Wed, Oct 25, 2006 page7

• World News Quick Take

  • AGENCIES
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  ■ Indonesia
  Suharto son's sentence cut

  Former president Suharto's youngest son -- jailed for plotting a murder -- could now benefit from a conditional release after his sentence was cut yesterday, Justice Minister Hamid Awaludin said. Hutomo "Tommy" Mandala Putra was sentenced to 15 years in jail in 2002 for paying a hitman to kill a Supreme Court judge and other offenses. The murdered judge had convicted Tommy in a graft case. His jail term was later reduced to 10 years in an appeal and has also been sliced several times under an Indonesian practice of sentence remissions for good behavior.

  ■ Kiribati

  Islands warn of exodus

  Low-lying South Pacific countries are asking their neighbors to prepare for a complete exodus of their people if global warming causes rising seas to swamp their island homes. President Anote Tong, whose nation of 32 atolls and 92,500 people has almost no land higher than 3m above sea level, said he would ask Australia and New Zealand to accept the region's environmental refugees. "If we are talking about our island states submerging in 10 years' time, we simply have to find somewhere else to go," Tong said at a news conference on Monday.

  ■ Singapore

  Child killer to be hung

  A Malaysian man will hang for the murder of an eight-year-old Chinese girl two years ago after President S.R. Nathan rejected his plea for clemency, a report said yesterday. The death sentence is likely to be carried out within two weeks, meaning Took Leng How, 24, is unlikely to live until his 25th birthday in December, the Straits Times reported. The Malaysian, who worked as a vegetable packer, was convicted of the killing of eight-year-old Chinese national Huang Na in October 2004. After strangling the girl with his hands inside a store room, Took wrapped the body in nine layers of plastic bag and stuffed it into a cardboard box sealed with an adhesive tape.

  ■ Indonesia

  Church burns as strife grows

  A church was set on fire yesterday on Sulawesi where sectarian violence has surged since last month's executions of three Roman Catholic militants, police said. No one was injured in the blaze. The arson attack in the town of Poso apparently followed rumors that an Islamic school had been torched, said police spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Muhammad Kilat, urging residents to be on the alert for "a campaign to fuel unrest." An investigation was being carried out, he said, "but all we know at this moment is that arsonists were behind the Eklesia church blaze."

  ■ China

  Two satellites launched

  Two experimental satellites were launched yesterday aboard the same Long March-4B carrier rocket from a launch center in the country's north, state press reported. The two satellites, launched from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in Shanxi Province, will conduct space-related experiments including exploring the environment and measuring radiation in space, the Xinhua news agency said. The two satellites, both of which were designed for a life of more than two years, were manufactured by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology and DFH Satellite, it said. The launch marked the 92nd flight for the Long March rockets.

  ■ Gaza Strip
  AP photographer kidnapped

  Gunmen kidnapped a Spanish photographer working for the Associated Press (AP) news agency in the Gaza Strip yesterday, Palestinian security sources said. An AP employee in Gaza said the photographer was getting into a vehicle outside his residence in Gaza City when four gunmen seized him. There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

  ■ Norway

  Blue-eyed men prefer blues

  Blue-eyed men prefer blue-eyed women, apparently because eye color can help reveal whether their partner has been faithful, a research group said on Monday. Two parents with blue eyes will always have blue-eyed children. So a blue-eyed man can know his blue-eyed wife or partner has cheated on him if their child has brown eyes. "Blue-eyed men may have unconsciously learned to value a physical trait that can facilitate recognition of own kin," Bruno Laeng and colleagues at the University of Tromso said in the study, published in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. A group of students were asked to rate the attractiveness of models based on picture. The blue-eyed men in the group showed a preference for blue-eyed women. Brown-eyed men had no preferences by eye color.

  ■ Sweden

  Bear attack questioned

  A coachman has claimed that a wild bear attacked three racehorses on a practice run but was forced to retreat into the forest with a broken leg and a bruised ego, but hunting authorities are doubtful. Bjorn Johansson said he was taking the three trotting horses for a run near the town of Ransater on Sunday when the bear charged them from behind. He said he was thrown from his carriage as the panicked horses defended themselves. He said one of the horses suffered a few cuts and the bear appeared to have suffered a leg injury. Swedish Association for Hunting and Wildlife Management officials who inspected the place where Johansson said the attack took place could not find any traces of a bear.

