■SERBIA
Union leader eats finger
A union official who chopped off his finger and ate it in a protest over wages that in some cases have not been paid in years, said on Monday he did it to show how desperate he and other workers were. “We, the workers have nothing to eat, we had to seek some sort of alternative food and I gave them an example,” Zoran Bulatovic said. “It hurt like hell.” Bulatovic, a union leader at the Raska Holding textile factory in Novi Pazar, used a hacksaw to cut off most of his left-hand little finger on Friday. Bulatovic said he decided to act after his deputy, “a single mother of three, was the first to say she would cut off her finger. I could not allow her to do that,” he said.
■ISRAEL
Six questioned on draft tips
Police questioned six people on Monday who allegedly gave tips over the Internet on how to avoid the draft. The six are members of New Profile and Objective 21, which advocates refusal to serve in the Israeli military. They were released after questioning. Documents were also seized from their homes. Military service is compulsory for Israelis over 18, with most Arabs exempted. Anyone found guilty of instigating refusal to serve in the army can be jailed for up to 15 years.
■SENEGAL
Amnesty urges protection
Amnesty International on Monday urged the government to ensure the safety of nine men freed last week after a court overturned jail convictions for homosexuality, saying they were at risk of homophobic attacks. “The decision of the court of appeal in Dakar to release them after they initially received an eight-year sentence is welcome. But it needs to be followed by concrete action from the authorities to ensure the men are safe from possible homophobic attacks,” Veronique Aubert, deputy director of Amnesty’s Africa Progam said in a press release.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Lockerbie appeal set
The Libyan jailed for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, was to begin appealing his conviction yesterday. Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, 57, who was diagnosed with prostate cancer last year, has spent 10 years behind bars for the 1988 terrorist attack that killed 270 people. Al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah were prosecuted in The Hague, Netherlands, in 2001 for the bombing. Fhimah was acquitted. Al-Megraphi has always said he had nothing to do with the attack, and while he lost an appeal in 2002 he was granted another two years ago following a major legal review.
■EUROPEAN UNION
Cyber security touted
The European Commission urged member governments on Monday to jointly beef up defenses against cyber attacks to protect large computer networks that run energy and water distribution, air and road traffic control systems, banking and other critical services. “Cyber attacks have become a tool in the hands of organized crime, a means of blackmailing companies and organizations [and] an instrument of foreign and military policy” that can threaten democracy and economies, Commissioner for Information Society Viviane Reding said. Reding called for the appointment of an EU “Cyber Cop” in a video message marking Monday’s opening of a two-day meeting in Talinn, Estonia, on cyberspace security cooperation.
■VENEZUELA
Formal ties with Palestine
Palestinian officials established formal ties on Monday with Caracas and opened a diplomatic mission in the South American country. Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad al-Malki thanked President Hugo Chavez’s government for its support during the recent Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip, which prompted the Chavez administration to break off relations with Israel. The country’s relations with Palestinians have warmed as tensions have grown between Chavez’s government and Israel. Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro said the Palestinian cause was “like our own,” while al-Malki praised Chavez as “the most popular leader in the Arab world,” in part for his staunch support of Palestinians.
■ISRAEL
Not swine, but Mexican flu
The outbreak of swine flu should be renamed “Mexican” influenza in deference to Muslim and Jewish sensitivities over pork, a health official said on Monday. Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman said the reference to pigs is offensive to both religions and “we should call this Mexican flu and not swine flu,” he told a news conference at a hospital. Both Judaism and Islam consider pigs unclean and forbid the eating of pork products. Scientists are unsure where the new swine flu virus originally emerged, though it was identified first in the US. They say there is nothing about the virus that makes it “Mexican” and worry such a label would be stigmatizing.
■UNITED STATES
Chihuahua takes flight
Tinker Bell has been reunited with her owners after a 113kph gust of wind picked up the 2.7kg Chihuahua and tossed her out of sight. Dorothy and Lavern Utley credit a pet psychic for guiding them on Monday to a wooded area nearly 1.6km from where eight-month-old Tinker Bell had been last seen. The brown long-haired dog was dirty and hungry but otherwise OK. The Utleys, of Rochester, Michigan, had set up an outdoor display on Saturday at a flea market in Waterford Township, 40km northwest of Detroit. Tinker Bell was standing on their platform trailer when she was swept away. Dorothy Utley told the Detroit News that her cherished pet “just went wild” upon seeing her.
■UNITED STATES
Stripper stands in at reunion
Comedy writer Andrea Wachner hated the idea of going to her 10-year high school reunion so much that she hired a stripper to go instead and what followed, she says, was a comical study in human nature. Her story is detailed in a nearly 40-minute documentary directed by Wachner that, because of issues surrounding its length and getting approval to show it from former classmates, may never be seen — not even by her parents.
■UNITED STATES
Hijacking trio sentenced
Life stopped smelling rosy for a New York gang sentenced on Monday to lengthy prison sentences for hijacking trucks loaded with perfumes and cosmetics. A court in White Plains, New York, sentenced the three men to 55, 37 and 26 years for a series of armed hijackings in the New York region between September 2006 and January 2007, prosecutors said. In one hit the gang stormed a truck carrying more than US$500,000 worth of perfume, pistol-whipped the drivers, then drove the truck to New Jersey for unloading. In another attack, two of the convicted men took part in the hijacking of a tractor-trailer containing more than US$150,000 worth of Elizabeth Arden cosmetics in Pennsylvania, prosecutors said.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
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