■HONG KONG
Maid jailed over blood broth
An Indonesian maid was in jail yesterday awaiting trial for mixing her menstrual blood in a pot of vegetables she was cooking for her employer. Indra Ningsih, 26, allegedly told police she mixed the blood into the meal in a superstitious effort to make her Chinese employer “more amiable and less picky” toward her. Ningsih was arrested on Tuesday and charged at a hearing on Wednesday with administering a poison or other noxious substance with an intent to injure. She was remanded in custody until May 13. Ningsih was arrested after her employer peered through the kitchen door and saw her acting suspiciously as she cooked vegetables for lunch. When the employer checked, she found a blood clot-like substance mixed with the vegetables and a used sanitary napkin in the kitchen bin, a report in the Hong Kong Standard newspaper said.
■JAPAN
Town to auction off schools
A small town with a falling birthrate plans to auction off four primary schools on the Internet, a local official said yesterday. Niikappu, on the northern island of Hokkaido, plans to start the auction next month on the Yahoo Japan online auction site, said Hidenori Tsutsumi, who is in charge of the auction. The farming and fishing town of 11,000 people last year closed seven of its nine schools. Three were turned into a corporate office, a nursing home and a horse-racing center, but the town was unable to find buyers for the others. With no immediate buyers for the other four, the town decided to list the schools on Japan’s largest auction site.
■INDONESIA
Orangutans captured as pets
Orangutans are still being captured for pets in the country, further threatening the survival of the critically endangered great apes, conservationists said yesterday, blaming poor law enforcement. Despite years of legal protection and awareness campaigns, the capture and trade of these apes for pets or local zoos continues to contribute to their decline, said Chris Shepherd, acting director in Southeast Asia for TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network. “Without serious penalties, this illegal trade will continue, and these species will continue to spiral toward extinction,” he said. Shepherd said the animals were generally caught when they are young.
■SWITZERLAND
ICRC talks to hostages
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) says it has spoken for the first time in two weeks with two of its workers being held by Abu Sayyaf militants in the Philippines. The ICRC said staffers in the Philippines talked to kidnapped Swiss worker Andreas Notter and Italian Eugenio Vagni on the phone on Tuesday. Spokeswoman Dorothea Krimitsas said on Wednesday the agency was glad for the contact, but she declined to comment on the content of the phone conversation. The two have been held on Jolo island since January.
■PHILIPPINES
Belgian kills wife, self
A 60-year-old Belgian man killed his 37-year-old Filipina wife and then shot himself in a fit of jealous rage in the northern province of Cagayan, a police officer said yesterday. Constant van Girt allegedly shot dead his wife, Rosaly, during a heated argument inside their house in Iguig town on Wednesday. Senior Inspector Wilfredo Dupaya said Van Girt then shot himself. The couple was rushed to hospital, but the husband was declared dead on arrival and his wife died two hours later.
■SLOVENIA
Bear scares city dwellers
Stand still or play dead, because the beast can outrun, out-jump and out-climb any human: These instructions were broadcast in Ljubljana yesterday morning as the search for a brown bear roaming the city began. The animal had first been sighted at 4am in the central city park. An alert was issued and a search launched after a head-count in the Ljubljana zoo confirmed that both resident bears were safely locked up. Police said the bear probably became lost after crossing from the hilly woodlands across the highway belt encircling the city and warned people to stay away from the area of the sighting. Some 700 brown bears are estimated to live in the former Yugoslavian Alpine-Adriatic republic, which is roughly half the size of Switzerland.
■SAUDI ARABIA
Mercury hoax causes frenzy
Police are investigating the origins of a hoax that had hundreds of people believing that old sewing machines could bring fortune because they contained an elusive — and probably mythical — substance called red mercury. Newspapers on Tuesday published pictures of people proudly posing next to old sewing machines, awaiting prospective buyers at traditional markets.
■UNITED STATES
NASA snubs Colbert win
NASA on Tuesday named its new living quarters on the International Space Station “Tranquility,” denying TV comedian Stephen Colbert his attempt to get the new Node 3 named after himself. Astronaut Sunita Williams, appearing on The Colbert Report on cable TV network Comedy Central, said NASA would name the new module Tranquility instead of Colbert, as he and his fans had demanded after winning an online poll conducted by NASA.
