■ China
Mine owners arrested
Police took the two owners of Baoxin Coal Mine in Heilongjiang Province into custody on Friday, a day after an explosion at the facility trapped the miners. The owners were not identified. Rescue efforts to free the miners were being hampered by heavy flooding in the mine triggered by the explosion. In January 2003 an explosion at the same mine killed 34 people.
■ China
Landslide traps 12
A landslide trapped 12 villagers and destroyed almost 100 homes in Gaolou, Shaanxi Province, state media said yesterday. Thirteen people were buried when the landslide occurred on Friday. One -- a child -- was rescued early yesterday. No cause for the landslide has been identified. More than 600 people were involved in the rescue efforts organized by Shaanxi's vice governor. Enclosed spaces at the site of the landslide meant that excavators could not be used to clear away tons of dirt, seriously hampering the efforts to rescue the trapped villagers.
■ China
Pollution fines mulled
China should slap daily fines on firms that pump untreated waste into lakes and rivers, as current penalty limits make long-term pollution profitable, an official was quoted as saying yesterday. Normally, fines for pollution are capped at 200,000 yuan (US$25,300) regardless of how long a factory ignores pollution regulations, the China Daily said. A daily charge would give companies an economic incentive to clean up their waste, Mao Rubai, chairman of the Environmental and Resources Protection Committee of China's parliament, said.
■ Japan
Ships run aground, one dies
One Indian sailor died and 25 people were missing off Japan's Pacific coast after two ships ran aground in high winds and heavy seas, a Japanese Coast Guard official said yesterday. Nine crew members of a Panamanian-flagged iron ore carrier were missing after being swept off the bow of the 98,600-tonne Giant Step late on Friday after the vessel became stranded off Tokyo after a fire. Seventeen others were rescued although one later died in hospital, the Coast Guard said. The crew consisted of 25 Indians and one Sri Lankan. Media reports said the ship had broken in two.
■ India
Dengue fever deaths mount
Dengue fever has killed three more people in the country's capital, news reports said yesterday. The Delhi High Court blamed the city administration and its municipal authority for the outbreak of the mosquito-borne disease. The disease, which usually spreads as the annual monsoon season tapers off and leaves puddles of stagnant water for mosquitoes to breed in, has killed more than 40 people across the northern part of the country in the past six weeks, with New Delhi the hardest hit. At least 743 people in and around New Delhi have been diagnosed with dengue fever and three people died on Friday, taking the death toll in the city to 21, Star News TV said.
■ Australia
Wannabe fireman sentenced
An Australian con man who wanted to be a fireman stopped at traffic accidents to offer help and even stole a fire truck so he could impress his girlfriend with a joyride, a court heard on Friday. Simon Francis Jobson pleaded guilty to 30 charges including fraud, theft, forgery and impersonating a public official, local media reported. Judge Michael Forde sentenced Jobson to five years in jail but told the District Court in the Queensland state capital Brisbane that he would be eligible for parole in a year.
■ India
Outsourcing sting exposed
An undercover operation run by Britain's Channel 4 that exposed how customer data from Indian call centers could be illegally sold has raised concerns among outsourcing companies, with a trade group demanding on Friday the television company share details to help investigate the matter. The program, which aired in Britain, showed a man from Calcutta boasting about his contacts in call centers across the country and offering to sell stolen credit card data from tens of thousands of British customers. The National Association of Software Services Companies, or NASSCOM, said Channel 4 has not responded to written requests for help tracking down the people shown.
■ Australia
Police take to moonlighting
Thousands of police officers moonlight at a second job, leading double lives as couriers, firefighters and teachers, a media report said yesterday. Police commanders in New South Wales, the country's most populous state, had approved at least 2,800 applications from the state's 13,000 officers to work extra jobs, ranging from parking attendants to pest controllers, the Sydney Morning Herald reported. Many of the 1,962 officers who applied over the past two years were given permission to work more than one extra job, figures obtained under Freedom of Information laws showed. The police force's block rostering system left officers with extended periods of free time to take up a range of jobs.
■ Latvia
Nation goes to the polls
The nation began voting yesterday in the Baltic state's first election since joining the EU two years ago, with social issues high on the minds of voters. Voting commenced at 7:00am under steady rainfall and polling stations were due to close 15 hours later, at 10:00pm. Nineteen parties are fielding some 1,024 candidates for 100 seats in the single-chamber parliament, with surveys showing the conservative, business-friendly People's Party, led by current Defence Minister Atis Slakteris, as likely to do best -- although without winning a majority. The election is the fifth since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
■ United Kingdom
More terror reforms mulled
The government is considering radical reforms to smash through a legal logjam of terror trials, the Times newspaper reported yesterday. The daily said government lawyers have held talks with the Bar Council, the professional body which regulates barristers, to streamline a trial process that is straining to cope with a growing number of defendants and increasingly complex cases. However, the newspaper added that attempts to overhaul a trial process which deals with mostly Muslim defendants in terror cases could inflame tensions with the Muslim community.
