■ AUSTRALIA
'Sydney' inquiry begins
An inquiry began yesterday into the 66-year-old mystery of why the pride of the country's World War II navy was sunk with all hands aboard by a more lightly armed German ship. A board of inquiry will seek to explain the fate of the HMAS Sydney and its 645 crew. The hulk of the Sydney was discovered off the western coast on March 16, a day after its nemesis, the German cruiser Kormoran was found. The vessels fought a battle on Nov. 19, 1941, and both went down.
■ CHINA
Teacher accused of rape
Police have arrested a teacher linked to the rape and sexual assault of 16 schoolgirls, a newspaper reported yesterday. Huang Shiming (黃世明), a primary school teacher in Huima, Sichuan Province, was accused of raping six girls aged between eight and 11 between April 2004 and last September, the Beijing Times said. He was also accused of sexually assaulting 10 other girls. Huang disappeared after a victim's family reported him to police and eluded authorities for more than a year before being identified in Guangdong Province.
■ SOUTH KOREA
Ad angers Russian champ
A famed Russian martial arts fighter is on the warpath after being featured in a honey commercial said to damage his image. Prosecutors said yesterday they had charged the chief of a martial arts group with fraud for using the publicity rights of world heavyweight champion Fedor Emelianenko without consent. Emelianenko filed a complaint seeking 1.55 billion won (US$1.56 million) in compensation from Korea Sambo Federation chief Moon Jong-keum and the head of a beekeepers' association that allegedly paid Moon 22 million won to use footage of Emelianenko. "The defendants damaged Fedor's image by producing commercials that do not fit his powerful image and were made with shoddy footage," the complaint said.
■ INDONESIA
Boys takes money and runs
Police said yesterday they were searching for a boy who ran away from his Jakarta home on Thursday with more than US$10,000 belonging to his father. The nine-year-old reportedly bought a PlayStation video game console and a mobile phone after enlisting the help of a mall security guard to change about US$800 into Indonesian rupiah. The boy ran away after his mother grounded him for not doing his homework, the Jakarta Post reported. He spent the night at the shopping mall and asked the security guard to take him to school the next morning, but disappeared after telling a teacher he was going to play basketball, the paper said.
■ GERMANY
Putin critic disappears
Police and state security officers have launched a wide-scale hunt for a Russian artist and critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin's government who disappeared from her Berlin flat 11 days ago. Anna Mikhalchuk, 52, who has lived in the German capital since November, went for a walk on Good Friday and failed to return. At the weekend, police divers and sniffer dogs trawled a lake and searched allotments close to the home she shares with her husband, Michail Ryklin, a prize-winning philosopher and author. "On that afternoon she said goodbye to me and said she wanted to go for a short walk," Ryklin said.
■ GERMANY
Swan reunited with boat
Petra the black swan has been reunited with her beloved swan-shaped paddleboat after a failed romance with a real bird. Officials at a Muenster zoo where Petra has been spending the winter took her to a nearby lake on Friday and released her next to the paddleboat -- shaped like a giant white swan. Petra became so attached to the boat back in 2006 that she refused to leave its side. When winter came around, she and the boat were taken into the zoo. In recent months, Petra had struck up a relationship with a real white swan. However, he abandoned her last week -- and officials decided to reunite her with the boat.
■ RUSSIA
Rain threatens cult bunker
Authorities urged 28 members of a doomsday cult on Sunday to leave the mud bunker in which they are awaiting the end of the world, saying spring rain may trigger its collapse at any time. The doomsday cult members have been in an underground shelter dug out of a muddy hillside gully in the Penza region of central Russia since October. They have been refusing to come out until the end of the world, which they predict will happen in late this month or next month. On Friday a small mud slide near the entrance to the dugout isolated seven women from the remaining cult members.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Plane crash kills five
A small plane crashed into a residential area in Kent, south of London, on Sunday, killing five people and completely destroying a house, police and rescue officials said. Fire and police officials said they had found no survivors amid the flaming wreckage. Officials said the plane was carrying two pilots and three passengers. "No survivors were found, but I can confirm that there were no people involved in the houses," said Jim Bascran, of the London fire department. Police said they would not release any more information on the identities of the dead until their next of kin had been notified.
■ VATICAN
Islam dominates: Vatican
Islam has overtaken Roman Catholicism as the biggest religious denomination in the world, the Vatican said on Sunday. Monsignor Vittorio Formenti, who compiled the Vatican's newly released 2008 yearbook of statistics, said Muslims made up 19.2 percent of the world's population and Catholics 17.4 percent. "For the first time in history we are no longer at the top: The Muslims have overtaken us," Formenti told Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano in an interview, saying the data referred to 2006. He said that if all Christian groups were considered, then Christians made up 33 percent of the world's population.
