■ Pakistan
Militant hideout attacked
Pakistani soldiers backed by helicopter gunships targeted a suspected militant hideout in Pakistan's volatile tribal region near the Afghan border and killed about 30 militants, an army spokesman said yesterday. General Shaulat Sultan said the attack was launched late on Friday near Miran Shah, the main town in North Waziristan and the scene of repeated clashes between security forces and militants in the past week. "We did that with full accuracy on authentic intelligence, and according to our information about 30 miscreants ... were killed," he told reporters.
■ China
Medical reforms planned
China plans to stop linking doctors' incomes to charges for drugs and tests, moving to curb a steep rise in medical costs, a state-run newspaper reported yesterday. Under the current system, doctors' salaries are linked to hospital charges, giving them an incentive to prescribe expensive drugs and unnecessary tests and treatments. The Health Ministry plans to crack down on such practices, the Shanghai Daily cited ministry spokesman Mao Qun'an (毛群安) as saying.
■ India
Perjurer turns herself in
A Muslim woman convicted of falsely testifying that she saw 17 Hindu men burn down her family's bakery during 2002 riots in western India has surrendered to police in Mumbai, a special prosecutor said yesterday. Zaheera Sheikh had initially identified 17 Hindu men as being responsible for burning her family's bakery on March 1, 2002, during religious riots in western Gujarat state, killing 14 people, including her sister, uncle and four children. She later changed her testimony.?ice data ends up online
■ Hong Kong
Police data ends up online
Detectives are investigating how information of 20,000 people who had complained about police treatment over the past decade ended up on the Internet, the South China Morning Post said yesterday. The data was apparently from the Independent Police Complaints Council's files, the newspaper said. It included names, addresses, ID card numbers, whether or not people had criminal records and if so of what nature, as well as details of the complaints, it said. The council had denied any link with the Web site that carried the information, it said, and quoted an unnamed police source saying the council outsourced data processing.
■ Thailand
Rights groups wants probe
Human Rights Watch yesterday called on Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra to order an independent investigation of what it described as a police cover-up in the killing of a prominent Muslim lawyer. Somchai Neelapaijit was last seen alive two years ago today, when witnesses saw him being forced into a car in Bangkok by a group of men. Thaksin said in January that Somchai was killed by at least four government officials. His body has never been found. One police officer has been sentenced in relation to the case and is serving three years in prison for coercion. "The prime minister's crucial admission that government officials were involved in Somchai's murder has led to no visible progress in the investigation," Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. "It appears that the authorities have instead focused their energies on deflecting criticism and concealing the truth."
■ Pakistan
Three killed in kite incidents
At least three people were killed and dozens more injured on Friday as kite-flyers defied an official ban on the sport to begin the traditional Basant festival that marks the onset of spring, news reports said yesterday. A teenage girl was electrocuted on Friday night in Rawalpindi city when a metal string touching an overhead power line fell onto her as she worked in the courtyard of her house, the English daily Dawn reported. Two more were reportedly killed in Faisalabad city. Dozens of others were admitted to various hospitals in Rawalpindi for multiple wounds that included injuries by lethal twine, while many others fell from rooftops while flying kites.
■ Indonesia
Salvagers arrested
The navy said yesterday that it had seized four ships and arrested 26 Indonesians for illegally salvaging valuable historical items buried in a sunken ship off the western coast of Borneo. The ships had just finished recovering 261 pieces of ceramics and glassware from a sunken Chinese ship in the South China Sea off Pontianak town when they were intercepted on Wednesday, the local navy commander said. The seizure followed the arrest on Thursday of a French diver and his German co-worker in Jakarta for allegedly stealing historical underwater treasures.
■ Philippines
Game show returns
A daily TV game show went back on the air yesterday, more than a month after triggering a stampede which killed 71 people. Organizers revamped the system for selecting the studio audience, segregating adults and children. Pregnant women and people with heart problems are no longer allowed in. Twelve TV executives could face charges over the stampede.? Laden niece's TV break
■ United States
Bin Laden niece's TV break
The niece of Osama bin Laden has signed up to star in a reality television show about her life as an aspiring singer and actress straddling US and Islamic cultures, a production company said on Friday. Wafah Dufour, who used to be known as Wafah Dufour bin Ladin is the daughter of bin Laden's half-brother Yeslam bin Ladin. Born in California, she was raised from the ages of 3 to 10 by the bin Laden family in Saudi Arabia.
■ United States
Transplant prisoner escapes
A man who was released from jail so that he could donate a kidney to his ailing son was being sought after he went on the run before the organ could be removed. Byron Perkins from Kentucky was awaiting sentencing for drugs and firearms offences and facing a minimum 25 years in prison. But he was allowed out after tearfully convincing officials that he wanted to help his son, Destin, 15, who has dialysis twice a week. Perkins was not wearing an electronic ankle bracelet because doctors told the judge who approved his release it would interfere with medical tests. Perkins went for hospital tests but vanished before his kidney could be removed.
