■ Bangladesh
Bombs strike movie theaters
Two near-simultaneous bomb explosions outside movie theaters killed a 13-year-old boy and injured seven other people in a northeastern Bangladeshi city, and police said yesterday they were questioning six men
about the attack. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the blasts Thursday night in Sylhet city, 190km northeast of the capital Dhaka, and police gave no word on a possible motive. The unidentified boy was killed instantly by a bomb outside Rangmahal cinema, said Ali Imam Chowdhury, a senior police official in the area. A second bomb injured at least seven people outside Monika, another movie theater in the same city, Chowdhury said.
■ Japan
Possible West Nile case
A Japanese woman who recently returned from a trip to the US is suspected of having West Nile virus in what would be Japan's first case of the mosquito-borne illness, an official said yesterday. Pre-liminary results from blood tests and a spinal tap on the 42-year-old women, from Japan's southernmost island of Okinawa, were positive for the disease but more precise tests were being carried out at an institute in Tokyo, Health Ministry official Tatsuhiro Isogai said. Test results are expected as early as Monday, he said. Japanese media reported there was a possi-bility that the woman has Japanese encephalitis, which also is spread by mosquitos. Isogai said Japan has had no cases of West Nile, and that even if the woman had the virus, an outbreak here would be very unlikely because
the disease is normally transmitted to humans by mosquitos that have fed on infected birds. "It's very likely that she became infected in the US, not on the plane or in Japan," he said.
■ Vietnam
Fish bomber killed
A man was killed on Tuesday while using explosives to fish in northern Vietnam, a police officer said yesterday. Nguyen Ngoc Hien, 30, and two of his relatives were fishing by throwing homemade mines into a stream near their home, said Dinh Van Chuc, chief of Dan Ha commune police. The 300g mine exploded in Hien's hand when he was about to throw it into the water, the police official from Hoa Binh province, 80km west of Hanoi said. Hien lost his right arm and suffered severe head and chest injuries. He was rushed to hospital by his relatives but died 36 hours later.
■ New Zealand
Drugs in lava lamps
Customs officers discovered crystal methamphetamine with a street value of US$5.75 million in five lava lamps imported from China, the New Zealand Herald Web site reported yesterday. Police said it was thought to be the biggest seizure of illegal drugs ever made in New Zealand. About 9kg of illicit drugs were suspended in the liquid inside the lamps. Police arrested and jailed a 23-year-old Chinese student at the Auckland address the lamps were consigned to.
■ Indonesia
Model banned from prison
An Indonesian model has been banned from visiting the son of former president Suharto in a maximum-security prison after a recent visit turned into a three-day stay, news reports said yesterday. Officials ordered the prison to blacklist Sandy Harun from visiting former billionaire playboy Hutomo Mandala Putra, better known as Tommy, the Jakarta Post said. Tommy is serving a 15-year sentence in an island prison off Java for graft and arranging the killing of a Supreme Court judge who had convicted him of corruption in a land deal.
■ Canada
Skating thief on the loose
Police were on the lookout on Wednesday for a rollerblading criminal who robbed a woman while she waited in her car at a fast food restaurant's drive-through lane. The woman told investigators in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby that the man rolled up to her car window on in-line skates late on Tuesday, brandished a knife and demanded cash. She complied and the man skated away with the money. "The female victim clearly remembers that this male smelled strongly of liquor," the Royal Canadian Mounted Police also noted in a press release.
■ United Kingdom
Murder sparks sales spree
Sales of a violent video game, linked to the brutal murder of a British teenager, were soaring on Thursday across the UK as buyers rushed to buy their copy before the game is banned. Publicity surrounding the Manhunt game has sparked a consumer frenzy in the UK, with copies flying off the shelves in stores where it is still available. Many multi-media retailers withdrew the game from their stores last week in the wake of media coverage about the murder of 14-year-old Stefan Pakeerah, killed in February by his friend, Warren Leblanc, 17, who was said to be obsessed with the game.
■ United States
`Lez' in Scrabble shocker
It wasn't a four-letter word, but it was close enough to cause a stir at the National Scrabble Championship in New Orleans. In the final round on Thursday, eventual champion Trey Wright played the word "lez," which was on a list of offensive words not allowed during the tournament. Normally, no word is off-limits, but because the games were being taped for broadcast on cable sports channel ESPN, certain terms had been deemed inappropriate, including the three-letter slang for lesbian. "There are words you just can't show on television," Scrabble Association executive director John Williams said.
■ United States
Hiker drives off bear with ax
Officials closed a back-country area of Denali National Park in Alaska after a hiker told rangers he had driven off an attacking grizzly bear by burying his ice ax in the animal's back. Park Service spokeswoman Kris Fister said Roberto Cataldo, 29, of Modena, Italy, reported the encounter on Monday. A 130km2 tract where Cataldo said he had hiked was closed indefinitely. Fister said much of what he told rangers has not been corroborated, but the park had to take protective measures. A wounded bear "poses a threat to anyone going into the area," she said on Thursday.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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