■ India
Impotent patient kills doctor
An angry patient gunned down his doctor for failing to treat him for sexual impotency, police said yesterday. The "sexologist," Rajesh Abbot, died at the scene in New Delhi on Sunday after the patient, Javed Ali, 21, pumped 13 bullets into his body, police said. Officers believe that Abbot, who was treating Ali for the last two years, was a quack who administered fake medicines. "Ali was enraged that the fake drugs had made him lose his remaining sexual prowess and ruined his life," said SS Yadav of the Mandir Marg police station. Police arrested Ali soon after the shooting.
■ Philippines
Gunmen kill top communist
Three gunmen riding a motorcycle shot dead a communist leader facing rebellion charges for his role in an alleged plot to oust President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, officials said on Monday. Sotero Llamas, 55, was attacked in the central town of Tabaco, 550km southeast of Manila, and was declared dead on arrival at a nearby hospital, a senior regional police official said. State prosecutors filed rebellion charges this month against Llamas and 40 other leaders of the communist movement for an alleged conspiracy to oust Arroyo in February. Llamas was a member of the central committee of the Communist Party of the Philippines.
■ India
Vegetarians in food fight
More than 50 passengers refused to disembark from an Air India plane at the New Delhi airport on Sunday in a row over food, a newspaper reported yesterday. At least 55 vegetarian passengers on the flight from Kuala Lumpur stayed in their seats at Indira Gandhi International Airport for an hour after the aircraft landed, angry at being forced to go hungry because the cabin crew offered only non-vegetarian meals on the four-and-a-half-hour flight, the Times of India reported. The airline blamed a travel agency for not marking their food preference while booking their tickets.
■ China
Toxic dumplings for sale
China yesterday warned consumers to be wary of eating dumplings served during the Dragon Boat Festival, saying they may be poisonous. The glutinous rice dumplings, or zongzi, are wrapped in bamboo or reed leaves and shaped like pyramids, but some unscrupulous manufacturers are using copper-based chemicals to keep the leaves green, the China Daily said. "The leaves dyed by copper sulphate or copper chloride contain metal elements which will penetrate into the zongzi and cause great damage to the health," a food expert was quoted as saying.
■ Nepal
Naked sherpa stirs uproar
The head of the Nepal Mountaineering Association urged the government on Saturday to take action against a sherpa who reportedly stripped on top of Mount Everest. The Himalayan Times had reported on Friday that the Nepali climbing guide, whose name it gave as Lakpa Tharke, stood naked for three minutes in freezing conditions on the summit of the world's highest peak. If confirmed, he would be the first person known to have stripped atop Everest. Ang Tshering Sherpa, head of Nepal's top mountaineering body, said he could not confirm that the incident had happened. "But if he did it, it is very shocking because Sagarmatha is the goddess mother," he said, using the mountain's Nepali name and referring to a belief that the mountain is sacred.
■ Iran
Fusion research starts
The government said yesterday it had conducted research into nuclear fusion, a process that carries the promise of clean, inexhaustible supplies of energy but one that triggers the destructive power of the hydrogen bomb. It gave no details on the fusion research program and it was not clear why the government had decided to announce the research now. But it appeared to be part of the country's policy of defying world calls for it to cease uranium enrichment as a guarantee that it was not trying to build a nuclear weapons. Iran says its nuclear program is designed only for energy production.
■ South Africa
Mother makes fatal mistake
A woman and her child died while trying to escape a fire in an apartment block in Johannesburg's crowded innercity suburb of Hillbrow on Sunday night, news reports said yesterday. The woman, her husband and their four-year-old child leapt from the sixth floor of the building, mistakenly thinking their apartment was alight, emergency services workers told the Sapa news agency. The man reportedly sustained serious injuries. The fire was believed to have been caused by candles. Similar fires have forced people to jump from apartments, including one recently in which a woman flung her eight-month old baby from a burning inner-city building. A passerby became a hero when he caught the child.
■ Tunisia
Group fights crackdown
A human rights league (LTDH) vowed on Sunday to hold its national congress a day after scuffles broke out as police blockaded its headquarters to prevent the meeting from going ahead. The LTDH announced "its perseverance and its determination to hold its sixth national congress, as soon as possible and completely independently" after police cracked down on the meeting on Saturday.
