■IRAQ
Four shot dead in Kirkuk
A Kurdish militiaman, Turkman policeman and two Sunni Arab civilians have been killed in three separate attacks by guns fitted with silencers in Kirkuk, police said on Saturday. The northern oil hub is plagued with tensions among its rival Kurdish, Turkmen and Arab communities. Assailants gunned down Bassem Abbas al-Bayati, a policeman of Turkman origin, as he returned home on Saturday in the center of the city, Lieutenant Colonel Kamel Ahmad said. A Kurdish peshmerga fighter, Karwan Jumaa Hussein, was killed the same way in northern Kirkuk, and two Sunni brothers, Shehab and Bilal al-Mufurdji, were shot dead in an eastern district of the city late on Friday.
■VIETNAM
Heavy rains claim eight lives
Heavy rains triggering floods and landslides have killed at least eight people, destroyed houses and damaged roads, the government said yesterday. Landslides killed six people in Bac Kan Province on Saturday and cut off roads, telecommunications and power to a district after heavy rains fell on Friday night, the government said in a disaster report. Floods also killed two people in the neighboring provinces of Cao Bang and Ha Giang, while three others, including two children, were carried away and remained missing, the report said.
■THAILAND
Minister faces charges
The foreign minister is among dozens of “Yellow Shirt” protest leaders who will face charges relating to a crippling airport blockade in Bangkok last year, police said. Police issued summonses to 36 leading members of the People’s Alliance for Democracy, including Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya, a former member of the group, Police Lieutenant General Wuthi Puavej said on Saturday. Police have issued summonses “against people who were involved with the closure of Don Mueang and Suvarnabhumi airports for the charges of illegal assembly, invasion, breaches of aviation law and terrorism,” Wuthi said.
■NEW ZEALAND
Roll-your-own is not safer
Roll-your-own cigarettes, favored by some smokers who think they are safer than the factory-made products, could be more dangerous, even when filters are used, research released yesterday showed. Murray Laugesen, a public health specialist based in Christchurch, said a study found that smokers of roll-your-owns inhaled 28 percent more smoke, even though they contained less tobacco than factory-made cigarettes, because they tended to suck more intensively. “Roll-your-own smokers inhale more to get the most value from their cigarettes and don’t let so much be wasted, while smokers of factory-made cigarettes let a lot of their smoke drift into the air,” Laugesen said.
■MALAYSIA
Viagra found in coffee
Authorities have confiscated 900 boxes of coffee laced with Viagra, a newspaper report said yesterday. Health Ministry officials raided a company in Kuala Lumpur that marketed the coffee as an energy booster, the New Straits Times said. The report did not say whether the package labeled Viagra as an ingredient. The report said the 900 confiscated boxes containing about 9,000 coffee packets were worth more than 72,000 ringgit (US$20,000). Some of the Viagra-laced coffee had been distributed nationwide, it said. Viagra is legal in Malaysia, but it requires a prescription. The drug helps men get an erection, but it can pose a heart hazard, especially when taken with certain medications.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Spy chief’s wife blunders
The wife of the new head of the spy agency has posted pictures of her husband, family and friends on Internet networking site Facebook, details that could compromise security, a newspaper said yesterday. Sir John Sawers is due to take over as head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in November. The SIS, popularly known as MI6, is the country’s global intelligence-gathering organization. In what the Mail yesterday called an “extraordinary lapse,” the new spy chief’s wife, Lady Shelley Sawers, posted family pictures and exposed details of where the couple live and take their holidays and who their friends and relatives are. The details could be viewed by any of the many millions of Facebook users around the world, but were swiftly removed once authorities were alerted by the newspaper’s inquiries.
■HUNGARY
Police disperse protesters
Police moved in on Saturday evening to disperse a demonstration in central Budapest by the Hungarian Guard, a nationalist paramilitary group allied to the radical Jobbik party. On one city square, police responded with tear gas when some demonstrators pelted them with plastic bottles and beer cans after being told to leave the area, the local news agency MTI reported. Some 200 members of the uniformed group, which on Thursday lost an appeal against a court ruling that it must disband, had assembled in the capital.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Ron Weasley has swine flu
Actor Rupert Grint, who plays Ron Weasley in the Harry Potter films, has contracted swine flu, his publicist said on Saturday, three days before the latest Potter blockbuster premieres in London. Grint took several days off filming the next movie in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but is still expected to join co-stars on the red carpet for the launch of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince tomorrow.
