■INDONESIA
Killer to release album
A man on trial over a string of gruesome murders is planning to release an album of pop songs, a report said on Wednesday. Verry Idham Henyansyah, also known as Ryan, is facing a possible death sentence over the murder of 11 people, including a toddler. Ten of Henyansyah’s alleged victims were found buried behind his parents’ home in East Java Province. The accused serial killer told reporters as he was led away from his first trial hearing that he was planning to record an album of pop songs in the archipelago’s languages, news Web site Kompas.com reported.
■JAPAN
Shy scientist accepts Nobel
Nobel Physics laureate Toshihide Maskawa, an introvert who until recently had no passport, said on Wednesday he would make his first trip overseas next month to accept the award in Stockholm. “The Nobel Prize is a social phenomenon and while it is not a research activity, I will go to accomplish that phenomenon,” he told reporters. The bespectacled, gray-haired physicist — one of three to share the prestigious award — denied being shy, although he blushed and giggled at times during a press conference at The Foreign Correspondents’ Club. In the 1970s, Maskawa and Makoto Kobayashi came up with a theory on why antimatter sometimes does not obey the same rules as matter. They found that nature had three families of quarks, an elementary particle.
■JAPAN
‘He’ bear turns out to be she
Handlers of a popular polar bear, brought to mate with a female in a zoo, found their breeding plan was doomed when they noticed that he, in fact, was a she. Tsuyoshi, a four-year-old, 200kg cream-colored polar bear, had been living in harmony with a female polar bear since June, the two often playing together, Masako Inoue, a zookeeper at the Kushiro Municipal Zoo, said on Wednesday. “We thought he was a male, so we never had any doubts as we took care of him,” she said. “But one day we realised that the two bears urinate in the same way, and we thought, is that how males do it? And once we started to look at things that way, we weren’t quite so sure.” After two DNA examinations of Tsuyoshi’s hair and a manual exam, the Kushiro Municipal Zoo found Tsuyoshi to be a female.
■MALAYSIA
Woman convicted of abuse
A court sentenced a former flight attendant to 18 years in prison yesterday for scalding her Indonesian housemaid with hot water and an iron in one of the country’s worst cases of domestic worker abuse. Sessions Court Judge Akhtar Tahir found Yim Pek Ha guilty of using dangerous weapons to inflict injury on Nirmala Bonat at her Kuala Lumpur condominium on three separate occasions in early 2004. Akhtar ordered Yim to start serving the sentence immediately. Bonat said she was beaten and burned for mistakes she made during her five months in Yim’s home. She said that on one occasion her employer took a hot iron and pressed it against her breasts after complaining that clothes had not been properly ironed.
■JAPAN
PM fumbles yet again
The gaffe-prone prime minister is in trouble again — this time for a remark criticizing the elderly as a tax burden for racking up medical expenses. “They’re hobbling around and constantly going to the doctor,” Prime Minister Taro Aso was quoted as saying in a transcript of a Nov. 20 meeting of ministers on economic policies.
■EGYPT
Man jailed for headache cure
A man has been admitted to a mental hospital after he killed his father with repeated blows to the head to cure his headache, Egyptian state news agency MENA said on Wednesday. Mustafa Said Khalil Ibrahim, 37, clubbed his elderly father over the head 25 times to “change the blood in his head and cure him of a chronic headache,” MENA said, adding the man said his father had requested the radical treatment. The man had initially been charged with manslaughter by a prosecutor in the Nile Delta rovince of Sharqiya, but a doctor declared him insane.
■HOLY SEE
Pontiff goes solar
The city-state inaugurated on Wednesday its new solar power energy system, which will heat the hall where Pope Benedict XVI holds his weekly general audience — in a move in keeping with the pontiff’s concern for environmental issues. Benedict, together with the visiting Armenian Apostolic Church Catholicos Aram I, joined hundreds of people gathered in the Paul VI Hall, inside Vatican City, for the ceremony. Built in 1971, the structure, one of the Vatican’s most modern, recently had its 5,000m² roof covered by 2,400 photovoltaic panels. That will be sufficient to provide all the hall’s power needs and that of several surrounding buildings, said SolarWorld, the German company that devised the system.
■ITALY
Party wants ‘Benitos’
A right-wing party is offering 1,500 euros (US$1,930) to parents who name their babies after wartime fascist dictator Benito Mussolini or his wife Rachele, saying their names are under threat. The MSI-Fiamma Tricolore party, the descendant of Mussolini’s fascist party, said the initiative in the poor, southern region of Basilicata was meant to keep alive names “at risk of extinction” and pay tribute to the movement’s roots. “Benito and Rachele are nice names and I hope our original initiative will get people going,” party official Vincenzo Mancusi said. The bonus applies to babies born in next year in five villages where the birth rate is especially low, Mancusi said.
■SOUTH AFRICA
‘Tarzan of suburbia’ found
Police on Wednesday were investigating an Austrian man who apparently kept his eight-year-old boy captive for half his life in a Johannesburg home. The boy had been locked in a bizarre make-believe world of paranoia and warship attacks, denied any contact with the outside world, police said. His plight only came to light after his 68-year-old captor, believed to be his father, collapsed on Nov. 12, sending paramedics bursting into the property in a Johannesburg suburb. Even then, it took neighbors five days to discover the boy, who has been dubbed “Tarzan of suburbia” because of his wild appearance.
