■ Thailand
Chat room page shut down
The government has shut down a popular political online chat room, the Web site said yesterday, just days after YouTube was blocked for videos deemed insulting to King Bhumibol Adulyadej. The political page of Pantip.com was closed for national security reasons at the request of the Information Communication and Technology Ministry (ITC), a notice on the Web site read. "ICT has asked for the temporary closure of [the political page] `Rajadamneon Room' after it found several topics that might endanger national security," the site said in a notice.
■ Hong KOng
Burial-at-sea operational
The ashes of 11 people were scattered off a small island a mile from downtown as a new burial-at-sea scheme went into operation in the space-scarce city, the government said yesterday. Family members and religious ministers took to the high seas aboard a specially decked out boat for the burials Saturday afternoon. Each deceased was given a religious send-off of their family's choosing before their ashes were tossed over the side, a government spokesman said. The government gave the go-ahead for burials at specific sites around the territory's coast last year in a bid to ease competition for burial space in its choked cemeteries and crematoria.
■ Hong Kong
Tourism boss to stop scams
The Hong Kong Tourist Board's new boss James Tien (田北俊) vowed yesterday to crack down on high-street retail scams that prey on unsuspecting Chinese visitors. The comments by Tien, follow revelations that a number of jewelry shops had sold fake goods to Chinese tourists. "I find these allegations shocking and deeply damaging for our tourism industry," Tien, a tycoon lawmaker and former Cabinet member, said in an address on public radio. Chiefs at the Tourism Industry Council trade body warned that such scams would damage the territory's reputation as a shopping destination.
■ China
Parent care check planned
Changyuan County plans in-depth checks on how its officials' treat their parents, with those who are nice to their mother and father first in line for promotion, Xinhua news agency reported on Saturday. Up to 500 family members, friends, colleagues and neighbors will be grilled by special investigators about the behavior of each official in the county, including their family values and any drinking or gambling habits, the report said. The findings will be considered when deciding promotions.
■ Australia
Hicks cannot sell story
Al-Qaeda supporter David Hicks will be barred from selling his story when he returns home from Guantanamo Bay prison camp, despite having broken no law, the attorney general said yesterday. Hicks will soon be sent to a prison in his hometown of Adelaide to serve a nine-month sentence after pleading guilty two weeks ago to aiding al-Qaeda in a plea deal agreed on at the US naval base at Cuba's Guantanamo Bay. The deal includes the condition that Hicks not speak to the media for a year, and does not sell his story -- provisions that Attorney General Philip Ruddock said will not be enforceable once he returns home. However, Ruddock said a separate federal law against criminals profiting from crime through media deals will stop the 31-year-old from selling his story.
■ United States
Famous criminal dies
Jimmy Lee Smith, the lifelong criminal whose role in the 1963 kidnapping and killing of a police officer inspired Joseph Wambaugh's true-life crime novel The Onion Field died in jail at age 76, a California prisons official said. Smith died on Friday at the Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic, where he was being held for failing to report to a parole officer, Bill Sessa, a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokes-man, said on Saturday. Foul play was not suspected, but the cause of death was under investigation, the county coroner's office said.
■ United States
Man wants to give house
Mike Bassett wants to give away a house, a big house, with a fireplace, built-in cabinets, a bay window, two full bathrooms and walk-in closets. There is just one catch -- the lucky recipient has to move it. Bassett says if he does not have a taker by July 1, he will raze the structure to make way for more parking for his supermarket and gas station next door in Bellevue, Ohio, 72km southeast of Toledo. "I hate to tear it down," Bassett, 54, said on Friday. "It's a beautiful house." He said that in the past week he has received about 20 inquiries about the house, which was used for offices until last June.
■ United States
Dolphin chat line opened
A marine mammal rehabi-litation facility opened a dolphin "chat line" on Saturday, hoping to teach a deaf dolphin's unborn calf to communicate. The stranded dolphin has been recovering at the Marine Mammal Conservancy in Key Largo, Florida, since Jan. 30. A battery of tests has confirmed she is deaf. Dolphins need to hear echoes of sounds they produce to find food, socialize and defend themselves. Researchers decided to electronically connect the dolphin's habitat with a lagoon at Dolphins Plus, a nearby research facility. Underwater speakers and microphones were installed at both locations and connected via telephone lines.
■ United States
Moviegoers shocked
A family-film audience was stunned to get an unintended glimpse of a horror movie, which left some parents shaken and the theater chain apologizing for the mix-up. The moviegoers were expecting to see The Last Mimzy, the PG-rated tale of a brother and sister who discover a mysterious box of toys and become endowed with superhuman powers to help preserve the future. Instead, the crowd saw the opening scene of The Hills Have Eyes 2, the R-rated sequel to a remake of a 1977 horror classic by Wes Craven. The movie, which centers on National Guard troops who stumble on a clan of mutant cannibals, starts with a chained woman giving birth to a mutant.
■ United States
Flight canceled over fit
Northwest Airlines canceled a flight from Las Vegas, Nevada, to Detroit, Michigan, after the captain cursed on a cellphone in a bathroom, then swore at one of the 180 passengers on the plane, officials said on Saturday. "He used what was described to me as rude language," Ian Gregor, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said about Friday's incident on Northwest Flight 1190. "At some point during the boarding process, he left the cockpit, went into the front lavatory, locked the door and continued his conversation. "Passengers who were boarding the aircraft could hear his end of the conversation through the lavatory door."
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
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
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
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