Fri, May 01, 2009 page7

• World News Quick Take

  • AGENCIES
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  ■CHINA

  Spy museum: Chinese only

  A new spy museum exhibits guns disguised as lipstick, hollowed-out coins used to conceal documents and maps hidden as a deck of cards. What you won’t find there, however, are foreigners. A sign outside the Jiangsu National Security Education Museum in a park in Nanjing states that only Chinese citizens are allowed inside, a policy designed to keep the communist regime’s cloak and dagger methods secret — no matter how timeworn they may be. “We don’t want such sensitive spy information to be exposed to foreigners, so they are not allowed to enter,” a spokeswoman for the museum, who would only give her surname as Qian, said by telephone. “Most of the people we turn away are pretty understanding since this is not your average museum,” she added.

  ■JAPAN

  Cyber ‘swine flu’ suspected

  The National Institute of Infectious Diseases yesterday warned that a “swine flu computer virus” has been spreading on the Internet in recent days. The institute said on its Web site that a suspicious Japanese-language e-mail message with an attached file called “information on swine flu” had been circulating in cyberspace. The institute did not say what kind of malware was hidden inside the file or what harm it might do. The e-mail, originating from senders in the “@yahoo.co.jp” domain, seemed to be sent to random Internet users, the institute said. “It is obviously a suspicious message falsely identifying itself,” it said.

  ■JAPAN

  Mom hid corpse for years

  A Japanese woman has been arrested on suspicion of hiding the body of her four-year-old son in a refrigerator for nearly two years, police said yesterday. Miyuki Otsuka, 33, turned herself in to police in western Hyogo Prefecture on Wednesday, and police later found a decomposed body in a plastic bag in her fridge, a police spokesman said. “We believe it was the body of her son,” who was aged four in 2007, the official said, adding that police were conducting a DNA test. Her husband, who was the child’s stepfather, 34-year-old truck driver Ryu Otsuka, was also arrested.

  ■MALAYSIA

  McCurry beats McDonald’s

  After an almost eight-year legal battle, an appeals court overruled a 2006 decision, saying that a local curry house did not infringe on the McDonald’s trademark by using the prefix “Mc.” The US fast-food giant argued that McCurry — a local eatery whose menu features delights such as murukku and fish head curry — had illegally made use of its trademark. “No way we infringed McDonald’s trademark,” McCurry owner Kanages Suppiah said after the ruling. “We have nothing synonymous with them.”

  ■PAKISTAN

  Gun attacks in south kill 26

  A slew of gun attacks in Karachi killed at least 26 people, officials said yesterday. Ethnic tension was the suspected spark for the gun attacks on Wednesday in the southern city. Much of the tension has been between the Pashtun population, who dominate the country’s militant-infested northwest, and ethnic Urdu-speakers, who are descendants of migrants from India. The latter are in large part represented by the political party that runs the city, the Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM). The city was largely crippled on Wednesday after two MQM activists were gunned down by unknown shooters, sparking street violence. Paramilitary rangers roamed the city’s trouble spots yesterday, as officials said the death toll hit 26.

  ■EGYPT

  Pig herds to be slaughtered

  Egypt, hit hard by bird flu, has ordered the slaughter of every pig herd in the country as a precaution against swine flu, a step the UN said was a mistake. The H1N1 swine flu virus is spread by people and is not present in Egyptian animals, but culling pigs, largely viewed as unclean in Muslim Egypt, could help quell any panic. Twenty-six people have died in Egypt from the highly pathogenic H5N1 bird flu virus and experts fear any flu pandemic could have a devastating impact in a country where most of the roughly 80 million people live in the densely packed Nile Valley, many in crowded slums in and around Cairo. But the UN said the mass cull of up to 400,000 pigs was “a real mistake.”

  ■SPAIN

  Aged drug mules arrested

  Police said on Wednesday they had smashed a drug trafficking ring which used senior citizens as drug mules on luxury trans-Atlantic cruises to smuggle cocaine into the country. “The group included members of an advanced age who boarded luxury transatlantic cruises to pick up the narcotics in South America. The ‘mules’ would pass themselves off as tourists to try to elude police controls,” police said in a statement. It is the first time that this method has been used to introduce cocaine into Spain, the statement added. Police said they had detained two of the group’s “drug mules,” two older women, just as they were about to unload cocaine, which they had picked up in Brazil, at the southwestern Spanish port of Cadiz. They also seized 27kg of highly pure cocaine from the women’s cabin.

  ■UNITED STATES

  Lifer to be set free

  A Texas man who spent 22 years in prison for a rape that forensic tests now suggest he did not commit is expected to be freed. Gary Alvin Richard was expected to be released yesterday after prosecutors and his defense attorney asked a judge to set him free on bail. Lawyers will then weigh what to do with Richard’s case. Defense attorney Bob Wicoff says the new tests based on blood-typing prove Richard’s innocence. Prosecutors agree the results contradict crime lab evidence, but say they do not know if Richard is innocent. If cleared, Richard — who is serving a life sentence for a 1987 rape — would be the fourth Harris County man to have his conviction overturned because of faulty forensics.

  ■NETHERLANDS

  Karadzic’s argument rejected

  A judge at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal has rejected challenges by Radovan Karadzic to the UN court’s jurisdiction to try him on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. The former Bosnian Serb leader objected to several parts of his 11-count indictment in motions filed since his arrest last July in Belgrade. Pretrial judge Iain Bonomy said in a 33-page ruling released on Wednesday that none of Karadzic’s arguments persuasively challenge the court’s jurisdiction.

  ■NIGERIA

  Canadian hostage freed

  A Canadian woman kidnapped two weeks ago in northern Nigeria was released late on Wednesday, the Canadian government said. An unidentified source close to the situation told Reuters earlier that Julie Mulligan was freed unharmed in the northern city of Kaduna. The 45-year-old was kidnapped on April 16 while visiting Nigeria for a conference. “We are greatly relieved to confirm that Ms Mulligan has been released and is now safe with Canadian officials,” a spokesman with Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department said.
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