■ JAPAN
Thieves pull off jewelry heist
Thieves in Tokyo made off with some 8,000 valuable pieces of jewelry after breaking into a store, apparently through the ceiling, police and reports said on Sunday. "About 8,000 ... rings, necklaces and other jewelry worth ¥100 million [US$860,000] were stolen along with ¥200,000 in cash," a Tokyo police spokeswoman said. The shop, Victor's Pearl, is located in a city center shopping arcade. The thieves are believed to have broken in through a hole in the ceiling, the Asahi television network said, adding police suspected a Chinese crime group's involvement in the case.
■ PHILIPPINES
Guerrillas seize hostages
Communist guerrillas raided a military detachment, snatching two hostages and taking away automatic rifles, the army said yesterday. An unknown number of New People's Army (NPA) rebels easily overpowered 23 militiamen guarding the detachment on Mindanao Island on Sunday, army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Ernesto Torres said. The rebels seized a village chieftain and another man and took away several M-16 and M-14 rifles, he said. The NPA is the armed unit of the Communist Party of the Philippines, which has been waging a Maoist rebellion since 1969.
■ AFGHANISTAN
Four tonnes of heroin seized
Authorities said on Sunday they had seized 4 tonnes of liquid heroin, one of their biggest hauls yet, as well as 1 tonne of hashish packed to look like a brand of instant yeast. The finds were made separately near the border with Iran. The heroin was discovered in Farah Province when a drug laboratory was raided on Saturday, Deputy Interior Minister General Daud Daud told reporters in Kabul. Four men were arrested. In Herat Province, officials showed journalists a shipping container holding hundreds of 500g packets of a brand of instant yeast called Hollandia. Inside the wrapping, which included the colors of the Dutch flag, was a second covering around dark hashish that read "Black Gold" and "Pak delight."
■ PHILIPPINES
Church condemns aid
A proposal by the legislature to spend US$22 million buying condoms and birth control pills has been condemned by the Roman Catholic Church, it was reported yesterday. The president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, Archbishop Angel Lagdameo, told the Manila Standard Today that the money would be "better spent on education and poverty alleviation projects." He told the paper that the use of condoms and artificial birth control methods was against "nature and God's law." The project is to fill the void left when a 30-year-old USAID program which supplies free contraception to the predominantly Roman Catholic nation comes to an end next year. At current rates, the nation could see its population double within the next 30 years.
■ CHINA
Krosa affects 5 million
Tropical Storm Krosa has affected more than 5 million people in China by paralyzing transportation, cutting power and forcing the closure of schools, state media said yesterday. The Xinhua news agency said Krosa, which was downgraded from a typhoon to a tropical storm on Sunday, had not caused any casualties. About 1.4 million people were evacuated from coastal areas as a precaution. Economic loses were estimated at 4.58 billion yuan (US$610 million).
■ EGYPT
Bedouin clash with police
Police used tear gas against hundreds of Bedouin in a border town on Sunday after protesters pelted them with rocks, wounding three officers, police and witnesses said. The clashes started after members of a Sinai tribe called El-Fawakhria took to the streets in the northern Sinai town of El-Arish, protesting that police had not protected them against hostile tribesmen. Fawakhria tribesmen threw stones at a government building, damaging it, and attacked the local headquarters of the ruling National Democratic Party, ripping down and burning pictures of President Hosni Mubarak.
■ FRANCE
Monet painting vandalized
The government should impose tougher penalties on art vandals, Culture Minister Christine Albanel said yesterday, after intruders broke into a Paris museum during the weekend and punched a hole in a prized Impressionist painting. Five people forced their way into the Musee d'Orsay early on Sunday and attacked Le Pont d'Argenteuil by Claude Monet, tearing a 10cm hole in the canvas. "It was a pure act of vandalism," Albanel told France Inter radio, adding that France should improve museum security and come down heavily on offenders. A security camera showed the intruders breaking into a back door of the museum.
