■NEW ZEALAND
‘Living fossil’ discovered
A rare “living fossil” tuatara reptile has been born in the wild in an area where it had been believed extinct for 200 years, conservationists said yesterday. The tuatara — a lizard-like reptile that has existed for 200 million years and shared the earth with dinosaurs — had been believed extinct on New Zealand’s three main islands for 200 years. But since 2005, 200 have been reintroduced from offshore islands into the Karori Sanctuary in Wellington, where the baby was discovered.
■MALAYSIA
Drugs found in TV
Customs officers who became suspicious after finding a television set on a flight have detained an Indian citizen for alleged drug smuggling, an official said yesterday. Customs officers in Sarawak state, suspicious that anyone would bring a television all the way from India, discovered 7kg of ketamine inside the set, said Rusmani Abdul Sukur, state customs director. The haul has a market value of about 245,000 ringgit (US$67,000).
■PHILIPPINES
Communists torch farm
Communist insurgents in the southern Philippines attacked a congressman’s poultry farm, setting it on fire and killing 8,000 chickens, a local official said yesterday. Guerrillas of the communist New People’s Army raided the poultry farm of Congressman Florencio Garay in Tagbina town in Mindanao late on Tuesday, said provincial administrator Johnny Pimentel. The motive for the attack was not clear but in the past, rebels have attacked rural businesses for refusing to pay extortion demands.
■INDONESIA
Activists protest palm oil
Nearly two dozen Greenpeace activists were forcibly dragged away by security guards yesterday while protesting the destruction of Indonesia’s forests by one of the country’s largest palm oil companies, witnesses said. Demonstrators dressed in bright orange jumpsuits chained themselves to the entrance of a high-rise building that houses Sinar Mas’ headquarters and many other offices. “We are facing the greatest threat to humanity — climate chaos — yet companies like Sinar Mas continue to destroy forests and peatlands,” releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, said Bustar Maitar, a Greenpeace campaigner, after demonstrators were forcibly removed from the premises. Sinar Mas, which has palm oil plantations covering about 125,000 hectares in Indonesia, defended its security guards, saying the activists were making it impossible for people to reach their offices. Indonesia is the third-highest emitter of carbon dioxide behind China and the US, largely because of rising demands for palm oil.
■INDIA
Thousands protest death
Thousands of people in Kashmir held a massive anti-India demonstration yesterday over the alleged murder by police of a Muslim carpenter on Wednesday evening in southern Pulwama district. Police said the carpenter, Mohiudin Malik was killed by crossfire during a confrontation between Muslim militants and police. But Malik’s family said he was killed after he argued with federal police who raided his house and that there were no rebels in the area at the time of the shooting.
■UKRAINE
Singing mayor woos votes
The mayor of Kiev has come up with a novel method of winning votes: singing. Last week Leonid Chernovetskiy released a CD of his greatest hits. They include cover versions of popular ballads from the Soviet Union in the 1980s, as well as schmaltzy duets with his wife. The tradition of bard-singing in Russia and Ukraine is an old one. Since at least the 1950s, gravel-voiced middle-aged men have strummed guitars and sung in pubs about the meaning of life, often when drunk. Usually, though, they are not elected officials.
■ROMANIA
Lawsuits erode freedoms
Media freedom groups criticized government plans that would allow people to sue for libel on behalf of the dead. The groups said draft legislation would limit press freedoms amid a continuing struggle between journalists and authorities since the country threw off communism 20 years ago. Some journalists have had hundreds of libel cases lodged against them. Measures proposed include obliging news organizations to print or broadcast an unedited “right to reply” within three days to anyone offended by an article. If they did not they would risk legal action. The law also allows for assets owned by the press to be confiscated, destroyed or withdrawn from circulation to pay damages.
■NORWAY
Gershwin’s Bess dies at 96
Anne Wiggins Brown, the African-American soprano who starred as the original Bess in George Gershwin’s landmark folk opera Porgy and Bess, but saw her career limited by racial discrimination, has died at age 96. Porgy and Bess, first performed in 1935, was based on DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy about a crippled beggar in love with Bess and living in the fictional Catfish Row slum in Charleston, South Carolina. It was a rare look in its time at the lives of some African-Americans and has since become a popular opera standard. Brown died on Friday in Oslo, where she had lived since 1948 after complaining of racial discrimination in the US.
