■ MYANMAR
Tycoon gets jail for ‘ice’
Prominent business tycoon Maung Weik — known to be close to the head of the country’s junta — was sentenced to 15 years in prison on drug trafficking charges in a Yangon court last week, legal sources said on Monday. Weik, 35, who owns Mg Weik and Family Company — one of the country’s largest real estate and trading firms — was arrested last May during a charity trip to the Irrawaddy Delta to help victims of cyclone Nargis. Weik is known to have close ties to Senior General Than Shwe, who heads Myanmar’s ruling junta. He was charged with involvement in trading methamphetamine tablets, called “ice” on the local market. According to charges brought by the government in July, Weik had been buying ice tablets from Peter Too Huat Haw, a Malaysian, since 2003.
■ NEW ZEALAND
Thief plastered on billboards
A thief caught on camera stealing expensive equipment picked the wrong target if wanted to keep a low profile: a billboard company that has plastered his image around the country’s largest city seeking his capture. The unidentified thief was photographed by a suspicious onlooker as he uncoupled 15 electrical transformers used to boost the lighting on a billboard in Auckland. The photographer knew the pillaged sign belonged to Mark Venter, who runs OTW Advertising, one of the country’s oldest billboard companies. So when the photographer offered pictures of the thief in action it cost Venter nothing to mount the images on four city billboards with the inscription: “Who is this Thief? Reward $500.”
■ AUSTRALIA
Gallery uncovers portrait
A rare portrait of Italian Renaissance noblewoman Lucrezia Borgia has been uncovered in a gallery, art conservators said yesterday, ending a 43-year mystery over the painting. The finding comes after several years of detective work by National Gallery of Victoria conservator Carl Villis, who identified the subject and artist behind the work, titled Portrait of a Youth, and painted around 1520. Villis said the painting, bought by the gallery in 1965, was by Renaissance artist Dosso Dossi and was a portrait of Lucrezia Borgia, overturning a century of opinion that the painting was of a young man because the subject was holding a dagger. “What was previously a portrait of an unknown sitter by an unidentified artist, now seems likely to be one of the most significant portraits surviving from the Renaissance,” gallery director Gerard Vaughan said yesterday.
■ CHINA
Falun Gong member jailed
The wife of a man who died in police custody ahead of the Beijing Olympics was sentenced to prison yesterday for supporting the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual group, her lawyer said. A Beijing court jailed Xu Na (許娜) for three years for “using a heretical organization to undermine the implementation of the law,” lawyer Cheng Hai (程海) said, referring to Falun Gong, which was banned in 1999. “During her trial Xu plead not guilty and cited the freedom of religious belief guaranteed by [China’s] Constitution,” Cheng said. “We will appeal the verdict.” Xu and her husband, Yu Zhou (於宙), were detained at a roadside police check point ahead of the Beijing Olympics when authorities discovered they had material published by Falun Gong, according to Cheng. Xu was convicted of possessing and intending to distribute 53 documents and eight computer disks of Falun Gong material, he said.
■ UKRAINE
Blast kills five scavengers
Five people scavenging illegally were killed in an explosion that engulfed a disused pit, officials said on Monday. The emergencies ministry said the five were engaged in “unauthorized gathering of coal and metals” in a mine in eastern Luhansk region when the blast occurred on Sunday.
■ SOMALIA
Pirates hijack Yemeni ship
Somali pirates have hijacked a Yemeni cargo ship in the Gulf of Aden, a regional maritime group said yesterday, a day after sources said the gang holding a Saudi Arabian supertanker were demanding a US$15 million ransom. Andrew Mwangura, coordinator of the Kenya-based East African Seafarers’ Assistance Program, identified the Yemeni vessel as the MV Amani. Few other details were immediately available. “We were just informed the Amani had been taken,” Mwangura said from Mombasa. “But it had been out of contact for about four days, so it is not known exactly when it was seized.”
■ BRAZIL
Mob attacks offices
About 3,000 people attacked government offices to protest a crackdown on illegal Amazon logging, the government said on Monday, prompting the environment minister to call for federal troops. The protests began on Sunday evening in the town of Paragominas in northern Para state after environment officials seized about 400m³ of illegally cut wood, the environmental agency Ibama said on its Web site. The protesters opened fire on a garage where vehicles belonging to the environment agency were parked, stole trucks with confiscated logs and tried to invade a hotel where government agents were staying, Ibama said. Environment Minister Carlos Minc said the government would not back down from efforts to enforce rules aimed at preventing illegal logging that has destroyed swathes of the world’s largest rain forest.
■ UNITED STATES
Last spacewalk completed
US astronauts Steve Bowen and Shane Kimbrough on Monday finished the fourth and last spacewalk of the shuttle Endeavour’s mission at the International Space Station (ISS), completing all the tasks and repairs required of them, NASA said. The “home improvement” mission at the orbiting station will be extended by one day with the Endeavour’s return to Florida set for Sunday, a NASA spokesman at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, said. The two astronauts finished cleaning, lubricating and replacing eleven of twelve ball bearings of a rotation device on one of the ISS’s three double solar antenna arrays, or Solar Alpha Rotary Joint, which was stuck. They also installed a camera on one of the ISS’s truss segments and a GPS on the Japanese Kibo laboratory module.
■ RUSSIA
Three killed in blast
Three people, including a child, were killed yesterday when a car blew up near a metro station in Saint Petersburg, local officials said, adding that a grenade may have caused the blast. The car that exploded was a Russian Lada Priora, said Andrey Alybayev, spokesman for the local branch of the emergencies ministry, said, without giving further details. A security source, who was not named, told the RIA Novosti agency however that the car was being used as an unlicensed private taxi of the type that are common in Russia. The Interfax agency also quoted a security source as saying that the cause of the blast could be one of the passengers was carrying an explosive material, likely to have been a grenade.
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