■ Germany
`Alien' lawyer touts services
A German lawyer hopes to drum up more business by pursuing state compensation claims for people who believe they were abducted by aliens. "There's quite obviously demand for legal advice here," Jens Lorek told reporters on Thursday. "The trouble is, people are afraid of making fools of themselves in court." Lorek, a lawyer based in the eastern city of Dresden who specializes in social and labor law, said he hoped to expand his client base by taking on the unusual work. He has yet to win any abduction claims, but says there are plenty of potential clients, noting that extra-terrestrial watchdogs report scores of alien assaults every year.
■ United Kingdom
Baldness project funded
The government is providing £1.85 million (US$3.5 million) of funding to a Cambridge-based company that is building a robot to help treat baldness. Biosciences firm Intercytex aims to perfect a treatment that involves taking hair follicles from the back of the neck, multiplying them and replanting them where they are needed. The company said on Friday it had been awarded funding from the government's Technology Program, which it planned to use to develop a robotic system to speed up the painstaking process of multiplying the hair cells before they are replanted.
■ Canada
PM complains to Bush
Prime Minister Stephen Harper protested to US President George W. Bush on Friday over the deportation to Syria of a Canadian, who was tortured and held for a year. Harper spoke about Maher Arar, a Canadian of Syrian origin, in a 15-minute telephone call with Bush following a Canadian inquiry's report that cleared Arar of any terror links. "I indicated to President Bush that Foreign Minister Peter MacKay, would be sending a letter today to his counterpart, Secretary of State Rice, to launch a formal protest on the treatment of Maher Arar," Arar was stopped in New York, on his way to Canada from a trip to Tunisia, in September 2002.
■ Mexico
Trade union factions battle
Two rival factions from a trade union battled in a trendy Mexico City neighborhood, wielding sticks, throwing stones and letting off a fire extinguisher. Three men received treatment after being sprayed in the eyes with foam from the fire extinguisher, Red Cross officials said. There were no immediate reports of arrests. The fight began on Friday when approximately 100 members of the National Union of Trade Union Workers tried to break into union offices in the Condesa neighborhood. The men were from a faction calling for the resignation of union general secretary Roberto Vega Galina. Supporters of Vega Galina were meeting inside the building and repelled the attack.
■ United States
Doctor charged over hand
A grand jury in Middlesex County, New Jersey, has indicted a doctor charged with removing a hand from a cadaver and giving it to an exotic dancer, officials said on Friday. The doctor, Ahmed Rashed, was a student when he gave the hand to the dancer, Linda Kay, said Judson Hamlin, an assistant Middlesex County prosecutor. The two were indicted on Thursday -- Rashed on two counts of robbery and Kay on two counts of receiving stolen property. Prosecutors said that Rashed, 26, had frequently visited the Hott 22 strip club in Union, New Jersey, and had befriended Kay, 31, there. The police, responding to an emergency call at Kay's house on July 21, found the hand in a jar of formaldehyde on her bedroom dresser.
■ United States
Rove aide resigns
Susan Ralston, a former aide to the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff who went on to work for the presidential adviser Karl Rove, has resigned from the White House after a report that she was a conduit between the two men. Ralston submitted her resignation to US President George W. Bush on Thursday night, saying the time had come "to pursue other opportunities." Administration officials acknowledged, however, that she quit as a result of a congressional report, released last week, that documented hundreds of contacts between Abramoff and the White House.
■ United States
`Star Trek' auction stuns
Bidders paid top dollars for Star Trek items on Thursday at the start of Christie's auction of memorabilia from the television and movie franchise. A model of the Starship Enterprise E was bought by an online bidder for US$132,000 including commission -- more than 10 times its US$8,000 to US$12,000 pre-sale estimate. Another item, a 193cm2 Borg cube model used in Star Trek: First Contact, sold for US$96,000 to a telephone bidder. Its estimated value was between US$1,000 and US$1,500. "The energy was definitely beyond what I expected," said Cathy Elkies, Christie's director of special collections.
■ United States
Chemical fire beaten
Firefighters brought a chemical fire under control early yesterday, more than a day after it filled the sky with a noxious yellow haze and forced more than 17,000 people from their homes. The fire, followed by a thunderous series of explosions, took place at the EQ Industrial Services plant late on Thursday. No employees were believed to have been inside the plant at the time. Firefighters and area hazardous materials teams worked closely with an outside contractor hired to help fight the blaze.
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
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
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
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