■PHILIPPINES
Police can’t shoot straight
Ninety percent of police cannot shoot straight or clean their guns properly, based on recent firearms proficiency tests, an official said yesterday. “Of the country’s 125,000 policemen and women, 90 percent cannot shoot straight and have difficulty just taking care of their guns,” National Police Commission Commissioner Luis Mario General told reporters. General, whose agency monitors the national police, said that of the remaining 10 percent, most of them ranked barely above the level of “novice.” General said his commission would recommend to the National Police that it conduct regular marksmanship training for all its members, including the top brass.
■SOUTH KOREA
Activists to stage pageant
A women’s movement that claims credit for driving the Miss Korea beauty pageant off the airwaves is this weekend staging an alternative festival mocking traditional attitudes to women. The Anti-Miss Korea Festival, which the movement has staged annually since 1999, is this year changing its name to IF (If you want to become a real Feminist), chief policy planner Gang Soo-jeong said yesterday. Today’s event at a Seoul university will focus on economic hardships and sexual mistreatment faced by Korean women during the global economic recession.
■SINGAPORE
Man transplants heart, liver
A 58-year-old pastor has undergone a simultaneous heart and liver transplant, the first time such an operation has been carried out in Asia, doctors said yesterday. The 13-hour surgery, which took place two weeks ago at the Singapore General Hospital, was needed to treat a rare genetic condition affecting Lau Chin-kwee, his doctors told a press conference. Lau suffers from a condition known as Familial Amyloid Polyneuropathy, in which a gene mutation causes the liver to produce abnormal proteins that affect the nerves. Eventually, the liver will no longer function properly. Further tests showed the pastor’s heart had also been affected by the same genetic condition, the doctors said.
■AUSTRALIA
Shark dumped on doorstep
A live shark was found dumped on the doorstep of a newspaper’s office in a coastal town in the southeast, police said on Thursday. A passer-by alerted police in Warrnambool, Victoria, shortly after midnight that a shark was lying at the front door of the town’s Standard newspaper. “We arrived and poured some water on it just to see if it was still breathing and it kicked around for a little while,” said Constable Jarrod Dwyer, who said the shark was about 70cm long. Dwyer said they took the shark to the town’s breakwater in a borrowed bucket of water, and released it into the sea.
■PHILIPPINES
Acquitted US Marine departs
The US Marine acquitted on appeal in a high-profile rape case has left the country, the US embassy said yesterday. The court of appeals on Thursday found Lance Corporal Daniel Smith not guilty of raping a woman in November 2005, overturning a sentence of life imprisonment handed down in December 2006. The mission served as Smith’s custodian while the case went on appeal. Outside the embassy, police blocked small groups of protesters who denounced the appeal court’s ruling and demanded that Manila cut military ties with Washington, its former colonial master, photographers at the scene said.
■FRANCE
Court annuls mayoral poll
The country’s highest court annulled last year’s election of a mayor in the town of Perpignan on Thursday because the head of a polling station tried to change the result by smuggling in ballots in his socks. When the votes for the election were counted in March last year, polling station head Georges Garcia was caught with ballots supporting Jean-Paul Alduy, a member of the ruling UMP party, in his pockets and socks. Garcia was then caught again trying to get rid of envelopes containing ballots. The Council of State confirmed a lower court ruling that annulled the vote. The election will be held again at a date to be fixed. Alduy won by 574 votes out of 41,938 ballots cast. The polling station in question gathered 825 ballots.
■NORWAY
Russian trawler sinks
A Russian trawler sank on Friday in the Barents Sea near Norway’s northern coast and its crew was rescued by another Russian fishing vessel and by helicopter, rescue authorities said. “Two people from the crew have been picked up by helicopter and are about to be flown to hospital in [the town] of Tromsoe,” said Geir Mortensen, spokesman at the Joint Rescue Coordination Center in Bodoe. “The 15 remaining crew, who were on inflatable rafts, have been picked up by another Russian fishing vessel,” he said. The trawler sank 17 nautical miles (31km) from Tromsoe. The cause of the accident was not immediately known, Mortensen said.
■SWITZERLAND
Basel bans food on buses
Cleanliness, order and more ways to take your money: Authorities in Basel may have found a perfect recipe. Tired of sticky, greasy and strong-smelling leftovers on buses and trams, authorities said they would start handing out fines of up to US$34 for soiling public transport with food and drinks. The Basel Public Transport Services said the fines were necessary because a 2003 prohibition on drinking and eating on buses and trams had been largely ignored. The fines would go into effect soon, it said.