■ RUSSIA
Convoy attacked, four killed
An attack on a convoy in the war-torn province of Chechnya killed a local police chief and three soldiers and wounded 10 servicemen, the local Interior Ministry said yesterday, ITAR-TASS reported. "Unidentified assailants opened fire on three police vehicles" traveling late on Sunday on the road between Dargo and Vedeno in the mountainous south of the tiny province, unidentified officials were quoted as saying. The assailants also wounded two more policemen and eight soldiers, the report said.
■ SOUTH AFRICA
Miners killed in fire
A fire killed 23 miners illegally working in an unused shaft of a mine last week, TV news reported on Sunday. Their bodies were discovered on Sunday morning and brought to the surface by others who had been illegally working at the mine when the fire broke out last Tuesday, police spokesman Motantsi Makhele said. He said 120 illegal miners were arrested when they made their way out of the mine in the Free State province on Tuesday. They have appeared in court on charges of trespassing. A group of them returned to the mine on Sunday to look for colleagues who were still missing.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Fraudsters enabled: study
Eight out of 10 households throw out personal information with the rubbish that could enable fraudsters to steal their identity, researchers in London said yesterday. A search of trash cans for a national anti-fraud campaign found discarded bank details, national insurance numbers, mortgage documents and copies of passports. Credit card numbers with expiry dates and signatures were found in one in 10 bins. A blank check neatly ripped into four pieces was also spotted. Experts say a date of birth, mother's maiden name, password or even an unopened letter can be as valuable as cash to experienced fraudsters. The research was conducted for National Identity Fraud Prevention Week campaign.
■ CANADA
RCMP officer killed
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police issued an arrest warrant for a 23-year-old man in the shooting death of a Mountie. Police said late on Sunday night they have charged Emrah Bulatci of Alberta with first-degree murder in the death of Constable Christopher Worden. They warned he may be armed and dangerous. Worden, 30, had been responding to a call for police assistance at a residence in Hay River early Saturday morning when his radio went dead. Two colleagues went looking for him and found him in a wooded area suffering from gunshot wounds. They rushed him to a hospital, where he died.
■ UNITED STATES
Thieves in for a surprise
Thieves who took a truck in Seattle may have looked a little flushed when they found out what was in the back: a soapbox racing car shaped like a toilet. Five friends built the racer in Colorado Springs for an event in Seattle late last month. It was stolen when the truck it was sitting in was swiped from their hotel parking lot late last month. Neither the truck nor the toilet-shaped racer have been found. "We're laughing about it," soapbox driver Tom Valentine said on Friday. He just wishes he could have seen the thieves' faces when they opened the back of the truck.
■ UNITED STATES
Rapist to plead guilty
A man accused of kidnapping and sexually assaulting two boys, including one held captive for more than four years, intended to plead guilty yesterday, his defense lawyer said. Michael Devlin was expected to enter his plea yesterday in Franklin County Circuit Court, Missouri, the first in a series of hearings this week in four jurisdictions where he faces more than 80 counts. A prosecutor and several other sources close to the case said that Devlin would receive multiple life sentences in exchange for a guilty plea. Devlin was said to be "at peace" about pleading to the charges.
■ UNITED STATES
NYC apartment explodes
A leaky kitchen gas hose was blamed for an apartment building blast in New York City that threw residents against walls, blew out their windows and hurled debris into the streets. The explosion on Saturday injured more than 20 people, including four badly burned girls. Fire marshals believe natural gas leaked from a flexible hose connection behind a stove in a first-floor apartment, fire department spokesman Tony Sclafani said yesterday. Local utility Consolidated Edison earlier said investigators checked pipes going from the street to gas meters and apartments and found all of them to be working properly.
■ UNITED STATES
Heavy equipment stolen
Authorities are wondering how a thief was able to make off with some pretty big bounty: an earthmover and an excavator from a construction site. Authorities believe the heavy equipment was taken some time on Friday night, after a construction crew left a site near the interchange of Interstates 235, 35 and 80. When another crew showed up on Saturday morning, the heavy equipment was gone. Jensen Construction Co values the equipment at US$150,000. "We have tool break-ins, small tools, trailers ... but something this size -- first time for me ever happening that big," said Randy Freel of Jensen Construction.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
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
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
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
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