■ UNITED STATES
Soldier's remains identified
The US Army has identified the remains of a soldier captured by insurgents in Iraq nearly four years ago, CNN reported on Sunday. Sergeant Keith Maupin, an Army reservist from Batavia, Ohio, had been missing since his convoy, part of the 724th Transportation Company was attacked near Baghdad on April 9, 2004.
■ HAITI
Ad features Wyclef Jean
In a radio ad sponsored by the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti, Grammy Award-winning musician Wyclef Jean is asking his fellow citizens to give up crime and work to improve the country. "If you love Wyclef, that means you love Haiti. So you should not be raping women, kidnapping people and children, because there can be no excuse for doing so," Jean said in Creole in a short ad run several times a day by local stations.
■ PERU
Ruins vandalized
Visitors are increasingly vandalizing the ruins of the famed Sacsayhuaman fortress, leaving behind what authorities say is an unusual accumulation of graffiti from the likes of soccer fans and lovers. Photos published on Sunday in the El Comercio newspaper show the ancient ruins scrawled with graffiti. Sacsayhuaman was built in the 1100s by the Killke culture and later enlarged during the Inca empire, which flourished in the 1400s until the arrival of Spanish conquistadors.
■ BRAZIL
Girl thrown from window
A five-year-old girl was apparently thrown to her death from a sixth-floor window in Sao Paulo, police said. The body of Isabella de Oliveira Nardoni was found early on Sunday outside her father's apartment building, the Agencia Estado news service reported, quoting inspector Calixto Calil Filho. Police found blood inside the girl's room and a large hole in the window's security netting and were investigating her death as a homicide rather than an accident, Calil Filho said.
■ UNITED STATES
Freeway shootings kill one
Rescue crews responding to a wreck on a San Fernando freeway found a driver fatally shot in the head, while another driver was shot and wounded in a separate attack about 48km away in Long Beach, authorities said. The incidents were the latest in a string of Southern California freeway shootings stretching back several weeks. The San Fernando Valley victim is thought to have crashed his car after being shot on the 101 Freeway early on Sunday morning, Los Angeles police officer Norma Eisenman said. The man shot in the Long Beach shooting was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries. He characterized the shooting as a road-rage incident, an officer said.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Meat increases cancer risk
Eating just one sausage a day, or the equivalent of any processed meat, may increase the risk of developing bowel cancer by a fifth, a leading scientist said. Martin Wiseman, medical adviser for the World Cancer Research Fund, said people eating 50g of processed meat a day -- about one sausage or a few strips of bacon -- were putting their health at risk. Processed meat includes food treated with preservatives, or which is preserved by smoking, curing or salting. Ham, bacon, pastrami, salami, hot dogs and processed sausages fall into the category, as do hamburgers and minced meat if preserved with salt or chemical additives. Bowel cancer is the third most common type of cancer in the UK.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Tuesday declared martial law in an unannounced late night address broadcast live on YTN television. Yoon said he had no choice but to resort to such a measure in order to safeguard free and constitutional order, saying opposition parties have taken hostage of the parliamentary process to throw the country into a crisis. "I declare martial law to protect the free Republic of Korea from the threat of North Korean communist forces, to eradicate the despicable pro-North Korean anti-state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people, and to protect the free
France on Friday showed off to the world the gleaming restored interior of Notre-Dame cathedral, a week before the 850-year-old medieval edifice reopens following painstaking restoration after the devastating 2019 fire. French President Emmanuel Macron conducted an inspection of the restoration, broadcast live on television, saying workers had done the “impossible” by healing a “national wound” after the fire on April 19, 2019. While every effort has been made to remain faithful to the original look of the cathedral, an international team of designers and architects have created a luminous space that has an immediate impact on the visitor. The floor shimmers and
CHAGOS ISLANDS: Recently elected Mauritian Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam told lawmakers that the contents of negotiations are ‘unknown’ to the government Mauritius’ new prime minister ordered an independent review of a deal with the UK involving a strategically important US-UK military base in the Indian Ocean, placing the agreement under fresh scrutiny. Under a pact signed last month, the UK ceded sovereignty of the Chagos archipelago to Mauritius, while retaining control of Diego Garcia — the island where the base is situated. The deal was signed by then-Mauritian prime minister Pravind Jugnauth and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Oct. 3 — a month before elections in Mauritius in which Navin Ramgoolam became premier. “I have asked for an independent review of the
LAOS: The bars of bustling Vang Vieng remain open, but information on the investigation into the deaths of six backpackers from suspected methanol poisoning is scarce The music is still playing and the alcohol is still flowing at the bars along one of the party streets in Vang Vieng. Inside a popular venue, a voice over the speaker announces a special offer on beers, as disco lights flicker on the floor. Small paper flags from nations across the world — from the UK to Gabon — hang from the ceiling. Young people travel from all corners of the globe to party in the small town nestled in the Laos countryside, but Vang Vieng is under a global spotlight, following a suspected mass methanol poisoning that killed six
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