■AUSTRALIA
Officials kill baby humpback
Wildlife officials killed a baby humpback whale that was trying to suckle on yachts moored north of Sydney after losing its mother, saying it would otherwise have starved to death. Vets lifted the female calf in a stretcher and sedated it before giving it a lethal injection yesterday, National Parks and Wildlife Service spokesman John Dengate said. “It’s been a harrowing decision to put this calf down, a last resort,” Dengate said.
■SOUTH KOREA
Students witness murder
Students were in shock after a repairman fatally stabbed his boss, teachers and police said yesterday. The 38-year-old suspect identified only as Lee was arrested for killing his 52-year-old boss, identified as Kang, at a middle school in Cheonan, 80km south of Seoul, on Thursday. Lee repeatedly stabbed Kang after being admonished for failing to replace light bulbs, police said. “Many students saw the victim fleeing the scene, bleeding from wounds,” a schoolteacher said.
■NEW ZEALAND
Tribe to help clean river
The government signed a multimillion-dollar deal yesterday with an indigenous Maori tribe to clean up the tribe’s Waikato River, one of the most polluted waterways in the country. The NZ$300 million (US$215 million) agreement, signed by leaders of the Waikato-Tainui tribe and Treaty Negotiations Minister Michael Cullen, makes the tribe a major player in the cleanup of the 350km river, the country’s longest.
■HONG KONG
Man missing after storm
One man was missing and 49 people were injured after Tropical Storm Nuri hit yesterday. Nuri, which had left seven dead in the Philippines, had weakened en route and been downgraded into a severe tropical storm by the time it hit late yesterday afternoon. Still, a total of 49 people were injured — two when scaffolding collapsed — as winds reached 87kph. A search was also mounted early evening after a man went missing at Big Wave Bay. By 10pm, the worst of the storm had passed and was centered over Shenzhen.
■JAPAN
Ashes stolen from graves
Police in Toyama Prefecture said on Thursday that they were trying to find out who has been snatching human ashes from graves, mostly those of women. Japanese cremate their dead and keep the ashes in urns, placed in a slot inside the gravestone. Jiji Press reported that at least 24 urns had been stolen from graves, mostly those of women. Some of the people who opened family graves found a piece of paper saying, “I got your ashes,” Jiji said. Another person had a note reading, “I will take care of it. Don’t worry.”
■JAPAN
Stem cells from teeth
Scientists said yesterday they had derived stem cells from wisdom teeth, opening another way to study deadly diseases without the controversy of using embryos. Researchers at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology said they created stem cells of the type found in human embryos using the removed wisdom teeth of a 10-year-old girl. “This is significant in two ways,” team leader Hajime Ogushi said. “One is that we can avoid the ethical issues of stem cells because wisdom teeth are destined to be thrown away anyway. Also, we used teeth that had been extracted three years ago and had been preserved in a freezer. That means that it’s easy for us to stock this source of stem cells.”
■UNITED KINGDOM
Pensioners outnumber kids
For the first time there are more people of pensionable age than children under 16, the Office for National Statistics revealed on Thursday. Confirmation of the ageing nature of the population comes as the improvement in mortality rates seen in the second half of the 20th century is shown to have accelerated during this decade. More people are living longer as medical advances continue to reduce the annual number of deaths, which fell to 571,000 last year from 599,000 in 2001.
■ALGERIA
Al-Qaeda claims bombings
The North African wing of the al-Qaeda terrorist network claimed responsibility for two car bombings this week that killed 12 people, the al-Jazeera television network reported. In an audio recording, a spokesman claimed Wednesday’s bombings in Bouira, about 100km southeast of the capital, Algiers, were carried out by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the news network said late on Thursday. The two car bombs detonated in the city center.
■LEBANON
Beirut approves Syria ties
The Unity Cabinet has formally approved diplomatic ties with Syria and the opening of an embassy in Damascus. Information Minister Tarek Mitri said following a Cabinet meeting late on Thursday that the foreign minister has been entrusted with following up on the mechanism to set up the embassy. He did not set a time frame. The two countries agreed earlier this month to establish full diplomatic ties for the first time since they gained their independence from France in the 1940s. They also agreed to demarcate their border.
