■ HONG KONG
Bird park closed over virus
The government ordered the famed Mai Po bird sanctuary closed for three weeks yesterday after a great egret found nearby was suspected of dying from bird flu, officials said. Preliminary tests indicated the great egret may have contracted the H5 virus, and more tests were being conducted to confirm whether it was the H5N1 strain, the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department said late on Tuesday. Last year, 21 wild birds infected with H5N1 were discovered, but the territory has not suffered a major outbreak of the disease since 1997.
■ JAPAN
Foreign ministry attacked
A man threw a Molotov cocktail into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs compound yesterday and slashed himself with a knife, but there were no other injuries or damage, police in Tokyo said. The man was rushed to a hospital for his cuts, and the motive for the attack was unknown, a police officer said. Kyodo News agency reported the man climbed over a fence surrounding the ministry and threw a bottle filled with a flammable liquid.
■ INDONESIA
`Tempo' sorry for parody
A leading magazine has apologized to Christians for depicting former president Suharto and his family in an image parodying Leonardo Da Vinci's Last Supper in the cover of its latest edition. Weekly magazine Tempo's cover showed a sketch of Suharto, who died at 86 last month, sitting at a table surrounded by his children in a parody of the last meal Jesus had with his disciples as depicted in Da Vinci's painting. Christian activists visited Tempo's building on Tuesday to protest the cover.
■ PHILIPPINES
Abu Sayyaf suspect nabbed
Police in the south said yesterday they arrested a Muslim militant involved in the mass kidnapping of tourists in 2001 that led to the death of five people. Al Muadz Ismael, a member of the Abu Sayyaf group, was arrested in a raid in Isabela City on Basilan on Tuesday, police Chief Inspector Albert Larubis said. He said Ismael was arrested for stealing a motorcycle, but was then found to be facing charges for the 2001 kidnappings. Ismael is believed to be part of an Abu Sayyaf cell that seized three Americans and a group of Filipinos from a resort off Palawan.
■ NEW ZEALAND
Baby to be treated in US
A severely deformed baby who was refused medical treatment in New Zealand has been granted a US visa and is heading to Miami for surgery, supporters said yesterday. Miracletina Nanai was born six months ago in Samoa with missing eyeballs and fingers, deformed feet and spinal cord, a partial brain and a double cleft palate. New Zealand denied the family visas in December, saying experts had decided there was no treatment that would benefit Nanai's quality of life.
■ CHAD
French minister arrives
French Defense Minister Herve Morin arrived in N'Djamena yesterday in a show of support for President Idriss Deby, who survived a weekend assault on the capital by rebels seeking to topple him. Meanwhile, UN Secretary- General Ban Ki-moon said the world body had evacuated most of its staff from the country because of worries for their safety. Ban said he was leaving in place a small number of UN peacekeepers and other personnel in the capital and that the UN would do as much as it could to help resolve the crisis.
■ UNITED STATES
Drug lord gets 30 years
A Colombian drugs kingpin described by US authorities as one of the world's most significant international cocaine barons was sentenced to 30 years in jail by a New York court on Tuesday. Manuel Felipe Salazar-Espinosa, 58, also known as "Hoover," was convicted on narcotics and money laundering charges. He was arrested in Colombia in 2005 while planning a cocaine shipment for the US. He was extradited to the US in August 2006 and put on trial and convicted last year. "Today's sentence puts an end to the 20-year criminal career of Hoover Salazar, one of the world's most significant cocaine kingpins," US attorney Michael Garcia said after the sentencing.
■ UNITED STATES
School receives US$5m
The checks to Temple University really were in the mail -- for US$5 million. It was a total surprise for the school to receive the anonymous donations, which were sent via mail from a bank in Arizona, said Stuart Sullivan, Temple's senior vice president for institutional advancement. One envelope contained a US$1 million bank check for the university to use however it chooses, Sullivan said on Tuesday. The second held a US$4 million check to endow a scholarship for women and minorities. The school contacted the bank to try to find out more, but the donors insisted on remaining anonymous, Sullivan said.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Blind musician wins suit
A blind calypso musician and his band who were thrown off a Ryanair plane as suspected terrorists were awarded a total of £4,000 (US$7,900) in damages on Tuesday. Michael Toussaint and four members of the London-based Caribbean Steel International Orchestra were escorted off the plane at gunpoint by Italian police without warning or explanation and were not allowed back on despite being cleared by authorities within 20 minutes. A judge ruled that Ryainair had not acted reasonably and had failed in its duty of care to the passengers, particularly Toussaint, who was entitled to special care because of his disability.
■ UNITED STATES
No serving fat customers
A lawmaker in Mississippi wants to ban restaurants from serving food to obese customers -- but please, don't be offended. He says he does not expect his plan to become law. "I was trying to shed a little light on the No. 1 problem in Mississippi," said Republican Representative John Read, who said that at 1.8m and 104kg, he would probably have a tough time getting served under his own bill. More than 30 percent of adults in Mississippi are considered obese, a study last year by the Trust for America's Health showed. The state House Public Health Committee chairman, Democrat Steve Holland, said he would "shred" the bill.
‘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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