■SINGAPORE
HFMD outbreak looms
An outbreak of hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) is looming in the city-state, the Straits Times reported yesterday, quoting health ministry officials. The newspaper said 553 people became infected with the virus last week, up from 415 the previous week and just 12 fewer than the health ministry’s official epidemic threshold. Health officials were quoted as saying the numbers are likely to increase between now and October, traditionally a peak period for the disease, which usually affects children. A three-year-old boy died at a local hospital earlier this month from a severe form of HFMD.
■NORTH KOREA
Super noodle fights hunger
The regime is reportedly claiming it has developed a new kind of noodle that makes people feel full longer than ordinary food. Choson Sinbo newspaper said yesterday that the noodle — made with a mixture of beans and corn — doesn’t make people “feel a sense of hunger that generally comes soon after eating [ordinary] noodle.” The Tokyo-based newspaper, a mouthpiece for the regime in Pyongyang, cited a North Korean research institute. It didn’t elaborate on how the special noodle works or how long people who eat it can go without hunger pangs. The report said the new noodle would be available soon.
■PHILIPPINES
Man arrested for terror joke
Airport police warned travelers yesterday that bomb jokes mean serious trouble after a man was arrested for making a joke while undergoing final security check at Manila’s international airport. Chief Superintendent Atilano Morada said a total of 15 people have been arrested at various airports in the country since the ban against bomb jokes was implemented two years ago. “The public should be reminded and warned that violating the law on false bomb threats is a crime punishable by up to five years imprisonment and a fine of up to 40,000 pesos [US$880],” he said. Morada said a man was arrested late on Friday for joking that his bags contained hand grenades at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport.
■BANGLADESH
Mother ends it all on rails
A woman killed herself and her baby daughter by jumping under a train, but a second daughter survived the murder-suicide, a railway official said yesterday. The unidentified woman, 30, jumped with her two children into the path of a train near Kishoreganj, 240km east of the capital Dhaka, security guard Abdul Alim Chowdhury said. The mother died on the spot and the two-year-old daughter also succumbed to injuries on the way to a local health clinic, he said. But rescuers were able to save the four-year-old daughter, he said.
■MYANMAR
Mini-skirt ads torn down
Billboards in the commercial capital that feature scantily clad women will be torn down and replaced with advertisements featuring more culturally appropriate images, the government said yesterday. Yangon Mayor Brigadier General Aung Thein Lin, commenting in an edition of the Voice journal, said models in mini skirts on advertisements for everything from skin creams to car lubricants were too provocative. He said the ads should be replaced with ones showing women in more conservative clothing. Aung Thein Lin did not say when authorities would order the billboards to be changed or what the new guidelines for culturally appropriate clothing would be.
■GERMANY
1,000 probed over child porn
Police are investigating around 1,000 people suspected of downloading child pornography from the Internet, police said on Friday. Officials started their investigation two years ago when they discovered videos showing the sexual abuse of two young girls on the Internet. The site in question had been visited more than 48,000 times in one month, police said. Analyzing connection data, police started investigating 987 suspects in Germany and passed on more than 41,000 sets of data to officials in 98 countries.
■IRAN
Murderer hanged: report
Authorities have hanged a man convicted of murder in the northeastern town of Bojnourd, a press report said yesterday. The man, only identified as Ali, was executed on Thursday in a prison in North Khorasan province for killing his friend in 2005, the reformist Etemad newspaper said. The hanging brings to at least 173 the number of executions in Iran this year. Amnesty International reported that last year Iran applied the death penalty more often than any other country apart from China, executing 317 people during the year.
■SERBIA
Stepfather arrested for rape
A man suspected of raping his stepdaughter over a dozen years and even fathering her child was arrested in the central part of the country, local newspapers reported yesterday. The man, 55, allegedly began raping his stepdaughter in 1996, when she was just 12 years old. A war veteran, he was exposed after the girl finally told her mother about the abuse. After the arrest, the man told an investigative judge he was in “an emotional relationship” with his common law wife’s daughter and that “all sex was consensual.” The woman reported him to police despite his threats that he would kill them.
