■ Pakistan
Tourist's body discovered
The body of a murdered South African national was found in a plastic bag on the outskirts of the northwestern city of Peshawar on Sunday, police said. The body of the 26-year-old man was found in the plastic bag in Peshawar's Baboo Garhi suburbs, local police investigator Kachkol Khan said. According to the passport found in his pocket the man was identified as Kenneth Scott Andrew, a resident of Durban, Khan said, adding that he had entered Peshawar on January 1 this year on tourist visa. Police are now treating the case as murder, Khan said. Doctors who carried out the post mortem on the body said that the man had no wounds and they suspected that he had been poisoned.
■ Vietnam
Mouse delays flight
A small white mouse running around a Boeing 777 delayed a Vietnam Airlines flight to Tokyo for more than fours, newspapers reported yesterday. A passenger saw the mouse on the aircraft, which had arrived in Hanoi from the central city of Danang at 10pm on Saturday and was scheduled to continue to Japan. Reports in state-run newspapers said the passengers went to a hotel and luggage was removed during the search for the mouse. The rodent was found early on Sunday and the aircraft took off at 4am.
■ China
Play-away official expelled
A provincial Communist Party official has been expelled from the party for having too many children by both his wife and a mistress, a state-run newspaper reported yesterday. The Beijing News said Qin Huaiwen was kicked out of the party because an investigation found he had three daughters with his wife, and a son and a daughter by his 31-year-old mistress, who was almost two decades younger than Qin. Qin, who ran a government construction office in Yulin, Shaanxi Province, had been his mistress' boss, the newspaper said. His family situation was exposed after the mistress complained about a lack of child support, it said.
■ South Korea
Wolf cloners probed
Scientists disgraced for massive fraud in stem cell studies are being investigated for possibly manipulating data in a paper on producing the world's first cloned wolves, officials said yesterday. "We will investigate suspected data inflation to increase the cloning success rate," Kuk Young, chief of Seoul National University's office of research affairs, told reporters. Lee Byung-chun, a professor who helped lead the wolf cloning, has asked the periodical Cloning and Stem Cells to issue a correction on the paper, but denied data was intentionally massaged, Kuk said. The team last month showed off 18-month old Korean wolves named Snuwolf and Snuwolffy.
■ China
Modern life affects infertility
Pollution, stress, smoking and multiple abortions are all leading to a rise in infertility, which may affect up to one-tenth of Chinese couples, Xinhua news agency said yesterday. Sperm counts had fallen noticeable since the 1970s, the report quoted Wang Yifei of Shanghai's Jiaotong University as telling a symposium on reproduction health in Hangzhou. Rising wealth resulting from the country's headlong economic boom had contributed to the problem in helping promote unhealthy lifestyles, said one academic. "The problem deserves attention because it threatens the quality and structure of our future population," said Huang Hefeng of Zhejiang University.
■ United States
Cartoonist Johnny Hart dies
Johnny Hart, whose award-winning B.C. comic strip appeared in more than 1,300 newspapers worldwide, has died. He was 76. Hart died on Saturday while working at his home in New York State. "He had a stroke," his wife, Bobby, said on Sunday. "He died at his storyboard." B.C., populated by prehistoric cavemen and dinosaurs, was launched in 1958 and eventually appeared in more than 1,300 newspapers with an audience of 100 million, according to Creators Syndicate Inc, which distributes it.
■ Germany
Egg tree record broken
A zoo broke the record on Sunday for the world's largest Easter egg tree, decorating an oak with more than 75,000 eggs, organizers said. The painted eggs donated by some 200 people, as well as by nurseries and schools, were hung on an American Red Oak tree before more than 3,000 spectators at the zoo in Rostock in the northeast. The 76,600 eggs are to remain in place until June 1, which had been "Children's Day" in the former East Germany.
■ United Kingdom
Arnie to meet Conservatives
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is set to attend this year's Conservative Party conference, it was announced yesterday. The former Hollywood action star will deliver a speech on climate change at the opposition party's annual meeting in Blackpool. Under his leadership, California became the first US state to impose a mandatory ceiling on environmentally harmful "greenhouse gas" emissions. "Governor Schwarzenegger led a dramatic revival of his party's fortunes in California and as governor he has shown tremendous leadership -- above all in pioneering measures to protect the environment, reaching out to political opponents in doing so," Tory party leader David Cameron said.
■ France
Le Pen defends self-help tip
Far-right presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen on Sunday defended his recommendation that young people should be encouraged to masturbate rather than be provided with condoms. Le Pen first made the suggestion at a forum organized by the glossy magazine Elle on Thursday. "When they asked me whether I agreed with the distribution of condoms to young secondary school children, I said listen ... they could always use the `manu militari' method," he said on TV5 television. "It's much less dangerous than using condoms."
■ Turkey
Nine killed in clashes
Eight soldiers and a village guard were killed in clashes and in two separate land mine explosions in Bingol Province, reports and officials said on Sunday. The troops were killed in the past two days, in one of the heaviest tolls suffered by Turkish troops in the fight against the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in recent months. Three of the soldiers were killed on Sunday during a clash with the rebels, local officials said. Two other soldiers and a government-paid village guard died on Saturday in another clash with the rebels in Sirnak Province, some 400km southeast of Bingol, the governor's office said. Two separate land mine explosions on roads in the nearby Bitlis Province, meanwhile, killed two soldiers on Saturday and one other soldier on Sunday, the Anatolia news agency said.
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
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
RSS