■NEPAL
Police detain refugees
Police detained dozens of Tibetan refugees heading toward the Chinese border yesterday to protest, officials said. The group of 36 Tibetan refugees will be transported back to the capital, Kathmandu, where authorities will decide their fate, police official Ajit Dangol said. The Himalayan country has banned protests against China or any other “friendly nations” after thousands of Tibetan refugees began frequent demonstrations last year against the treatment of Tibetans in China.
■CHINA
Authorities probe hospital
A hospital is under investigation for dumping eight bodies at a construction site after being unable to locate the relatives of the dead, state media reported yesterday. The bodies of two adults and six aborted fetuses were found earlier this week in shallow graves at a building site in the city of Xiangfan, Hubei Province, the China Daily said. A bag containing three severed human limbs was also discovered, it said. Police tracked the bodies to the Xiangfan Central Hospital through a logo on a bag containing the limbs, the report said. It quoted a hospital spokesman as saying staff at its morgue had buried the bodies on May 19 after no one claimed them and relatives could not be found. The report said hospital morgues across the country hold too many unclaimed bodies and that there are no laws regulating how to handle them.
■SOUTH KOREA
Military targets cyber war
The military is looking to launch a cyber warfare command designed to fend off computer attacks from North Korea and other countries, officials said yesterday. The plan will be included in a military reform package to be presented to President Lee Myung-bak, a defense ministry spokesman said. The military computer networks are under ever-growing cyber attack. The South’s military security unit said in a report last month that every day the military counters an average of 10,450 hacking attempts and 81,700 computer virus infections. Experts say the South — one of the world’s most wired societies — needs an integrated unit to fight cyber attacks by North Korea and China, which run elite hacker units.
■NEPAL
France seeks extradition
France has sought the extradition of a French national accused of sexually abusing children, a news report said yesterday. French national Jean-Jacques Haye, 60, was arrested in Kathmandu in March after a tip-off from organizations working for children’s rights. France made a formal request for extradition earlier this week in a letter from French Prime Minister Francois Fillon to Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal, the government-owned Rashtriya Samachar Samiti news agency reported.
■SRI LANKA
Police book ‘bad’ astrologer
Police say they have arrested an astrologer after he predicted serious political and economic problems for the government of President Mahinda Rajapakse. Chandrasiri Bandara, who writes an astrology column for a pro-opposition weekly, was taken in on Thursday, police spokesman Ranjith Gunasekara said. The astrologer had predicted that a planetary change on Oct. 8 would be inauspicious for parliament and the government may not be able to arrest rising living costs — a prediction already made by private economists. Politicians take astrology seriously and most have their own personal seers who decide the auspicious times to launch any new program or work.
■NIGERIA
Rebels blow up oil well
A militant group said it had blown up a well-head in a Royal Dutch Shell oil field in Delta state late on Thursday, hours after President Umaru Yar’Adua announced an amnesty offer for gunmen. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) accused the military of going on a “punitive expedition” to hunt down suspected militants in the Agbeti community of Delta state after Yar’Adua’s amnesty proclamation. “In response ... [operation] Piper Alpha continued its rampage on the Nigerian oil industry by blowing up the second remaining well-head of the Shell Afremo offshore oil fields in Delta state,” MEND said in a statement e-mailed to media. There was no immediate independent confirmation of an attack or of a military offensive.
■ZAMBIA
Monkey pees on president
A monkey urinated on President Rupiah Banda as he spoke to reporters outside his State House offices on Wednesday. “You have urinated on my jacket,” a startled Banda told the monkey, one of many that makes their home in the trees outside his offices. “I will give this monkey for lunch to Mr Sata,” he joked, referring to opposition leader Michael Sata, who Banda defeated in last year’s elections. Banda devoted much of his second news conference as president to reassuring Zambians over the dramatic economic slowdown resulting from plunging prices for copper, the nation’s main export.
■GERMANY
Wed and divorced in a day
A Polish couple fell out after tying the knot and decided to end their marriage on the same day. “He said he never wanted to see her again and wanted an immediate annulment, and she said the same thing,” a spokesman for police in the northern city of Hanover said on Thursday. Right after the civil ceremony on Wednesday, the 50-year-old man began rowing with his bride and tried to cut her hair with a kitchen knife, police said. The 34-year-old woman called police, who issued the man with a restraining order, which he readily accepted, police said. Two attempts at a rapprochement later that evening by telephone ended in more shouted exchanges before the man went to spend his wedding night in a local shelter for homeless people.