■SWITZERLAND
Bern may drop convictions
The government has said it supports a bill to cancel the convictions of citizens punished for fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. The government estimates that more than 600 Swiss were found guilty in the 1930s of breaking a law that forbids the neutral country’s citizens from taking part in a foreign war. They were sentenced to between 15 days and four years in prison. Wednesday’s decision by the Cabinet still has to be approved by both houses of parliament. Campaigners say that only five men who joined the fight against General Francisco Franco’s right-wing forces are still alive today.
■BRAZIL
Norwegian tourist shot
Three Norwegian tourists came under fire and one was shot after the satellite navigation system in their car guided them into one of Rio de Janeiro’s most dangerous slums. Trygve Killingtveit, 24, was shot in the shoulder by suspected drug traffickers. The tourists were returning from a beach resort when they got lost, newspapers reported. They told police their Global Positioning System (GPS) system led them into the Mare slum, where their car came under fire. Killingtveit drove the car to safety despite being wounded.
■UNITED STATES
Iraqi dog policy upsets NGO
An animal rights group is urging Iraqi authorities to find better ways to eliminate stray dogs after 200 were killed in Baghdad this week with poisoned meat and rifles. The methods were “neither humane nor have been found to provide long-term solutions,” Humane Society International said in a letter on Wednesday. “We are willing to help the city of Baghdad initiate [alternative] programs,” it said in the letter to Baghdad Provincial Governor Hussein al-Tahan and other officials. Baghdad is culling stray dogs after a spate of fatal attacks on residents. The NGO suggests neutering, dog registration and euthanasia to deal with the problem.
■UNITED STATES
Hitler bookmark recovered
Police recovered a stolen bookmark reportedly once given to German leader Adolf Hitler by his mistress Eva Braun, authorities said on Wednesday. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency said officers arrested Christian Popescu, 37, in Bellevue, Washington, on Tuesday as he attempted to sell the 18-carat gold bookmark to undercover agents. The bookmark was reportedly given to Hitler by Braun in 1943 to console him after Germany lost the Battle of Stalingrad, ICE said. It was among several items that were to be auctioned in Spain in 2002 but were stolen.
■ITALY
Mafia firing range found
One of the many mysteries that surrounds the Sicilian Cosa Nostra mafia is where its killers acquire their lethal dexterity. Part of the answer has emerged in Palermo’s notorious Zona Espansione Nord (ZEN) housing projects. Ten meters below ground police have found a firing range. Police chief Sara Fascina said it also seemed to have been used for hiding fugitives. The officers found the shooting range by chance. While searching the apartment of a suspected drug dealer, officers saw a large bunch of keys. They found a shed in the courtyard with an entrance opened by remote control, leading to some 100m of passageways, the firing range and a furnished refuge for fugitives.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Alas, Yorick’s skull no joke
A Polish pianist made a stage debut 26 years after his death. Andre Tchaikowsky’s skull featured in Hamlet by the Royal Shakespeare Company between July and this month, the company said on Wednesday. Director Greg Doran said he did not disclose the skull’s use earlier because he feared the news could overshadow the play. “I thought it would ... be all about David [Tennant] acting with a real skull,” Doran told the Daily Telegraph. It was the first time the skull was used in a performance. Tchaikowsky donated his skull in his will to the Royal Shakespeare Company. He was a fan of William Shakespeare’s plays and had finished orchestrating all but 24 bars of his operatic adaptation of The Merchant of Venice when he died of stomach cancer on June 26, 1982.
MINERAL DEPOSITS: The Pacific nation is looking for new foreign partners after its agreement with Canada’s Metals Co was terminated ‘mutually’ at the end of last year Pacific nation Kiribati says it is exploring a deep-sea mining partnership with China, dangling access to a vast patch of Pacific Ocean harboring coveted metals and minerals. Beijing has been ramping up efforts to court Pacific nations sitting on lucrative seafloor deposits of cobalt, nickel and copper — recently inking a cooperation deal with Cook Islands. Kiribati opened discussions with Chinese Ambassador Zhou Limin (周立民) after a longstanding agreement with leading deep-sea mining outfit The Metals Co fell through. “The talk provides an exciting opportunity to explore potential collaboration for the sustainable exploration of the deep-ocean resources in Kiribati,” the government said
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
Indonesia’s parliament yesterday amended a law to allow members of the military to hold more government roles, despite criticisms that it would expand the armed forces’ role in civilian affairs. The revision to the armed forces law, pushed mainly by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s coalition, was aimed at expanding the military’s role beyond defense in a country long influenced by its armed forces. The amendment has sparked fears of a return to the era of former Indonesian president Suharto, who ex-general Prabowo once served and who used military figures to crack down on dissent. “Now it’s the time for us to ask the
The central Dutch city of Utrecht has installed a “fish doorbell” on a river lock that lets viewers of an online livestream alert authorities to fish being held up as they make their springtime migration to shallow spawning grounds. The idea is simple: An underwater camera at Utrecht’s Weerdsluis lock sends live footage to a Web site. When somebody watching the site sees a fish, they can click a button that sends a screenshot to organizers. When they see enough fish, they alert a water worker who opens the lock to let the fish swim through. Now in its fifth year, the
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