■IRAN
Scientists clone goat
Scientists have cloned a goat and plan future experiments they hope will lead to a treatment for stroke patients, the leader of the research said on Wednesday. The female goat, named Hana, was born early on Wednesday in Isfahan, said Mohammed Hossein Nasr e Isfahani, head of the Royan Research Institute. “With the birth of Hana, Iran is among five countries in the world cloning a baby goat,” Isfahani said. In 2006 the country became the first in the Middle East to announce it had cloned a sheep. Two-and-a-half years later, that animal is healthy, the institute said. The effort is part of the country’s quest to become a regional powerhouse in advanced science and technology by 2025. In particular, it is striving for achievements in medicine and aerospace and nuclear technology. Cloning sheep and other animals could lead to advances in medical research, including using cloned animals to produce human antibodies against diseases, Isfahani said. He said his institute’s main aim in cloning the goat is to produce medicine to be used to treat people who have had strokes.
■GERMANY
Modified corn to be banned
The government will ban cultivation and sale of genetically modified corn, Agriculture Minister Ilse Aigner said on Tuesday. The ban affects US biotech company Monsanto’s MON 810 corn, which may no longer be sown for this summer’s harvest, Aigner told a news conference. MON 810 corn is the only genetically modified crop approved by the EU for commercial use.
■UNITED STATES
YouTube orchestra debuts
The world’s first orchestra founded online, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, had its much-applauded debut on Wednesday evening at New York’s Carnegie Hall. The audience cheered the orchestra of 96 musicians from 13 countries, who never met before and auditioned online with a clip on the Internet video sharing site YouTube. After only three days of rehearsals with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, the orchestra performed a broad program, including works by Bach, Mozart, Brahms and Tchaikovsky, as well as contemporary music. A highlight of the world premiere was the Internet symphony No. 1 Eroica by Chinese composer Tan Dun (譚盾).
■UNITED STATES
Department reins in NSA
The Justice Department has reined in electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA) after finding the agency had improperly accessed phone calls and e-mails. The problems were discovered during a review of the intelligence activities, the Justice Department said in a statement on Wednesday night. The New York Times, which first reported the matter on its Web site, said the NSA had been improperly intercepting communications by Americans. In its statement, the Justice Department said it has taken “comprehensive steps to correct the situation and bring the program into compliance.” The Justice Department did not elaborate on what problems it found. Once corrective measures were taken, Attorney General Eric Holder sought authorization for renewing the surveillance program, officials said.
■UNITED STATES
California satellite energy
Californians could soon be powering their homes, and no doubt their hot tubs, from a space-based solar electricity program. The plan by the state’s massive energy company PG&E calls for the generation of 200 megawatts over 15 years to be collected by space-based solar arrays and beamed down to earth via radio frequency. PG&E hopes to have the system running by 2016 and is seeking permission from regulators to contract with a company called Solaren to put the system in place. Experts say that harnessing solar power in space has advantages over terrestrial systems since solar energy can be harvested around the clock and is never obscured by clouds or bad weather. Solaren’s solar-power satellite would consist of mirror arrays up to several kilometers wide that would focus sunlight onto photoelectric cells. The electrical power would be converted into a microwave beam directed toward Earth, where it would be converted back into electricity. The company said the system could generate roughly 1.2 gigawatts to 4.8 gigawatts of power at a price comparable to that of other renewable energy sources.
■GERMANY
US sergeant sentenced
A US Army master sergeant convicted of murder in the 2007 killings of four bound and blindfolded Iraqis was to be sentenced yesterday and could receive life in prison without parole. Master Sergeant John Hatley was convicted of premeditated murder and conspiracy in the execution-style killings. But the jury of eight officers and noncommissioned officers on Wednesday found him not guilty of obstruction of justice in the incident and not guilty of premeditated murder in the January 2007 death of an Iraqi insurgent. Hatley faces a possible sentence of life in prison, but is likely to receive parole and a lesser sentence. He could also see his punishment reduced further through an appeal or other future Army clemency.
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Russian hackers last year targeted a Dutch public facility in the first such an attack on the lowlands country’s infrastructure, its military intelligence services said on Monday. The Netherlands remained an “interesting target country” for Moscow due to its ongoing support for Ukraine, its Hague-based international organizations, high-tech industries and harbors such as Rotterdam, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said in its yearly report. Last year, the MIVD “saw a Russian hacker group carry out a cyberattack against the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands,” MIVD Director Vice Admiral Peter Reesink said in the 52-page
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
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