■UNITED STATES
Israelis sue Bank of China
A group of Israelis sued the Bank of China (BOC) in a California court on Thursday, saying it facilitated terrorism by transferring millions of dollars for Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The 100-some plaintiffs are victims of “a series of terrorist attacks” carried out in Israel by the two Palestinian groups between May 2004 and January last year, documents filed in the Los Angeles Superior Court show. Beginning in 2003, US branches of Bank of China executed dozens of wire transfers totaling several million dollars to an account at a BOC branch in Guangzhou, China owned by Said al-Shurafa, “a senior operative and agent of the PIJ and Hamas,” the lawsuit alleged.
■ISRAEL
Police question Olmert
Police questioned Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for the sixth time yesterday over fraud and bribery allegations, a police spokesman said. Detectives arrived at his official home around 10am, in what has become a familiar weekend pattern since the scandal broke in May. It led last month to Olmert announcing he would resign once a successor is chosen. The prime minister, suspected of taking bribes from a US businessman and of making false travel expense claims, could step aside immediately after his centrist Kadima party votes in a leadership election on Sept. 17.
■RUSSIA
Khodorkovsky refused bail
A court rejected a request by jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky for parole yesterday. The judge said Khodorkovsky was ineligible for early release from a sentence for tax evasion and fraud because he had refused to undertake professional training at his prison, which specializes in sewing, and because of an incident in which he flouted prison rules.
■UNITED STATES
Ex-Marine in landmark trial
A former Marine ignored clear rules for handling prisoners and ordered the killing of four unarmed Iraqis during 2004 fighting in Fallujah, a landmark trial heard on Thursday. Jose Nazario, 28, disregarded Marine Corps training that prisoners must be protected at all times, shooting dead two of the captives himself before ordering two subordinates to kill the others, prosecutors said. The allegations came in opening statements of a trial that has made legal history. It is the first time a military veteran has been tried by a civilian jury for actions that occurred during combat. Nazario, who had left the Marines by the time he was arrested last year, denies the charges.
■IRAQ
US releases cameraman
The US military released an Iraqi television cameraman for the Reuters news agency and other news organizations without charges on Thursday, after 26 days in detention. Ali al-Mashhadani, who also works for the BBC and National Public Radio, had been detained twice before, including for a five-month stretch. Al-Mashhadani was freed “because he was deemed not to be a security threat,” Major John Hall, a US military spokesman, said in a statement. Reuters and the BBC demanded an explanation for al-Mashhadani’s detention.
■CHILE
Gas subsidy suspended
The lower house of congress has suspended plans to boost a US$1,626 gasoline subsidy for each of its members. The payment dwarfs a US$2.80 monthly electricity subsidy that President Michelle Bachelet unveiled this week for the nation’s poor. Legislators were planning an 11 percent increase in extra gas money, but quickly backed down on Thursday and even criticized the increase. The lawmakers have received the subsidy for years and there was no talk of ending the practice.
■BRAZIL
Bishops defend reservation
Roman Catholic bishops urged the Supreme Court on Thursday to uphold the creation of a native Indian reservation that sparked a violent land conflict earlier this year. The court is to decide whether to annul an Indian reservation in northern Roraima state created three years ago. Bishop Geraldo Lyrio Rocha, president of the Brazilian Catholic Bishops Conference, warned that a decision against the reservation would undermine the Indians’ constitutional right to live on their ancestral lands. The dispute began in April when police tried to evict rice farmers from the reservation in Roraima. The farmers resisted by blocking roads, blowing up bridges and hiring gunmen. Ten Indians were wounded in a shootout in May.
■UNITED STATES
Couple wins lottery twice
A woman and her accountant husband who claims he has a formula for lottery picks each won US$350,000 jackpots — twice. Verlyn and Judith Adamson claimed two US$350,000 jackpots on Monday because each held a ticket in the state SuperCash drawing last Saturday. They didn’t mention at the time that they also held two more of the winning tickets. They claimed those jackpots on Thursday. Their winnings amount to US$1.4 million, or about US$955,000 after taxes. Verlyn Adamson said earlier in the week that he’s a big fan of math puzzles. He claims he developed a formula for lottery picks. But Steven Post, a mathematics professor at Edgewood College in Madison, wasn’t buying it. He said there is no way to devise a strategy in a game that uses randomly generated numbers.
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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