■ MALAYSIA
Workers stab each other
Two Indonesian workers stabbed each other to death in front of hundreds of horrified onlookers in a Malaysian town, the Star newspaper reported yesterday. The two men, in their early 20s, chased and attacked each other after a row in a coffee shop on Borneo island, the report said. They died before police arrived at the scene, it added. Local police chief Sulaiman Abdul Razak said the fight resulted from a misunderstanding. "They were with their respective groups of friends at the coffee shop. The others did not get involved," he said.
■ JAPAN
Memory lane caught on tape
Researchers have implanted a camera inside a mouse's brain to see how memory is formed, in an experiment they hope to some day apply to humans to treat illnesses such as Parkinson's disease. The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience Methods and Sensors and Actuators. Jun Ohta of the Nara Institute of Science and Technology and Kinki University researchers implanted a tiny camera designed to show blue light on a screen whenever the camera captured memory being recorded by the brain. The researchers injected the mouse with a substance that lights up whenever there is brain activity.
■ INDONESIA
Soldier slaughters rare tiger
A soldier shot dead a Sumatran tiger that was caught in a trap, then skinned it and distributed its meat to villagers, a conservationist said. The incident happened in Tenggayun, Riau Province, after residents asked the soldier to help free the animal of a pig snare, Bastoni, a Sumatran Tiger Conservation Program official, said on Thursday. "Instead, the soldier fired nine bullets," he said. "It was sadistic," said Bastoni, who like many Indonesians goes by only one name. He said he intends to file a complaint with the army. The Sumatran tiger is the most endangered tiger subspecies in the world, with fewer than 400 believed to be left in the wild.
■ NEW ZEALAND
Oxford to return remains
Britain's Oxford University said on Thursday it has agreed to return to New Zealand human remains obtained by its natural history museum in the 19th century. The four sets of remains include two Maori skulls, a Moriori skull from the Chatham Islands and a section of a pelvis. The director of Oxford's Museum of Natural History, Jim Kennedy, said on Thursday this was the first repatriation of human remains since a new claims procedure was established by the university in 2006.
■ CANADA
Macca slams seal hunt
Paul McCartney criticized Canada's annual seal hunt on Thursday and asked animal lovers around the world to pressure the EU to proceed with a ban on seal products. The former Beatle issued the appeal in a release distributed by the international and US humane societies. The EU is accepting public comments on the proposed ban until Feb. 13, and McCartney said it is a chance for people everywhere to help end the commercial slaughter of seals. He said a ban on the trade of all seal products in the EU could spell the end of many commercial seal hunts. McCartney said that if the hunt does end, governments should find employment alternatives for seal hunters and compensate them for lost income.
■ GUYANA
Forces kill gang members
Security forces have shot dead two gang members and arrested five men suspected of taking part in a weekend massacre of 11 villagers that shocked the nation, police and army officials said on Thursday. Thousands attended Hindu funeral rites on Thursday, where 10 massacre victims were cremated on open air pyres. At a joint news conference, the army and police said they had killed two men linked to the massacre in a gun battle in a village where bandits were said to hide out. Women and children were among those killed in the village of Lusignan on Saturday. Authorities said the attacks were an attempt to inflame tensions between ethnic African and Indian Guyanese. One notorious gang leader, Rondell Rawlins, is still at large. On Wednesday Rawlins called a local newspaper and pledged more violence if his pregnant, 18-year-old girlfriend does not appear. Rawlins has accused police of abducting Tenisha Morgan.
■ BRAZIL
Gamers to protest ban
Fans of the popular computer games Counter-Strike and EverQuest are to protest a ban against the titles imposed by authorities concerned they incite violence. A blog on the site Liberdade Games said a demonstration was scheduled for today in Sao Paulo, with the aim of getting the prohibition lifted. "We consider the decision absurd, and what's worse is it is unconstitutional and violates the rights of citizens as consumers and vendors," the site said.
■ UNITED STATES
Soldier suicide figures go up
As many as 121 Army soldiers committed suicide last year, a jump of more than 20 percent over the year before, officials said on Thursday. The rise comes despite numerous efforts over the past year to improve the mental health of a force stressed by a longer-than-expected war in Iraq and the six-year-old conflict in Afghanistan. Internal briefing papers prepared by the Army's psychiatry consultant earlier this month show there were 89 confirmed suicides last year and 32 deaths that are suspected suicides and still under investigation.
■ BRAZIL
Croc 'missing link' revealed
Paleontologists on Thursday unveiled a fossil of a creature that they said is the "missing link" between prehistoric and modern crocodiles. Called Montealtosuchus arrudacamposi, it measured 1.5m to1.7m, weighed about 40kg and lived about 80 million years ago in the region of Palo Alto, in Sao Paulo state. Paleontologist Felipe de Vasconcellos, who helped research the fossil found in 2004, said the reptile's physical characteristics placed it between prehistoric crocodiles and their current descendants.
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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