■ SOUTH KOREA
Cull planned of 5.3m birds
Seoul yesterday said it planned to cull a record 5.3 million birds as it announced its 17th case of bird flu in three weeks, in what has become the country’s fastest and biggest outbreak of avian influenza. The nation has culled 4.86 million chickens and ducks since the beginning of the month, as the highly virulent H5N1 strain, first reported in the southwest, has been confirmed in five provinces.
■ CHINA
Rain forces evacuations
Authorities evacuated about 200 people living near the Three Gorges Dam because of a landslide that followed heavy rains, state media and local officials said yesterday. The landslide hit on Sunday in Hubei Province, inundating 37 homes and a primary school with rocks and mud, the Xinhua news agency said. Residents were evacuated to a temporary shelter before the landslide hit and no casualties were reported. A government official said the landslide began on Saturday afternoon.
■ SOUTH KOREA
Sex killers may face death
The justice ministry on Sunday drafted a bill that could punish child sex killers with the death penalty after a high-profile crime that rocked the nation, officials said. The bill, made public by Yonhap news agency, stipulates that people who sexually assault and then kill children aged under 13 would face either the death penalty or imprisonment until they die. No one has been executed in South Korea for 10 years and activists have called for the death penalty to be formally scrapped. But the bill was prompted by a case where two girls aged 11 and nine were kidnapped, raped and murdered in December. Their bodies were found cut up and buried several months later.
■SOUTH KOREA
Cloned dogs start sniffing
The world’s first cloned sniffer dogs have begun training and will be ready to report for duty this year, customs officials said yesterday. Seven cloned puppies named Toppy (“Tomorrow’s puppy”) were born late last year to three surrogate mothers under a state-funded project, the Korea Customs Service said. The Toppies have passed the first round of tests for behavioral patterns and genetic qualities, it said. “They will report for duty in June after completing a second round of training,” customs spokesman Lee Ho said. The 300 million won (US$301,205) project was carried out by Lee Byung-chun, who played a key role in the world’s first successful cloning of a dog by creating a duplicate of a three-year-old Afghan Hound. Lee used the nuclei of somatic cells from sniffer dog Chase, a Golden Retriever, to clone the puppies.
■ MYANMAR
Bombs explode in Yangon
Two bombs exploded on Sunday in the country’s biggest city, witnesses said, but no casualties were reported. The witnesses, who insisted on anonymity for fear of official reprisal, said the first blast occurred on a downtown Yangon street at around 8pm. The second took place about an hour later on a different street near the luxurious Traders Hotel, the witnesses said. There was no known claim of responsibility and authorities did not immediately mention any suspects or confirm what caused the blasts. The first bomb damaged a car that it was hidden under, said witnesses who live nearby. They said the other bomb was also placed under a car. No other details of either blast were available. Few people were in the streets at the time. Security and riot police quickly blocked off both blast sites. Terrorism is rare in Myanmar, which has been under near-continuous military rule since 1962.
■ THAILAND
Sun chicken makes debut
Solar energy has found a unique outlet as one innovator is using the sun’s rays to roast barbecued chicken at his roadside stall, drawing the attention of Japanese researchers and hungry motorists, news reports said yesterday. With temperatures and fuel prices rising around the globe, Sila Sutharat’s solar-seared chicken, sold at a roadside in Phetchaburi town, 90km southwest of Bangkok, recently attracted a team of Japanese researchers keen to learn his cooking techniques, the Bangkok Post newspaper reported. Sila, 50, has devised a concave collection of small mirrors, that reflect the morning sun’s rays onto his chickens. The Thai innovator, who attributed his culinary brainstorm to a childhood experiment with a magnifying glass, said the sun can roast a 1.6kg chicken in 10 minutes for an average of 50 birds each morning, selling at 160 baht (US$5) each. While the solar system saves on fuel, Sila acknowledged that it only works from 7am to 11am and takes twice as long when the skies are overcast.
