■Hong Kong
Boy arrested for hoax
An 11-year-old boy was arrested for a bomb hoax that sparked the evacuation of a housing estate with more than 100 residents, police said yesterday. A wooden box was found on Saturday with a bomb threat attached in the Aberdeen area. It was one of a series of hoaxes over the last few weeks as officials tightened security while the territory played host to the Olympic equestrian events. One false bomb was discovered in a flower bed outside the main entrance of a Tsim Sha Tui hotel where Olympic VIP guests were staying.
■VIETNAM
Police raid nightclub
A newspaper said hundreds of riot police raided a nightclub in a northern city, detaining nearly 200 people for suspected drug use. Thanh Nien newspaper said more than 200 police raided the Friendly bar in Hai Phong early on Saturday. The report yesterday said at least 37 people tested positive for drugs and that police seized 10 ecstasy tablets, 22 marijuana cigarettes and an unspecified amount of heroin. Nearly 200 people were detained. Police were not available for comment yesterday.
■SOUTH KOREA
Beef protesters arrested
Police arrested 19 people for illegally occupying streets here overnight in a continued protest against US beef imports, a report said yesterday. They were among hundreds of people holding separate vigils on Saturday through early yesterday, as protesters accused police of excessive use of force, Yonhap news agency said. Police refused to comment. Seoul’s decision in April to resume imports of almost all cuts of US beef sparked months of street protests over supposed health concerns, lifting a 2003 ban after a US case of mad cow disease.
■MALAYSIA
Deceased couple wed
An infant dead for 50 years and a teenager who died of kidney failure three decades ago were married over the weekend by a temple medium in a ceremony on the resort island of Penang. The ghost nuptial came during Ghost Month, during which spirits of the deceased are believed to roam the earth and relatives offer them food and take care of their needs to appease them. In a front page article, the Star Daily reported Chee Yu Quan was married to Cheah Beng Eng in a tea ceremony, with the deceased bride and groom represented by paper effigies. The bride’s mother, Ong Kim Luan, 74 said Cheah had expressed her intention to get married during last year’s festival. Ong said a medium told them the couple met in the afterworld two years ago.
■AFGHANISTAN
Six killed in clash
US-led coalition troops clashed with a group of Taliban fighters yesterday, killing six militants, a provincial official said. The troops returned fire after being attacked by militants while on patrol in the volatile Tagab valley of Kapisa Province, coalition spokesman First Lieutenant Nathan Perry said. Rahimullah Safi, the province’s deputy governor, said six militants were killed in the clash, while Perry said “multiple militants” were killed. Tagab is close to where militants killed 10 French troops on Tuesday in the deadliest ground attack on foreign troops since the Taliban were ousted from power in 2001. Separately, three civilians were killed and seven others wounded when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb in Khost Province on Saturday.
■RUSSIA
Officers killed in Chechnya
Two senior officers were killed when their armored vehicle was hit by explosives in Chechnya yesterday, Interfax news agency reported. A major and a lieutenant died of their wounds and two other officers were injured after two bombs went off underneath their vehicle in the village of Agishty. Security officials have said they expected a rise in rebel attacks after Moscow launched a military incursion into Georgia to crush its attempt to retake South Ossetia.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Thatcher dementia revealed
The daughter of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, 83, tells in book extracts published yesterday how her mother’s dementia has left her struggling to remember the simplest facts. On her worst days, her mother struggles to finish sentences, but shows occasional glimpses of her old self, Carol Thatcher wrote in her memoir, A Swim-On Part in the Goldfish Bowl, which was serialized in the Mail on Sunday newspaper. She wrote of how her mother keeps forgetting that husband Denis died in 2003. “I had to keep giving her the bad news over and over again,” Carol wrote. “Every time it finally sank in that she had lost her husband of more than 50 years, she’d look at me sadly and say ‘Oh’ as I struggled to compose myself. ‘Were we all there?’ she’d ask softly.”
■FRANCE
Ten missing after avalanche
An avalanche hit climbers on Mont Blanc yesterday, injuring eight and leaving 10 others missing, police said. The injured included five French and three Italians. Five Austrians and three Swiss were among the 10 missing. “The avalanche occurred at dawn on the French side, hitting a group of climbers who were roped together,” an Italian police official said yesterday. French police and the Italian Civil Protection are at the scene and the injured are being treated at a hospital in the French town of Chamonix.