  ■ United States

  Enzo wrecker charged

  A Swedish man appeared before a Los Angeles court on Monday charged with stealing a rare, US$1 million Ferrari that he later wrecked in a high-speed car crash. Stefan Eriksson, 44, stole two Ferrari Enzos as well as a top-end Mercedes-Benz from a British car-leasing company before shipping them to the US, prosecutors said. Eriksson, who is charged with grand theft auto and embezzlement, was caught after he wrote off one of the Enzos in a 257kph crash near Malibu in February. The car was ripped in half after slamming into a power pole, while Eriksson walked away unscathed. He pleaded no contest last week to charges of driving under the influence.

  ■ United States

  Lawyers under pressure

  Yukos oil company founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky is jailed as a political prisoner in Siberia, his lawyers said in Washington on Monday. "Khodorkovsky is a political prisoner right now and he sits in a jail in Siberia and you need somebody to do something about it," attorney Maria Logan said. She said that Russian authorities were stepping up pressure on Khodorkovsky's lawyers. The former tycoon was sentenced to eight years in prison in May last year for embezzlement and other financial crimes.

  ■ Namibia
  US requests extradition

  The US has requested the extradition from Namibia of Jacob "Kobi" Alexander, accused in the US of hatching a scheme to pocket millions of dollars by secretly manipulating stock options, the US embassy spokesman said on Monday. No date was set for an extradition hearing for the former chief executive of voicemail-software maker Comverse Techno-logy Inc. Alexander was granted bail by a local court earlier this month on condition that he hand in his passport, stay in the Windhoek district and report twice a week to an Interpol inspector.

  ■ Brazil

  Serial killer confesses

  A 41-year-old bicycle mechanic accused of killing dozens of young boys and castrating many confessed on Monday to the 2003 murder of a 15-year-old boy during his first day of trial. Sexual abuse he suffered as a child, he said, had driven him to kill. "He knows he killed him but [doesn't] remember anything [other than] that he was acting in revenge for when he was sexually abused when he was six," a court spokes-woman said. Chagas has confessed and then retracted his confession to the killings of 30 boys in Maranhao state and 12 others in Para state between 1991 and 2003. If convicted of all murders, Chagas would be Brazil's most prolific serial killer.

  ■ Panama

  Bus catches fire

  Mechanical problems triggered a fire aboard a bus in Panama City, killing at least 18 people, injuring 25 and sending passengers jumping from the flaming vehicle. Investigators using trained dogs found no evidence of explosives on the city bus and believed some form of fuel leak was to blame for the blaze on Monday. The bus lacked an emergency exit. Witnesses said they saw smoke pouring from the area around the motor seconds before the bus caught fire. Authorities were checking the charred remains of the motor and bus for clues.

  ■ Iraq

  Shiites fight Shiites

  Militiamen loyal to an anti-US cleric re-emerged in the southern city of Amarah, hunting down and killing four policemen from a rival militia in a brutal Shiite on Shiite settling of scores. The Iraqi army set up a few roadblocks but did not interfere in the movement of Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army fighters after police fled the streets. The latest attacks on Monday came despite a public call by al-Sadr to halt the tribal vendetta, suggesting that splinter groups were developing within his militia. The spread of revenge killings among Shiites in their southern heartland has opened a new and ominous front as US forces struggle to control insurgent and sectarian bloodshed to the north -- especially in Baghdad.

  ■ United States

  Egyptian couple gets jail

  Two Egyptians who enslaved a 10-year-old girl as their domestic helper for two years were jailed by a court in California on Monday. Abdel Nasser Ibrahim, 57, was handed a three-year prison sentence while ex-wife Amal el-Motelib, 43, was sentenced to 22 months. The pair were also ordered to pay just over US$76,000 in unpaid wages to their victim, now 16, who was forced to work as a servant for a family of seven at their home in Orange County, California. Justice officials said the victim has now been granted a visa allowing her to stay in the US.
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