■ MALAYSIA
Teenager falls to death
A teenage girl plunged to death after losing her grip on the blanket she had tied to her apartment window in an attempt to swing into her friend’s home one floor below. The 17-year-old had been sneaking out of her 11-story apartment to meet a girlfriend who lives just one floor down, the Star newspaper reported yesterday. But she lost her grip and fell all the way to the ground. Local police chief Abdul Razak Abdul Majid said the case was classified as sudden death and no foul play was suspected.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Police avoid dismissal
Scores of police officers are avoiding dismissal after being convicted of drunk-driving, despite official guidelines that say they should usually be sacked or forced to resign because of the seriousness of the offense. The Guardian has learned that at least 170 officers have been allowed to remain serving or to retire at taxpayers’ expense — after being convicted of drunk-driving since the guidelines were issued six years ago. A series of requests for information have revealed wide differences in the manner in which forces deal with officers convicted of drunk-driving, or related offenses.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Sexual offenders nabbed
A police agency specializing in protecting children from sexual abuse played a part in the arrest of 297 suspected offenders last year, a three-fold annual increase, it said yesterday. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), set up in 2006 to monitor suspected sex offenders, particularly on the Internet, said it had rescued 131 children from sexual abuse — double the figure from the previous year. The CEOP said it had dismantled six pedophile rings with international links and processed almost 1 million images of child sex abuse.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Media slam prince’s landing
Prince William landed an air force helicopter at the home of his girlfriend’s parents during a training flight, the Defence Ministry said. Media on Sunday called the exercise wasteful at a time when the military is stretched by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and warned it risked testing the public’s patience with the monarchy. The landing on the Middleton family farm on April 3 was planned and authorized as part of the prince’s Royal Air Force pilot training, the ministry statement said. “The aircraft landed in the field, after taking all necessary safety precautions and was on the ground for 20 seconds,” the ministry said.
■ GEORGIA
Russia shoots down drone
The former Soviet state yesterday accused a Russian air force jet of shooting down one of its unmanned reconnaissance plane in an “unprovoked act of aggression,” but Moscow said the allegation was nonsense. Officials in Tbilisi released video footage they said came from the drone’s on-board camera and which they said showed a Russian military MiG-29 jet launching a missile at the plane as it flew over the breakaway Abkhazia region. The allegation is likely to aggravate tensions between Moscow and Tbilisi. A spokesman for Russia’s air force, when asked about the allegation, said: “Nonsense. What would a Russian jet fighter be doing over Georgian territory?”
■ IRAN
Police chief denies rumors
The police chief has rejected allegations that a former top commander was arrested after being found with several naked women, saying the accusation was more “personal and minor,” the Fars news agency reported on Sunday. Reza Zareie, who was the head of police for Tehran Province and enforced one of the toughest moral crackdowns in years, has been detained and placed under investigation. Web sites have been abuzz with speculation over his arrest, with outlets alleging he was found in a “house of corruption” with six naked prostitutes. However, police chief Esmaeel Ahmadi Moghaddam said the accusations were less serious than those reported by the Web sites and denied that six women had been involved.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
No change in climate: Gore
Nobel Peace Prize-winner Al Gore said in an interview published yesterday in the Sun tabloid that there had been no improvement in the fight against climate change since his Oscar-winning film on the issue was released. He said the situation had gotten worse since his documentary An Inconvenient Truth hit movie theaters in 2006. “Sure, awareness has grown and more people are concerned since scientists said we had just 10 years to take action to halt rising sea levels. But the situation has got worse. The entire North Polar ice cap is melting and could be gone in some areas in as little as five years,” he said. “You have to ask what would it take to set off the alarm bells to make this a top-of-mind priority in the body politic.”