■ United Kingdom
Earth is in hands of `idiots'
Humanity has reached a "defining moment" in our dominion over the planet and our ability to destroy it, according to the head of the Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific institution. "The 21st century is the first in the Earth's history where one species has our planet's future in its hands and could jeopardize life's immense potential," Lord Rees told an audience at the Hay festival on Sunday. The physicist said scientific advances had made it much easier for individuals to commit devastating acts of terror on a much greater scale than 9/11, using for example biological weapons. "In a global village there will be global village idiots. And with this power, just one could be too many," he said.
■ Egypt
Activist's life in danger
An Egyptian political activist who said that he was tortured and sexually assaulted last week had a forensic medical exam on Sunday but has not been treated for his injuries, his lawyer said. Mohammed el-Sharkawi, 24, said he was beaten and sodomized with a rolled up piece of cardboard on Thursday at a Cairo police station after being arrested following a peaceful protest. "He has severe pain in his ribs and bleeds when he urinates. It's no exaggeration when we say his life is in danger," el-Sharkawi's lawyer, Gamal Eid, said.
■ Bolivia
Chavez warns government
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez told Bolivian forces to be on guard against conspirators, alleging US President George W. Bush is plotting against the left-leaning government. Chavez delivered his weekly radio and television program Hello President on Sunday from the ruins of Tiawanacu, an ancient city located roughly 56km west of La Paz. "When the US president said a few days ago that he was worried because democracy is eroding in Bolivia it's because, you can be sure, he has a plan against Bolivia," Chavez said without elaborating. He urged his "brothers, the Bolivian soldiers," not to be caught off guard. The comments were Chavez's latest response to Bush's remarks last week that he was "concerned about the erosion of democracy" in Bolivia and Venezuela.
■ Mexico
Former rebel joins march
Former Zapatista rebel Subcomandante Marcos joined thousands of marchers in the capital on Sunday demanding the release of 49 persons jailed after a police eviction of street flower vendors. The former leader of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, which sprang up in 1994 in the southern state of Chiapas, joined the crowd, which also demanded respect for the human rights of the detainees, jailed three weeks ago. The protesters chanted "freedom for political prisoners" and "we are all Atenco," referring to the continued custody of 49 persons after a police crackdown in the town of San Salvador Atenco on May 4.
■ Nicaragua
Strange political bedfellows
The leftist Sandinista Party, which fought a bloody war against Contra rebels in the 1980s, chose a former Contra leader as running mate on Sunday for perennial presidential candidate Daniel Ortega. Jaime Morales Carazo, 70, a former banker and political leader of the conservative US-backed Contras, will run for the vice presidency on Ortega's ticket, a Sandinista Party meeting announced. While politics does make strange bedfellows, Morales Carazo's enthusiasm for running mate Ortega -- who led the Sandinista regime from 1979 to 1990 -- seemed muted.
■ United States
Rock the `right' way
It may only be rock 'n' roll, the music born of anti-establishment rebels, but conservatives can like it too. Sure, Neil Young just released Let's Impeach the President and Green Day scored a huge hit with its 2004 American Idiot album, one track featuring the anti-Bush lyric Zieg Heil to the President Gasman. "But some rock songs really are conservative -- and there are more of them than you might think," political reporter John Miller wrote on the Web site of the US conservative magazine National Review. Starting with The Who's Won't Get Fooled Again, deemed the number one right-leaning rock anthem, Miller's list of "The 50 greatest conservative rock songs" will be published in the magazine's June 5 issue.
■ United States
Ex-cop assaults boy
A former sheriff's deputy and police sergeant was arrested for allegedly posing as a police officer and abducting and sexually assaulting a teenage boy in Las Vegas, Corona police said on Sunday. Shawn Shelton, 39, was arrested on Friday evening by officers acting on a tip from Las Vegas police, a spokesman said. Police said Shelton flashed his old police badge at a 14-year-old boy at a Las Vegas bus stop last Sunday and ordered the victim into his black Hummer SUV.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Russian hackers last year targeted a Dutch public facility in the first such an attack on the lowlands country’s infrastructure, its military intelligence services said on Monday. The Netherlands remained an “interesting target country” for Moscow due to its ongoing support for Ukraine, its Hague-based international organizations, high-tech industries and harbors such as Rotterdam, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said in its yearly report. Last year, the MIVD “saw a Russian hacker group carry out a cyberattack against the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands,” MIVD Director Vice Admiral Peter Reesink said in the 52-page
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