■GERMANY
Man kills partner, son, self
A man killed his partner and their eight-year-old son before committing suicide at Hornsen near Hildesheim, local police said late on Wednesday. Two of the couple’s other children aged 14 and 16 were wounded along with a 15-year-old friend. The couple’s fourth child, a six-year-old girl, was unhurt, a police spokesman said. Neighbors gave the alert after hearing shots. First reports said the man used a large-caliber handgun.
■GERMANY
New tack in Nazi hunt
The Simon Wiesenthal Center filed a lawsuit on Wednesday asking Berlin prosecutors to investigate whether the family or attorneys of Nazi war criminal Aribert Heim have lied about whether he was dead or alive. The SS doctor’s son, Ruediger Heim, claimed in a February TV interview that his father died in 1992 in Cairo. But Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said Heim’s attorney recently claimed in a tax case in Berlin that there was still regular contact with the doctor, who would be 94 if he was alive. The Wiesenthal Center cited a copy of a 2001 ruling that it had obtained in which the judges wrote that “according to the testimony of the attorney of Dr. Heim ... the holder of Heim’s power of attorney Dr. (Fritz) Steinacker has regular contact with Dr. Heim, who is abroad.”
■UNITED STATES
Obama picks Sudan envoy
President Barack Obama on Wednesday appointed a former general to serve as his special envoy for Sudan’s Darfur region, pledging to keep up the pressure on Khartoum to end the conflict. Retired Major General J Scott Gration has agreed to accept the post as international focus on Darfur intensifies following Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir’s expulsion of humanitarian organizations from the country. “The government of Sudan’s disastrous decision to expel humanitarian relief organizations leaves a void that will be filled by deprivation and despair, and they will be held accountable for the lives lost,” Obama said in a statement. Obama said that Sudan will be a “priority” for his administration, adding that addressing the humanitarian crisis was “urgent.”
■UNITED STATES
US endorses gay rights text
The administration of President Barack Obama on Wednesday formally endorsed a UN statement calling for the global decriminalization of homosexuality, a measure that former president George W. Bush had refused to sign. The move was the administration’s latest in reversing Bush-era decisions that have been heavily criticized by human rights and other groups. The US was the only western nation that did not sign the declaration when it came up at the UN General Assembly in December. “The United States supports the UN’s statement on human rights, sexual orientation and gender identity and is pleased to join the other 66 UN member states who have declared their support of the statement,” State Department spokesman Robert Wood said.
■UNITED STATES
Astro-bat feared dead
The seven astronauts onboard the space shuttle Discovery had an unexpected companion during their liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center earlier this week, the US space agency said. NASA said the crew was joined by a free tail bat, which clung to the side of Discovery’s external fuel tank as it rocketed toward the heavens. “Liftoff imagery analysis confirmed that he held on until at least the vehicle cleared [the] tower before we lost sight of him,” a NASA memo obtained by Space.com said. “The animal likely perished quickly during Discovery’s climb into orbit,” a NASA official said.
■UNITED STATES
Thieves steal panties
Police are looking for two men and a woman they say snatched US$3,400 worth of panties from a Victoria’s Secret in Hurst, Texas, on March 9. The thieves took 100 panties valued at US$14 each and 125 valued at US$16 each, the police report said. The suspects removed the panties from drawers opened at the front of the store and started placing them into a bag while most of the employees were in the rear of Victoria’s Secret, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported in its online edition on Wednesday.
■UNITED STATES
Jewelry robbers robbed
Two robbers leaving a south side Milwaukee jewelry store with cash and gems didn’t get far with the loot. Police said a group of robbers met the two as they walked out and robbed them. A fight broke out in the street before the groups got in vehicles and a chase ensued, police Lieutenant Thomas Welch said, adding that officers pulled over both vehicles and arrested four people, including the original two robbers, ages 40 and 31, and two robbers from the second group, of ages 22 and 27. All four are from Illinois. But he said that police didn’t recover any cash or jewelry.
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
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
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
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