■ITALY
Illegal immigrants hit shores
Nearly 900 would-be immigrants have arrived on the country’s shores in the last two days, putting new pressure on an already overcrowded processing center, a coastguard spokesman said on Friday. The coastguard rescued some 480 people on Friday after they were spotted near the island of Lampedusa, a speck of land 185km from Tunisia and 321km from Libya, the embarkation point for most of the boat people. Another 42 arrived on their own, the day after 355 Eritreans disembarked on the Mediterranean island, the southernmost piece of Italian territory. Nearly 1,600 people are crowded into Lampedusa’s processing center, built to accommodate 850 people, Lampedusa Mayor Bernardino De Rubeis said.
■ANGOLA
85,000 expelled before polls
Angola has expelled more than 85,000 Congolese citizens over the past three months as the African oil giant prepares for its first elections since a 27-year civil war ended in 2002, the UN said on Friday. Returnees began streaming across the border into Congo from northern and eastern Angola in late May, as Angola’s army and police began clamping down on illegal residents, it said. “It was announced by the [Angolan] authorities that they wanted to expel illegal foreigners before the elections,” Ivo Brandau, spokesman for the UN humanitarian coordination office in Kinshasa, told reporters. An estimated 400,000 Congolese live in northern Angola, with a large number working in the mines of Africa’s third largest diamond producer.
■UNITED STATES
‘McCain’ defeats ‘Obama’
This presidential race was no contest: John McCain sped to the finish while Barack Obama was reluctant to leave the starting point. Of course there is no guarantee giant Madagascar hissing cockroaches will predict the real result in November. The roach race on Thursday was part of the New Jersey Pest Management Association’s annual clinic and trade show. Organizers liken the race’s prediction success to that of Punxsutawney Phil on Groundhog Day, when lore says the rodent can predict how long winter weather will last depending on whether he sees his shadow.
■UNITED STATES
Driver hits grizzly bear
One moment Howard Hawkins Jr was driving to get an early morning cup of coffee, and the next he hit a large grizzly bear running at a full gallop across one of Anchorage’s busiest streets. “It is just unreal,” Hawkins said Friday, less than 12 hours after his 2002 Land Rover struck the bear. “I didn’t have time to react. I wasn’t even able to hit my brakes or anything. What stopped the forward motion of the car is that I ran into a big bear.” Hawkins, 57, plowed into the bear shortly before 4am in what is the latest in a summer of close encounters between human and bruin in Alaska’s largest city.
■UNITED STATES
Small plane crashes
A twin-engine plane crashed near the Canyonlands Field airport in Mohab, Utah, on Friday, killing at least three people, the Grand County sheriff’s office said. The plane was fully engulfed in flames when emergency responders arrived, so the plane’s tail number was unreadable and its ownership was not immediately known, the sheriff’s office said in a statement. The pilot appeared to try to land before the crash, Sheriff James Nyland told the Salt Lake Tribune newspaper. “It skidded along the desert out there,” he told the paper. Nyland said the Utah state medical examiner was to arrive on scene yesterday morning.
■ARGENTINA
Dog takes baby girl in
A female dog found an abandoned newborn baby girl early on Thursday and took the child home with her puppies in a poor suburb of La Plata, local media reported, citing police sources. The owner of the dog reportedly noticed the baby hours later, when he heard her cry. The man immediately called the police, and the newborn was taken to a hospital in La Plata. The dog, called China, reportedly found the baby in a barren lot in the neighborhood of Abasto. Guided by her instinct, she took the girl with her puppies and kept her warm in the winter.
■CANADA
Top drug exporter to US
Canada is one of the top three world suppliers of the psychedelic drug ecstasy and a significant supplier of marijuana to the US, the government admitted on Friday. A survey of organized crime by Criminal Intelligence Services Canada found that it, the Netherlands and Belgium were the primary sources of ecstasy, an illegal drug that is popular at clubs, raves and rock concerts. “Canada continues to be a major producer for both domestic and international markets, exporting significant quantities primarily to the US and to a lesser extent, Japan, Australia and New Zealand,” the report said.
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
RSS