■ Pakistan
Bomb rocks official's home
A powerful bomb exploded outside the home of a senior security official in central Pakistan on Saturday, killing one person and wounding three others, police and doctors said. Nobody immediately claimed responsibility for the blast outside the home of Ghani-ur-Rahman, the commander of the Frontier Constabulary in Dere Ismail Khan, 300km southwest of Islamabad. It was not immediately clear whether Rahman was at home when the explosion occurred, but police said he was not among the injured. Police said a man who died in the blast was a clerk at a government office. He was crossing the road outside Rahman's residence when the bomb detonated.
■ China
Sickly police solve few cases
Poor health and shoddy detective work kept Chinese police from tracking down millions of criminals last year, state media reported on Friday. About 70 percent of all criminal cases investigated in the country last year went unsolved, the Xinhua News Agency said. China's Ministry of Public Security tested the stamina of nearly 400 police from different parts of the country last year and the vast majority came up short, Xinhua said. "The ministry also randomly picked 400 front-line policemen to receive a medical check last year, finding 30 percent of them suffered cardiovascular diseases, 40 percent suffered high blood pressure..., 30 percent had gastroenteric diseases and 16 percent had hepatitis," the report said.
■ Japan
Iraqi food makes troops sick
Dozens of Japanese troops dispatched to Iraq for a humanitarian mission have fallen ill and military officials think they have identified the enemy: bacterial microbes in the food. As many as 90 of the roughly 550 soldiers at the base in the southern city of Samawah complained of diarrhea this week, a Defense Agency spokeswoman said yesterday on condition of anonymity. Japanese media reported that others had suffered from fever, vomiting or dehydration -- symptoms that military doctors say indicate food poisoning.
■ Vietnam
Fraudster sentenced to death
A post office employee has been sentenced to death after embezzling US$365,000 from a district post office in Vietnam, a court official said Saturday. Tran Phuoc Toan, 36, embezzled the money from payments he received for prepaid mobile phone cards he was distributing, said Dang Quoc Khoi, the judge in Bac Lieu province people's court. "He used most of the appropriated money for his drinking and gambling," Khoi told reporters from the rural province 200km south of Ho Chi Minh City. Under Vietnamese law, fraud cases involving more than US$194,000 can lead to a death sentence.
■ Vietnam
Drunk swallows metal bars
A man in southern Vietnam is in stable condition after an operation to remove three 17-cm metal bars he swallowed in a drunken challenge, a nurse said yesterday. Hoang Ngoc Son, 22, swallowed the metal bars -- normally used in construction -- after a challenge from his friend during a drinking session, the nurse said. Son swallowed the bars in in the middle of last month. They did not pass through his digestive system and he went to hospital on Wednesday complaining of stomach pain. "He thought the bars would go out of his stomach in the digestive way, but they didn't," a nurse said. Son is recovering from the operation and will be discharged in a week, the nurse said.
■ Russia
Soldiers killed in Chechnya
Eleven Russia soldiers were killed in rebel Chechnya over the past day, including three who died in an attack on a military train, an official in the Moscow-backed Chechen administration said Friday. Initial reports of the Thursday train attack said one soldier was wounded when an explosive went off under one of the train's armored wagons. But the Chechen official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the train also was fired on and that three soldiers died and four were wounded. Five other soldiers were killed in firing by separatist rebels on Russian military positions, two were killed in a clash near the settlement of Komsomolskoye and another died in a clash in Kharachoi, the official said.
■ United Nations
Cyprus force renewed
The UN Security Council on Friday extended its peacekeeping mission in Cyprus for six months and asked Secretary-General Kofi Annan to review the purpose of the force after Greek Cypriots turned down a reunification plan. The meeting was rancorous, rare for a routine renewal, with Pakistan and Algeria saying the 40-year-old force should only have been renewed until Annan gives his appraisal, due in three months, rather than until Dec. 15. James Cunningham, the US deputy ambassador, harshly criticized the Greek Cypriots, saying Annan had to examine "the need" for the operation, in light of scarce resources and the results of the April 24 referendum.