■GERMANY
Dad admits murder: police
Police said a Turkish man had admitted fatally stabbing his 15-year-old daughter and told investigators he had problems with the girl’s Western lifestyle. Police in the Bavarian town of Schweinfurt said the 45-year-old was arrested on suspicion of murder after his daughter’s body was found on Wednesday. A police statement said the man said “he had problems with the fact that his daughter did not want to go the Muslim way.” The man was not identified. Police said he would be given a psychiatric examination.
■GERMANY
Owner finds mower thief
A thief was arrested after he tried to sell a garden mower online to the man he had stolen it from, police said on Wednesday. The owner went to inspect the goods and recognized the mower as his own,” a spokesman for police in the southern town of Tuebingen said. “Then he left and told police.” Officers confronted the 46-year-old suspect, who confessed to stealing the mower from a shed in February. He later put it for sale on Internet auction site eBay, the spokesman said.
■UNITED STATES
Two indicted for 2004 bomb
Two alleged white supremacists from Illinois have been indicted in a 2004 mail bombing that injured a diversity director in the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale, federal authorities said. Twin brothers Dennis and Daniel Mahon are charged with conspiracy to damage buildings and property by means of explosive, according to an indictment unsealed on Thursday. The indictment says the brothers intended to “promote racial discord” on behalf of the White Aryan Resistance, a decades-old group based in California. The package detonated in the hands of Don Logan, who is black, on Feb. 26, 2004, in the city’s Human Resources Complex. The blast injured Logan’s hand and arm, and a secretary was also injured. Authorities arrested the brothers on Thursday in their Davis Junction, Illinois, home and say they had assault weapons, hundreds of rounds of ammunition and white supremacist material. A Missouri man was also arrested on Wednesday.
■MEXICO
Violence kills at least 10
The bodies of four people, including two state police officers, were found dumped on Thursday in a western Mexican state known for drug violence. The remains of the two police officers were found inside black plastic bags in Union, a town north of the Pacific coast resort cities of Acapulco and Zihuatanejo, the Guerrero state Public Safety Department said in a statement. The officers had been missing since Sunday. Their bodies were found a day after two municipal officers were killed in Union. Police later found the bodies of two other, unidentified people wrapped in plastic bags and left near a bridge. Also in Guerrero, a federal police officer was killed and his partner gravely injured when gunmen ambushed their patrol car, the state’s Public Safety Department said. Also on Thursday, two federal highway patrol officers were killed in a shootout in the northern city of Chihuahua, authorities said. Three civilians were also killed in the clash, federal prosecutors said in a statement. Federal authorities announced on Thursday they detained 92 local and state police officers in central Hidalgo state who were allegedly protecting the Zetas, a group of hit men tied to the Gulf cartel. Federal police intelligence coordinator Luis Cardenas told reporters the officers had been working for the gang for at least two years.
■UNITED STATES
Group asks for investigation
An anti-abortion group is asking the US Justice Department to investigate what it says are death threats against abortion opponents after the killing of abortion provider George Tiller in Kansas. Operation Rescue of Wichita, Kansas, on Thursday released audio recordings and e-mails containing threats, including one that says it’s “time to start killing Bible-thumping morons.” Operation Rescue president Troy Newman said the Justice Department dispatches federal marshals to protect abortion providers but ignores threats against abortion opponents.
■CHILE
Japanese bar owner slain
Police suspect a slain Japanese bar owner knew his assailants and shared a beer with them before he was killed. Authorities are investigating friends of 56-year-old Kasuiko Mitsogushi after they found full glasses of beer at his bar in Santiago. The Chilean newspaper La Cuarta quotes a witness as saying that the Japanese citizen was found at the bar with his hands and feet tied and lying in a puddle of blood, stabbed 15 times. Cash and valuables were left at the scene.
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis
Incumbent Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa on Sunday claimed a runaway victory in the nation’s presidential election, after voters endorsed the young leader’s “iron fist” approach to rampant cartel violence. With more than 90 percent of the votes counted, the National Election Council said Noboa had an unassailable 12-point lead over his leftist rival Luisa Gonzalez. Official results showed Noboa with 56 percent of the vote, against Gonzalez’s 44 percent — a far bigger winning margin than expected after a virtual tie in the first round. Speaking to jubilant supporters in his hometown of Olon, the 37-year-old president claimed a “historic victory.” “A huge hug
A judge in Bangladesh issued an arrest warrant for the British member of parliament and former British economic secretary to the treasury Tulip Siddiq, who is a niece of former Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina, who was ousted in August last year in a mass uprising that ended her 15-year rule. The Bangladeshi Anti-Corruption Commission has been investigating allegations against Siddiq that she and her family members, including Hasina, illegally received land in a state-owned township project near Dhaka, the capital. Senior Special Judge of Dhaka Metropolitan Zakir Hossain passed the order on Sunday, after considering charges in three separate cases filed
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