■ 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.
PARLIAMENT CHAOS: Police forcibly removed Brazilian Deputy Glauber Braga after he called the legislation part of a ‘coup offensive’ and occupied the speaker’s chair Brazil’s lower house of Congress early yesterday approved a bill that could slash former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence for plotting a coup, after efforts by a lawmaker to disrupt the proceedings sparked chaos in parliament. Bolsonaro has been serving a 27-year term since last month after his conviction for a scheme to stop Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after the 2022 election. Lawmakers had been discussing a bill that would significantly reduce sentences for several crimes, including attempting a coup d’etat — opening up the prospect that Bolsonaro, 70, could have his sentence cut to
A powerful magnitude 7.6 earthquake shook Japan’s northeast region late on Monday, prompting tsunami warnings and orders for residents to evacuate. A tsunami as high as three metres (10 feet) could hit Japan’s northeastern coast after an earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 7.6 occurred offshore at 11:15 p.m. (1415 GMT), the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) said. Tsunami warnings were issued for the prefectures of Hokkaido, Aomori and Iwate, and a tsunami of 40cm had been observed at Aomori’s Mutsu Ogawara and Hokkaido’s Urakawa ports before midnight, JMA said. The epicentre of the quake was 80 km (50 miles) off the coast of
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
A passerby could hear the cacophony from miles away in the Argentine capital, the unmistakable sound of 2,397 dogs barking — and breaking the unofficial world record for the largest-ever gathering of golden retrievers. Excitement pulsed through Bosques de Palermo, a sprawling park in Buenos Aires, as golden retriever-owners from all over Argentina transformed the park’s grassy expanse into a sea of bright yellow fur. Dog owners of all ages, their clothes covered in dog hair and stained with slobber, plopped down on picnic blankets with their beloved goldens to take in the surreal sight of so many other, exceptionally similar-looking ones.
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