■NEW ZEALAND
‘Tasteless’ pizza ad pulled
A pizza chain has withdrawn an advertisement showing the corpses of actor Heath Ledger, Britain’s Queen Mother and Mount Everest conqueror Sir Edmund Hillary dancing on a grave. The animated Halloween promotion advertisement on the Hell Pizza Web site shows the three decomposing celebrities emerging from graves and dancing to Michael Jackson’s song Thriller. Ledger and Hillary died this year and the Queen Mother passed away in 2002. Hillary’s son Peter said the ad was in “extremely poor taste.” “I think it’s a bit disturbing ... a little grotesque,” he told the Dominion Post.
■CHINA
‘Dark’ networks to blame
Eggs tainted with an industrial chemical were an isolated case, the Agriculture Minister was quoted saying the day after officials were ordered to crack the “dark” networks selling contaminated animal feed. The country is battling to restore faith in its food and the regulators who are supposed to check it after milk powder laced with melamine killed four babies and made tens of thousands more so sick they needed hospital treatment. The government rushed to tighten checks on milk and put melamine — used legally in making plastics and illegally to cheat nutrition tests — to a list of controlled ingredients.
■HONG KONG
Car plate draws US$46,000
The wealthy Special Administrative Region may be teetering on the brink of a global recession, but a prestige car number plate can still fetch more than US$46,000, auctioneers said yesterday. The car registration number 1234 fetched HK$360,000 (US$46,445) at Sunday’s government auction where a total of 280 unusual plates raised just short of US$345,000. However, of the 280 plates put up for auction, some 30 failed to reach their reserve price in a sign that the economic downturn is beginning to bite in one of the world’s richest cities. Shares have been among the worst hit in the recent downturn, with the Hang Seng Index shedding more than 25 percent of its value in the past six weeks alone.
■SOUTH KOREA
Public toilets get nod
Two South Korean cities have flushed away competition and won a best public toilets contest in Asia, the WHO said yesterday. The WHO said Seongbuk, which is part of Seoul, and the city of Jinju bested other cities in Asia in providing well-maintained public sanitary facilities. The mayors of Seongbuk and Jinju will receive their awards at the World Toilet Summit & Expo 2008 to be held in Macau starting yesterday. The WHO, which cosponsored the contest with the Alliance for Healthy Cities, cited Seongbuk for investing a significant amount of money in rehabilitating and upgrading government-operated toilets in the area.
■HONG KONG
Patten slams Bush
The last British colonial governor Chris Patten said in a radio interview yesterday that he thought US President George W. Bush was the worst US president he had seen. “I think that President Bush has been the worst American president in my lifetime,” Patten, who was in the former British colony this week to promote his latest book on global politics and economy, told broadcaster RTHK. “I don’t happen to think that President Bush is as foolish as lots of Europeans and others suggest. I think he’s actually perfectly intelligent,” he said ahead of today’s US presidential election. “But I don’t think he’s got a first-class temperament, to put it mildly. And I think he’s deeply uncurious intellectually.”
■SOMALIA
Rape victim, 13, stoned
An Islamist rebel administration has had a 13-year-old girl stoned to death for adultery after the child’s father reported that she was raped by three men. Amnesty International said al-Shabab militia, which controls the city of Kismayo, arranged for 50 men to stone Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow in front of about 1,000 spectators. A truckload of stones was brought to the stadium for the killing. Amnesty said Duhulow struggled with her captors and had to be forcibly carried into the stadium. It said nurses were told to check if she was still alive when buried in the ground. “They removed her from the ground, declared that she was, and she was replaced in the hole where she had been buried for the stoning to continue,” the group said. “Inside the stadium, militia members opened fire when some of the witnesses to the killing attempted to save her life, and shot dead a boy who was a bystander.”
■IRAN
Anti-US rally draws crowd
Thousands of young people rallied outside the former US embassy in Tehran yesterday to mark the 29th anniversary of the seizure of the building by Islamic revolutionaries. The demonstrators, mainly schoolchildren and students, brandished banners proclaiming “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” and carried effigies of Uncle Sam, which were to be torched later. “We will not get on with America even for a moment,” read one placard. Tehran and Washington have had no diplomatic relations for nearly three decades since students took US diplomats at the mission hostage for 444 days following the 1979 Islamic revolution. Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said last week that hatred of Washington was deep-seated and praised the Islamist students who took over “the center of espionage.”