■GERMANY
Spider silk now stronger
Spider silk is already tougher and lighter than steel, and now scientists have made it three times stronger by adding small amounts of metal. The technique may be useful for manufacturing super-tough textiles and high-tech medical materials, including artificial bones and tendons. “It could make very strong thread for surgical operations,” said researcher Lee Seung-mo of the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle. Lee and colleagues, who published their findings in the journal Science, found that adding zinc, titanium or aluminum to a length of spider silk made it more resistant to breaking or deforming.
■UNITED NATIONS
Russia wants to talk peace
Russia has called for a ministerial-level Security Council meeting on May 11 to discuss peace in the Middle East, diplomatic sources said on Thursday. Russia holds the rotating Security Council presidency for next month. Russian Ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin told his 14 Council colleagues that the meeting would be headed by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, the source said. Churkin did not say whether the Council member nations agreed to the meeting or whether they would send their top diplomats, the source said.
■UNITED STATES
Detainee pics to be released
The Defense Department will release 44 photographs of prisoner treatment at facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan next month in response to a long-running lawsuit over detainee abuse. In documents filed late on Thursday, the government said that 44 photos would be issued by May 28. The court documents were released by the American Civil Liberties Union, a non-governmental organization that sued for the release of photos and other documents pertaining to possible detainee mistreatment and abuse at military facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan.
■CANADA
Health officials eye outbreak
Health officials are expressing concern about an outbreak of a severe respiratory illness in Mexico, media reports said on Thursday. The Public Health Agency of Canada has advised health officials and doctors to be on the alert for reports of illness from people who recently travelled to Mexico, an agency official said. The federal agency has not told Canadians to avoid Mexico but issued the alert to doctors and provincial officials last week after receiving a notification on the outbreak from Mexican health authorities. No illnesses linked to the Mexican outbreak have been reported in Canada but as many as 20 deaths in Mexico in recent weeks may be linked to the outbreak.
■UNITED STATES
Blagojevich stars in ad
Disgraced former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich eagerly became a Hollywood high-flyer, but his hair paid the price. During filming on Thursday of a promotional spot for the NBC reality series I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! Blagojevich, who faces trial for trying to sell the Senate seat vacated by US President Barack Obama, was strapped into a harness and hoisted in front of a blank “green screen” to simulate a parachute jump. Wind machines mussed his famous mop of hair for the spot filmed at the Los Angeles County Arboretum, standing in for the Costa Rican jungle. I’m a Celebrity will be shot in Costa Rica, but according to a federal judge’s ruling this week in Chicago, Blagojevich won’t be there. The ex-governor was refused permission to travel abroad while he faces trial on racketeering, fraud and other charges.
■UNITED STATES
British-born director dies
British-born film director Ken Annakin, the man behind war film The Battle of the Bulge and Swiss Family Robinson, has died at his Beverly Hills home at the age of 94, his family said on Thursday. Annakin, who was born in Yorkshire, England, made more than 60 movies, ranging from comedies and adventures to documentaries, his daughter Deborah Peters said.
■PANAMA
Mogul leads in polls
A supermarket tycoon holds a comfortable lead over the ruling party’s leftist candidate as the presidential election nears, the final poll said. The poll gave Ricardo Martinelli a 14 point lead over Balbina Herrera before the May 3 election. Martinelli, a white-haired multimillionaire who owns a supermarket chain, promises to attract private investment for massive infrastructure projects he hopes will see Panama through the world economic crisis. Support for Herrera, a former housing minister once linked to former military strongman General Manuel Noriega, has fallen in recent months as voters grow frustrated with the high cost of living and rising drug gang violence.
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
INSTABILITY: If Hezbollah do not respond to Israel’s killing of their leader then it must be assumed that they simply can not, an Middle Eastern analyst said Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah leaves the group under huge pressure to deliver a resounding response to silence suspicions that the once seemingly invincible movement is a spent force, analysts said. Widely seen as the most powerful man in Lebanon before his death on Friday, Nasrallah was the face of Hezbollah and Israel’s arch-nemesis for more than 30 years. His group had gained an aura of invincibility for its part in forcing Israel to withdraw troops from southern Lebanon in 2000, waging a devastating 33-day-long war in 2006 against Israel and opening a “support front” in solidarity with Gaza since
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