■ Kazakhstan
Parrot smuggler arrested
Kazakh border guards arrested a man trying to smuggle 500 parrots in his car from neighboring Uzbekistan, media reported on Tuesday. "Border guards discovered a live cargo of 500 parrots in his car," Kazakhstan Today news agency quoted a KNB security service official as saying. It was unclear how the parrots were made to fit into the Kazakh man's Audi. Trade in wild parrots is banned around the world, according to the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.
■ Vietnam
Snakes and turtles seized
Police in the north confiscated nearly 8 tonnes of snakes and turtles destined for restaurants in neighboring China, an official said yesterday. The animals were smuggled from Thailand across Laos into Vietnam and were discovered in the back of a truck in the northern port city of Haiphong, where they were to be loaded onto a China-bound ship, said Pham Van Long, an official with the city's Forest Control Bureau. Long said two-thirds of the animals had already died, and the bureau was asking the government what to do with the remaining snakes and turtles.
■ Papua New Guinea
Women killed for witchcraft
Four women, believed by fellow villagers to have used sorcery to cause a fatal road crash, were tortured with hot metal rods to confess, then murdered and buried standing up in a pit, said police. The National newspaper said yesterday that police had only just uncovered the grisly murders, which occurred last October near the town of Goroka in the jungle-clad highlands, 400km north of Port Moresby. Black magic is widespread in the South Pacific nation where most of the 5.1 million population live subsistent lives. Women suspected of being witches are often hung or burnt to death. Local police commander Chief Inspector David Seine told the newspaper that people in the village of Kamex accused the four women of sorcery after a road crash killed three prison officers.
■ China
Mine rescue abandoned
Rescue workers have abandoned efforts to find 29 miners trapped for a week in a flooded mine in the north because of safety concerns, state media said yesterday. The water level in the mine has risen despite efforts to pump it out, and experts believe there is little chance that any of the trapped miners are still alive, Xinhua news agency said. The flood occurred Jan. 17 at the Haolaigou Iron Ore Mine near Baotou, the biggest industrial city in Inner Mongolia, when 46 miners were changing shifts. Eleven miners escaped right away and six more were rescued the next day, Xinhua said.
■ Australia
Man's life sold on eBay
An Australian man who agreed to sell his "life" on eBay for A$7,500 (US$5,875) said yesterday he was prepared to go through with the deal if the buyer pays cash. Earlier this month, 24-year-old Nicael Holt posted his life for sale on the Internet auction site, saying the deal included his name, phone number and all of his belongings. "New life for sale!!" Holt's entry on eBay read. He said he would also introduce the buyer to all his friends and "potential lovers [around eight which I have been flirting with]." The buyer would also "have access to a cruisy job in March delivering fruit." Also part of the sale was a repertoire of six jokes, a fractured relationship with an ex-girlfriend and a training course in becoming Holt.
■ Chad
Hijacker wants UK asylum
A Sudanese plane carrying 103 passengers and crew was hijacked yesterday and diverted to N'Djamena, where the hijacker surrendered, officials said. Saif Omer, managing director of Air West, said the lone hijacker walked out of the plane after it landed in Chad and said he wanted asylum in Britain. Nobody was injured, he said. The man had been holding a pistol to the pilot's head during the flight, Omer said. Air West 612 took off from Khartoum, Sudan, at 8:30am on a domestic flight when the pilot was forced to change course, Khartoum's airport manager said.
■ United States
Iraq veteran killed
Three teens have been charged in the death an Iraq War veteran who was shot and robbed shortly after cashing a tax refund check for more than US$5,000 in Detroit, Michigan. Steven Johnson, 15, was charged as an adult with first-degree murder, while his brother, William and cousin, Duane Johnson, both 17, were charged with conspiring to rob and kill Terron Bush, 24. All three were arraigned on Monday. Authorities said Duane Johnson's mother had prepared the tax return for Bush, who was confronted by a gunman as he left a check-cashing store. Bush was shot once in the abdomen as he handed over his money, but the gunman shot him three more times, his cousin, Dwight Bush, said.
■ Bosnia
Patient fixes own machine
A mechanic spent seven hours fixing a hospital machine in order to have his kidney stone removed, a newspaper reported on Tuesday. Slobodan Mocevic asked for tools to fix the lithotripsy machine after his operation in the small town of Kasindol, near Sarajevo, had been delayed because the apparatus had broken down. "I was desperate, I could not have waited for another minute," he told the daily Oslobodjenje. The machine sends shockwaves through a patient's body to break the stone into tiny fragments.
■ Space
ISS safe from debris
Debris thrown out by a satellite destroyed by Chinese authorities earlier this month poses no immediate threat to the International Space Station (ISS), NASA administrator Michael Griffin said on Tuesday. "We are always performing debris analysis and so far we do not see any need for debris avoidance maneuvers," Griffin told a news conference in Paris attended by representatives of agencies participating in the construction of the space station. China publicly confirmed on Tuesday that it had tested a satellite-destroying weapon on an old weather satellite on Jan. 11, sparking international concern.
■ United Kingdom
Cloned chicken a success
British scientists have succeeded in producing multiple generations of genetically altered, or transgenic, hens that produce functional pharmaceutical proteins in the whites of their eggs. To transfer drug-making genes into chickens, Helen Sang, from the Roslin Institute in Midlothian in the UK and her associates used a lentivirus carrier from which all viral coding sequences were deleted. The genetic material was replaced with the gene regulating ovalbumin production combined with genes for making human interferon or an antibody targeting malignant melanoma. "This construct is used to incorporate new protein genes into the chicken chromosome," Sang said.
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
Three sisters from Ohio who inherited a dime kept in a bank vault for more than 40 years knew it had some value, but they had no idea just how much until just a few years ago. The extraordinarily rare coin, struck by the US Mint in San Francisco in 1975, could bring more than US$500,000, said Ian Russell, president of GreatCollections, which specializes in currency and is handling an online auction that ends next month. What makes the dime depicting former US president Franklin D. Roosevelt so valuable is a missing “S” mint mark for San Francisco, one of just two
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