■ Italy
Prosecutors target PM
Prosecutors have requested that lawyer David Mills, the estranged husband of the UK culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, be put on trial alongside Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who they claim paid the British lawyer a bribe of at least ?345,000 (US$595,000). The two men already risk being committed on other charges. Friday's move, which put the case at the center of Italy's general election campaign, followed a lengthy inquiry focusing on testimony that Mills gave in two trials in the 1990s in which Berlusconi was a defendant. The prosecutors claim that Mills subsequently accepted a payment as his reward for withholding evidence prejudicial to his former client.
■ United States
Man jailed over cartoons
A court on Friday jailed a man for two years for receiving pedophile Japanese anime cartoons in the first conviction of its kind in the US, the justice department said. Dwight Whorley, 52, of Richmond, Virginia was found guilty of receiving 20 anime cartoons of girls being forced to engage in sex with men on a public computer at a state employment office. He was the first person to be convicted under a 2003 federal law against the production, distribution, or receipt of obscene drawings, cartoons, sculptures, paintings or any other obscene representation of the sexual abuse of children.
■ Canada
Lonely orca meets sad end
A killer whale that became the object of a tug-of-war between biologists and Native Indians on the Pacific Coast was feared dead on Friday. Officials said the orca, nicknamed Luna, appeared to have been hit by the propellers of an ocean tugboat in Nootka Sound, off Vancouver Island, where it had lived since 2001 after getting separated from its family pod. The young male whale, which often played with boats in an apparent search for companionship, was the focus of a battle on the water in 2004 between scientists, who wanted to capture it for relocation, and Native Indians, who used canoes to lure Luna away from the scientists' pen. The Indians said Luna held the spirit of a chief who had died a week before the animal arrived in Nootka Sound.? must turn over briefings
■ United States
CIA must turn over briefings
A federal judge ordered the CIA on Friday to turn over highly classified intelligence briefings to Vice President Dick Cheney's former top aide to use in preparing the aide's defense against perjury charges. US District Judge Reggie Walton rejected CIA warnings that the nation's security would be imperiled if the presidential-level documents were disclosed to lawyers for Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff. The judge said the CIA can either delete highly classified portions from the briefing material and provide what amounts to a "table of contents" of what Libby and Cheney received six days a week. Or, Walton said, the CIA can produce "topic overviews" of the matters covered in the briefings.
■ Canada
Coffee-cup dispute escalates
A dispute between two girls over a prize-winning cup has stirred up a national debate. According to reports, a 10-year-old girl found a prize-winning Tim Horton's coffee cup in the garbage at her Montreal school, but was unable to "roll up the rim" to determine if it was a winner, so she asked an older girl for help. The annual promotion urges coffee drinkers to check under the rim to look for millions of dollars in prizes, including the brand new Toyota sport utility vehicle worth C$28,000 (US$24,000) now being fought over. The two girls took the cup to a teacher, who called their parents, according to broadcaster CTV. After initially agreeing to share the prize, the parents were soon at odds over how to split it.
■ United States
Wind to power Liberty torch
The torch on the Statue of Liberty is to be lit exclusively by wind power. The "huddled masses" famously welcomed to the US by the inscription on the statue will be able to breathe a little more freely after the US National Parks Service announced a contract to provide 27 million kilowatt hours of green energy to the statue, as well as to the nearby Ellis Island museum and several other sites. "It is an honor to assist Lady Liberty in keeping the torch shining," said Ed Mayberry, president of Pepco Energy Services, which won the contract and will provide power primarily from wind farms in Pennsylvania and New York state.
■ Jordan
Diplomat killers hanged
Two militants were executed by hanging yesterday for the killing in Amman of a US diplomat. Laurence Foley, a 60-year-old administrator of US aid programs in Jordan, was gunned down outside his Amman home on Oct. 28, 2002. Jordanian authorities have blamed al-Qaeda in Iraq's top operative, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for Foley's death. The two militants were Salem bin Suweid, a Libyan, and Yasser Freihat, a Jordanian. They were part of an 11-member cell headed by al-Zarqawi.
■ Russia
Eight die in Chechnya unrest
Seven Russian soldiers and a policeman have been killed in a bloody 24 hour period in Chechnya, an official in the region's administration said on Friday. Four soldiers were killed and five others wounded in a string of ambush attacks on federal forces, said the source. In another incident, a soldier was killed when a military vehicle came under fire near a village in the Nozhai-Yurt region. A further two servicemen from a unit stationed near Nozhai-Yurt were killed on Thursday by a grenade that exploded in their hands. In the southern Vedeno region a police unit was ambushed early on Friday, with one policeman killed and another wounded.?
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
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
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
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
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