■ Italy
Anarchists plant bomb
A homemade bomb exploded outside the Sardinia headquarters of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party before dawn yesterday, causing no injuries. Police arrested three men after the bomb went off just hours before voting was to begin in Italy's EU parliamentary elections. The bomb went off in the Sant Elena district near Cagliari in the south of the island, the Ansa news agency reported. Three members of the local anarchist group Frairi were caught planting the bomb outside the party HQ and arrested by police.
■ Italy
Fashion designer dies
Egon von Furstenberg, a Swiss-born aristocrat who started his fashion career as a buyer for a New York department store and went on to be known as the "prince of high fashion" for his elegant ways and glamorous creations, died Friday in Rome, where he lived in a Renaissance palace. He was 57. His fashion house said he died in a hospital but declined to give the cause of death. During Rome's High Fashion weeks, a glittering event that draws stars like Sophia Loren, his designs were worn by some of the models whose "runway" was the Spanish Steps.
■ Canada
Lonely whale to be moved
A lonely killer whale on Canada's Pacific coast, whose search for companionship has become a danger to boats and float planes, and himself, will be captured next week so he can be reunited with his family pod, officials said on Thursday. Scientist said it was clear the one-tonne whale, nicknamed Luna, would not be able to link up with the pod on his own, so he will have to be trucked to the southern tip of Vancouver Island, where the other orcas normally spend the summer.
■ Russia
Suicide bomber' detained
A woman was detained in southern Russia on Friday after she threatened to blow up the train in which she was traveling, an Emergency Situations Ministry official said. Police arrested the woman after she told passengers she was a suicide bomber and threatened to blow up the train. Following her statement, the train, en route to Baku, Azerbaijan, made an emergency stop and the woman was detained. Policemen and sappers searched the train, but no explosive devices were found.
■ Portugal
10 detained in Euro sweep
More than a dozen men of Arab descent were arrested in the northern Portuguese city of Porto on Friday, a day before the Euro 2004 football championship will kick off in the country, media reports said early yesterday. Different reports put the number of people detained between 14 and 19. The arrests came during a joint operation between police and the Portuguese secret service SIS. Authorities acted on a tip from the Dutch secret service, which said one man was potentially dangerous, the newspaper Publico reported in its online edition. Portuguese authorities are investigating if the men have links to terrorist groups.
■ Peru
Men survive 59 days adrift
Three Peruvian shark fishermen lost at sea for 59 days survived by eating turtle meat and drinking the reptiles' blood, a newspaper reported on Friday. The men set out on March 25 in the Pacific Ocean in a fishing boat without radio equipment. They soon ran out of food and turned to eating turtles caught from the boat, El Comercio reported. The sailors tried drinking the water in the radiator of the ship's engine but quickly realized it was toxic and turned to turtle blood instead. "Thanks to training on a survival course, we also knew how to heat salt water to give us half a liter of drinking water every day," fisherman Manuel Ramirez told El Comercio. An Ecuadorean ship rescued the men some 1,125 km from the Peruvian coast on May 23. Each had lost 10 kg, the paper said.
■ United States
`Bald' becomes hair color
In America's rugged west, a cowboy can still mask a thinning hairline under a hat, but today's outdoor sports enthusiast may have to admit to being bald. The official Montana web site now asks those applying for a hunting or fishing license for their hair color, and gives "bald" as one of the options alongside blond, black, gray, white, red and brown.
■ United States
Lake dissapears
To people around Wildwood, it is nothing but freaky: 9-hectare lake vanished in a matter of days, as if someone pulled the plug on a bathtub. Lake Chesterfield went down a sinkhole this week, leaving homeowners in this affluent suburb wondering if their property values disappeared along with their lakeside views. The town is about 40km west of St. Louis. What once was an oasis for waterfowl and sailboats was nothing but a muddy, crackled pit outlined by rotting fish. David Taylor, a geologist who inspected the lakebed Wednesday, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the sinkhole was formed when water eroded the limestone deep underground and created pockets in the rock. The sinkhole was "like a ticking time bomb." Because the lake is private property, the subdivision's residents will have to cover the cost of fixing it, US$1,000 a household.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
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