoint our nominee in place of Chand," said Subash Chandra Nemwang, of the Communist Unified Marxist-Leninist (UML) Party, one of five parties leading the protest.
■ Indonesia
Soldiers to be tried
Four Indonesian soldiers will go on trial this week accused of beating up villagers in Aceh Province during the military's ongoing offensive against separatist rebels, a military official said yesterday. This was the first time that Indonesia's notoriously brutal military has acknowledged that its troops may have committed human-rights abuses during the two-week campaign. Previous offensives in the oil- and gas-rich province were marked by persistent allegations of extra-judicial killings and torture of civilians that served to fuel support for the insurgency. Operation commander
■ Thailand
Do not take sex survey!
Thailand's Public Health Ministry warned parents to beware of bogus ministry officials conducting a telephone survey of teenage sexual behavior in order to obtain sexual gratification. Ministry spokeswoman Nitaya Chanruang Mahabhol said parents had complained about calls their daughters had received from men who claimed to represent the ministry. She said the male callers asked the girls what aroused them sexually, with the questions becoming progressively more obscene. Nittaya said the few complaints received by the ministry were "just the tip of the iceberg," and estimated that more than 1,000 young girls received such obscene calls from the ministry imposters.
■Canada
BSE vaccine tested
Researchers in Canada are testing a prototype vaccine which could halt the spread of brain-wasting diseases such as scrapie, BSE (mad cow's disease) and its human form, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. If the tests are successful, the vaccine will first be used to wipe out the devastating infections, caused by rogue proteins called prions, in national herds of cattle and sheep. Prions occur naturally in all mammals and usually cause no ill effects. But sometimes, the proteins fold into abnormal shapes. These can then spread around the body and convert other normal prions into abnormal prions.
■ Saudi Arabia
Al-Qaeda suspects arrested
Saudi newspapers reported last Wednesday that security forces had arrested the alleged mastermind of the May 12 suicide attacks in Riyadh as well as several other suspects of the al-Qaeda terror network. The arrests, including suspected mastermind Ali Abdulrahman al-Ghamdi, were made in the holy city of Medina. Nineteen Russian-made Kalashnikov automatic rifles, grenades, seven ammunition boxes and barrels containing chemical substances intended for making explosives were found at the suspects' residences. Manuals on how to make explosives, sabres, computers, booby-trapped mobile phones and false identity papers were recovered, according to the official news agency SPA.
■ Ghana
Violence mars Togo vote
Violence erupted during vote counting in an opposition stronghold in southern Togo, West Africa, after allegations surfaced that ballot boxes in the mayor's office were stuffed with votes favoring current President Gnassingbe Eyadema, a report said yesterday. Opposition supporters stormed the mayor's office at Tsevie, 35km outside the capital Lome, on Sunday and set it ablaze, the BBC reported. A soldier was severely injured after his weapon was seized, the report said. Togo's Ministry of the Interior issued a statement condemning the violence. Calm was restored by yesterday, but tensions in Tsevie remained high, the report said.
■ United States
Broccoli better raw: study
For many children, broccoli is bad enough boiled. But if you want to get the best from the vegetable, you need to eat it raw, it is claimed. Scientists found chewing up broccoli releases a powerful antioxidant chemical that protects against cancer. But cooking destroys an enzyme that produces the anti-cancer sulphoraphanes. Nathan Matusheski, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in the US, crushed raw broccoli to mimic chewing before carrying out tests.
■ Germany
`Missing' matter detected
Astronomers who have clocked the orbits of smaller galaxies around big solo galaxies believe they have found the mysterious dark matter that makes up much of the "missing" mass in the universe, Germany's Max Planck Institute says. It quoted Francisco Prada, who divides his time between the Max Planck Astronomical Institute in Heidelberg and the Instituto de Astrofisica in the Canary Islands. The team observed 3,000 of the smaller galaxies to check the prevailing cosmological theory, which holds that most of the universe's mass is invisible: 70 percent consisting of radiation and dark energy, and 27 percent of dark matter.