■SOUTH AFRICA
ANC rebels to register
African National Congress dissidents were scheduled to register the name of their new movement with the electoral commission, former Gauteng premier Mbazima Shilowa said yesterday. The new party would be called the South African Democratic Congress (SADC), he said. A resolution to form a new party to contest the year’s election was taken during a national convention in Johannesburg over the weekend. “We are not doing this for or with [former president] Thabo Mbeki. He is not involved in the formation, he is not one of us,” Shilowa told the radio SA FM.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Welsh translation goof
In English, the road sign was just fine, warning drivers that the route ahead is not suitable for heavy trucks. But the translation in Welsh didn’t work so well. “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated,” it said. Swansea Council says the embarrassing error occurred when officials didn’t realize an e-mailed reply from a translator was a warning that he wasn’t available, not the wording to be used on the sign. Council spokesman Patrick Fletcher said on Friday that the misleading sign was being replaced.
■EGYPT
Tunnel collapse kills four
Four people were killed and three went missing in the collapse of an underground tunnel on Sunday north of the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt, security sources said. Hamas sources told Cairo authorities of the incident and a search was under way for the missing people inside the tunnel. The identities of the dead and missing were not immediately known, the sources said.
■CENTRAL AMERICA
Heavy rains kill nearly 50
Weeks of rain have caused the deaths of nearly 50 people and left more than 20 missing in Honduras and killed dozens more in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nicaragua and the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, officials said. Most of the victims were buried in landslides and drowned in rivers that overflowed their banks, authorities said on Sunday. In Honduras, 100,000 people were affected by flooding while the emergency services agency estimated damage to highways, bridges, crops and houses at US$150 million. The flooding could postpone party elections to choose presidential candidates from Nov. 16 to Nov. 30. In Nicaragua, tens of thousands of people have been evacuated to higher ground.
■MEXICO
Gunmen kill 11 officers
Eleven policemen have been shot to death near Mexico City in a three-day string of drug-gang attacks, prosecutors said on Sunday. Mexico State prosecutor Alberto Bazbaz said 10 suspects believed linked to drug gangs had been arrested in the killings, which mainly occurred on highways and at police checkpoints in the state that loops around Mexico’s capital. Some of the suspects were carrying rifles and grenades at the time of their arrest. Bazbaz said that many of the suspects were from the neighboring state of Michoacan, a hotbed of drug violence dominated by a drug gang known as “The Family.” But he said evidence indicates that low-level traffickers and criminals, rather than organized cartel hit squads, were responsible for the attacks.
■CANADA
Baby elephant dies in zoo
A baby elephant died at the Calgary Zoo in Alberta over the weekend after a brief battle with a virus that has killed dozens of captive elephants around the world in the past two decades, zoo officials said. The 15-month-old pachyderm, named Malti, collapsed and died on Saturday afternoon, one day after being diagnosed with elephant herpesvirus, a disease that can cause internal bleeding, zoo officials said in a press release. “The disease, which has also been diagnosed in the wild, is responsible for the death of nearly a dozen young North American elephants in the past 20 years,” the zoo said.
■UNITED STATES
Court hears amputee’s case
A musician who lost her arm because of a botched drug injection is squaring off against drug maker Wyeth Pharmaceuticals and the government in one of the most closely watched business cases of the Supreme Court’s term. At issue is whether the federal government can limit lawsuits by consumers like Diana Levine, who have been harmed by prescription medications. The justices were to hear arguments in Levine’s case yesterday, shortly after the court announces whether it would accept other cases for argument sometime next year. Levine, a guitarist and pianist, lost her right arm after an injection of the anti-nausea drug Phenergan.
■UNITED STATES
Five homeless people dead
Five people were found shot to death on Sunday in a homeless encampment obscured by heavy brush in the shadow of a Long Beach freeway, Los Angeles police said. Officers received an anonymous call on Sunday morning and went to an area between several commercial buildings and freeway ramps. They found five dead adults, all of them gunshot victims, Long Beach Deputy Police Chief Robert Luna said. Detectives have not determined a motive or identified a suspect.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
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