■GERMANY
Swastikas found on site
Police said on Saturday they were investigating the desecration of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, after a caretaker discovered 11 Nazi swastikas on seven of the memorial’s pillars. The swastikas, in red and black, measured between 20cm and 60cm, the police statement said. The memorial commemorates the 6 million European Jews murdered by the Nazis.
■ITALY
Dutch couple attacked
A gang of men badly beat a Dutch couple and raped the woman while they camped in an isolated field outside Rome during a cycling tour, police said on Saturday. The Carabinieri said three or four men struck on Friday night when the married couple, both in their fifties, were asleep in a tent at Ponte Galeria. The couple were being treated for shock and multiple fractures at Rome’s San Camillo hospital. Carabinieri Captain Fabrizio Cassatella said the attackers also stole some US$2,200. News agency ANSA reported police had arrested two Romanian shepherds for the attack and said the two were recognized by the couple in a lineup.
■ITALY
Bomb defused in Ravena
Soldiers have defused an unexploded World War II bomb that forced the evacuation of 15,000 people from their homes in Ravenna. Officials said everyone who lived within 800m of the bomb was moved. The British bomb resurfaced during construction work. Army engineers defused the bomb and took it to a nearby military shooting range for detonation.
■MEXICO
Storm approaches coast
Tropical Storm Julio formed off the country’s Pacific coast and was headed toward the Baja California Peninsula. The storm shifted direction late on Saturday and was headed straight for Cabo San Lucas, the popular resort city on the tip of the peninsula. Forecasters said Julio was not expected to become a hurricane, though it will likely strengthen. The storm packed maximum sustained winds of 64kph and was centered on Saturday night about 300km south-southeast of the tip of the Baja Peninsula, according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami. “We think it’s going to remain a tropical storm. There’s not a zero chance of a hurricane but it’s very small,” said Richard Knabb, a senior hurricane specialist with the center.
■VENEZUELA
Court rules for three judges
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled on Saturday that three judges sacked by the government in 2003 must be rehired and compensated for their trial costs, but cast no doubt on the independence of the nation’s judiciary. The three judges told the autonomous judicial institution of the Organization of American States that they were fired for political reasons, while the country argued they had made an “unforgivable judicial error” in a case involving a real estate deal. The human rights court said the three judges must be rehired, if they so choose, and paid US$5,000 each “for court costs incurred” at their trial.
■UNITED STATES
Fay lowered to depression
The National Hurricane Center says Tropical Storm Fay has been downgraded to a tropical depression. Heavy rain is still expected along the Gulf Coast as the depression continues to move west northwest at about 13kph. Maximum sustained winds are now 56kph. At least 12 deaths in the US were blamed on the storm. Fay set a record with four landfalls in Florida before it was downgraded on Saturday night. Thousands of homes and businesses were inundated with flood waters this week as the storm worked its way north from its first landfall in the Florida Keys and zigzagged across the peninsula.
■UNITED STATES
Coach fired over angry fit
Fort Hays State University in Wichita, Kansas, has fired its debate coach for losing his temper at a tournament, engaging in a videotaped shouting match that included pulling down his shorts to expose his underwear. University president Edward Hammond also announced on Friday that the school was immediately suspending its debate program until problems are addressed at the national level. He said it was important to take a stand against the declining standards of college debate, which he said are laced with profanity and a lack of personal respect and civility.
■UNITED STATES
Typo fixers get probation
When it comes to marking up historic signs, good grammar is a bad defense. Two self-styled vigilantes against typos who defaced a more than 60-year-old, hand-painted sign at Grand Canyon National Park were sentenced to probation and banned from national parks for a year. Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson pleaded guilty on Aug. 11 for the damage done on March 28 at the park’s Desert View Watchtower. The sign was made by Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter, the architect who designed the rustic 1930s watchtower and other Grand Canyon-area landmarks. Deck and Herson, both 28, toured the US this spring, wiping out errors on signs.
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
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
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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