■ UNITED STATES
Family awaits body ID
The family of a contractor kidnapped in Iraq said on Sunday that US officials have notified them they have found a body that could be his. The family of Jonathon Cote said on the Web site Free Cote that an unidentified sixth body has been recovered near Basra. Cote was one of six Western contractors kidnapped in two separate incidents. The New York state resident was working in Kuwait for Crescent Security Group when he and four colleagues were abducted in November 2006. Their disappearance received new attention last month when the severed fingers of several men were sent to the US military in Iraq, followed by the discovery of two bodies. The remains of the other men have already been identified.
■ RUSSIA
American sentenced
A Moscow court yesterday sentenced a US pastor to three years in prison for illegally bringing hunting ammunition into the country. Phillip Miles was arrested in a Moscow airport on Feb. 3 after customs officials found a box with 20 rounds of undeclared hunting ammunition in his luggage. Miles said at the time it was a present for his friend, a pastor from the Urals city of Perm. A judge ruled that the 52-year-old pastor from South Carolina will spend three years and two months in a prison camp. Interfax news agency quoted Miles as saying he regretted violating Russian law, but he also called his sentence “severe.”
■ MEXICO
Oil fight triggers ad row
A political row over an oil reform plan intensified over the weekend as a TV ad compared a firebrand leftist leading a siege of Congress to 20th century dictators Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Funded by a businessman angry at a 10-day blockade of Congress by opposition left-wing lawmakers, the ad says the antics of protest leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador are endangering democracy. Leftists are blocking a government proposal to lower barriers to private investment in the oil sector, controlled by the state since 1938. “Who shuts congresses? In 1933, Adolf Hitler in Germany. In 1939, Benito Mussolini in Italy. In 1973, Augusto Pinochet of Chile,” the ad says.
■ UNITED STATES
Bottle plea lands at NASA
A Bahamian girl’s seaborne school project has landed on the sandy doorstep of NASA in Titusville, Florida. United Space Alliance worker Jill Vogel found a message in a bottle from a student at the Holy Name Catholic School in Bimini while volunteering for a beach cleanup near the Kennedy Space Center. Vogel and her colleagues have collected space memorabilia to send to the nine-year-old girl and her classmates.
The collapse of the Swiss Birch glacier serves as a chilling warning of the escalating dangers faced by communities worldwide living under the shadow of fragile ice, particularly in Asia, experts said. Footage of the collapse on Wednesday showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountainside into the hamlet of Blatten. Swiss Development Cooperation disaster risk reduction adviser Ali Neumann said that while the role of climate change in the case of Blatten “still needs to be investigated,” the wider impacts were clear on the cryosphere — the part of the world covered by frozen water. “Climate change and
Poland is set to hold a presidential runoff election today between two candidates offering starkly different visions for the country’s future. The winner would succeed Polish President Andrzej Duda, a conservative who is finishing his second and final term. The outcome would determine whether Poland embraces a nationalist populist trajectory or pivots more fully toward liberal, pro-European policies. An exit poll by Ipsos would be released when polls close today at 9pm local time, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Final results are expected tomorrow. Whoever wins can be expected to either help or hinder the
DENIAL: Musk said that the ‘New York Times was lying their ass off,’ after it reported he used so much drugs that he developed bladder problems Elon Musk on Saturday denied a report that he used ketamine and other drugs extensively last year on the US presidential campaign trail. The New York Times on Friday reported that the billionaire adviser to US President Donald Trump used so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that he developed bladder problems. The newspaper said the world’s richest person also took ecstasy and mushrooms, and traveled with a pill box last year, adding that it was not known whether Musk also took drugs while heading the so-called US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after Trump took power in January. In a
It turns out that looming collision between our Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies might not happen after all. Astronomers on Monday said that the probability of the two spiral galaxies colliding is less than previously thought, with a 50-50 chance within the next 10 billion years. That is essentially a coin flip, but still better odds than previous estimates and farther out in time. “As it stands, proclamations of the impending demise of our galaxy seem greatly exaggerated,” the Finnish-led team wrote in a study appearing in Nature Astronomy. While good news for the Milky Way galaxy, the latest forecast might be moot
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