■United Kingdom
Queen marks coronation
Queen Elizabeth II celebrated the 50th anniversary of her coronation yesterday with several low-key events. The major events were a service at Westminster Abbey -- where she was crowned on June 2, 1953 -- and a children's tea party in the garden of Buckingham Palace. Some 1,000 members of the public were given tickets to the service along with 16 senior members of the royal family. Some 240 people who participated in the 1953 coronation ceremony were also invited. The queen acceded to the throne on Feb. 6, 1952, on the death of her father, King George VI, but the coronation took place 16 months later.
■ Iran
Tehran won't sign protocol
Iran yesterday rejected mounting international calls for it to sign an additional protocol of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that would allow tougher inspections of its suspect nuclear program. The refusal came after Russia, which is helping the Islamic republic build its first atomic power plant in Bushehr in southern Iran, joined calls for Tehran to allow International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to have access to suspect facilities. "The question of sanctions has to be resolved first. We will not sign any other international accord while the West does not respect its obligations outlined by the NPT," foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said.
■ United Kingdom
Morbid pictures discovered
British police said yesterday they had found some 2,000 photographs of dead people during a search of a private house. The photos were believed to have been taken in a London mortuary where police earlier this year discovered the desecrated body of a Muslim woman. Thought to date back over 10 years, the photos were discovered during the search of a 53-year-old man's home in connection with theft allegations at the mortuary at Hillingdon hospital. The discovery came after a series of incidents at the mortuary. In January, the family of a 65-year-old Muslim woman found slices of bacon had been placed on her body while it lay in the mortuary.
■ Iraq
Men killed in gunfire
Two Iraqi men were killed and two US servicemen injured in an exchange of gunfire at a mosque in Baghdad, witnesses and soldiers said. But the US Central Command said Sunday it could not confirm that the incident occurred or that there had been any casualties. However, witnesses said that in an apparently coordinated attack on Sunday, a grenade was thrown at the turret of an armored vehicle as unidentified gunmen opened fired from the rooftops of buildings opposite the Abu Hanifa mosque. The mosque is in the Adamiya district, one of the last areas of Baghdad to fall to allied forces during the war.
■ United States
Nuclear waste suspected
The US Air Force is investigating whether there may be radioactive waste underneath more than 80 past and present air bases around the US. The Wall Street Journal reported that the Air Force said the burial sites would not pose a health risk if undisturbed. One of the sites, in Atwater, California, hosts a federal prison. Previously, the site held munitions that the Air Force Safety Center suspects included nuclear weapons. The paper also cited a 1972 internal Air Force survey that, the newspaper said, named 46 bases where radioactive waste was known to exist.
Agencies
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis
Incumbent Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa on Sunday claimed a runaway victory in the nation’s presidential election, after voters endorsed the young leader’s “iron fist” approach to rampant cartel violence. With more than 90 percent of the votes counted, the National Election Council said Noboa had an unassailable 12-point lead over his leftist rival Luisa Gonzalez. Official results showed Noboa with 56 percent of the vote, against Gonzalez’s 44 percent — a far bigger winning margin than expected after a virtual tie in the first round. Speaking to jubilant supporters in his hometown of Olon, the 37-year-old president claimed a “historic victory.” “A huge hug
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
A judge in Bangladesh issued an arrest warrant for the British member of parliament and former British economic secretary to the treasury Tulip Siddiq, who is a niece of former Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina, who was ousted in August last year in a mass uprising that ended her 15-year rule. The Bangladeshi Anti-Corruption Commission has been investigating allegations against Siddiq that she and her family members, including Hasina, illegally received land in a state-owned township project near Dhaka, the capital. Senior Special Judge of Dhaka Metropolitan Zakir Hossain passed the order on Sunday, after considering charges in three separate cases filed
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