■IRAN
Twenty people hanged
The official news agency reports that 20 people have been hanged on charges of drug trafficking. IRNA said on Saturday that all of the 20 had been convicted of buying, selling and possessing various kinds of narcotics. The sentences were carried out at a prison in Karaj, 30km west of Tehran. The convicts ranged in age from 35 to 48 years old. Two days earlier, the country hanged another six people convicted of drug trafficking. Murder, rape, armed robbery, kidnapping and drug trafficking are all punishable by death under the country’s Islamic penal law. Tehran has executed more than 120 people this year, media reports say. The country does not publish official statistics on executions.
■HUNGARY
Revolutionary leader dies
General Bela Kiraly, one of the last surviving activists of the failed 1956 Revolution against Soviet rule, died on Saturday at age 97, the Defense Ministry said. During the short period that Imre Nagy was prime minister after the Soviet-backed government was ousted, Kiraly served as commander of the military guard and led the battles against the advancing Soviet Army. After the Soviets regained the upper hand, Kiraly fled to the west and taught history at Brooklyn College in New York until the collapse of communism. In 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down, Kiraly returned to his home country and was elected to the first democratically elected parliament after Soviet rule ended. Nagy was executed for his role in the 1956 revolution.
■UNITED STATES
Music mogul Klein dies
Record label mogul Allen Klein, who handled the affairs of both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, died in New York on Saturday after a battle with Alzheimer’s disease, a spokesman said. He was 77. The former New Jersey accountant secured a fortune as one of the savviest and most infamous players in the music business during is 50 year career. He played a key role during the bitter demise of the Beatles, coming on board in 1969 at the behest of John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison. Paul McCartney was fiercely opposed to Klein, preferring the legal expertise of his high-powered father-in-law Lee Eastman. The feud set the scene for the court battle that led to the group’s dissolution. Klein also managed the Rolling Stones during the 1960s and ended up owning the rights to their recordings and copyrights from that decade — to the eternal regret of Mick Jagger.
■UNITED STATES
Champ keeps hot dog record
Joey Chestnut, 25, chomped down a record 68 hot dogs, capturing his third straight July Fourth hot-dog eating contest at Coney Island, an annual showcase for flamboyant hot dogging contestants eager to show they really are what they eat. Chestnut of California hoisted the US flag and then stood proudly like an Olympic athlete as The Star-Spangled Banner played following his 68 to 64 dog victory over his archrival, six-time titleholder Takeru Kobayashi. Chestnut coasted to victory in contrast to last year, when he and his Japanese rival both gobbled 59 hot dogs, forcing a dramatic five hot dog eat-off before Chestnut emerged victorious.
■UNITED STATES
Couple top pit-spitters
A husband and wife are tops at this year’s International Cherry Pit Spitting Championship. Rick “Pellet Gun” Krause, of Tuba City, Arizona, spit for the win on Saturday at the contest, held in Eau Claire, Michigan. In somewhat windy conditions, he shot a pit 14.75m. Organizers say his wife Marlene took first place in the women’s contest, spitting a pit 11.8m.
■UNITED STATES
Pot sellers offer tax increase
Vendors of “medical marijuana” at legal herbal clinics in Oakland, California, are offering to pay increased taxes in a move that many believe could save the state from bankruptcy. Medical marijuana is big business in California. In Oakland last year “pot clubs” rang up sales of more than US$20 million. Currently those clubs pay a minimal tax of US$1.20 for every US$1,000 of marijuana sold. However, in a move rare among business owners, the medical marijuana clinics are offering to raise the tax they pay to US$18 for every US$1,000 of weed sold. The marijuana tax, which goes to ballot this month, would bring in about US$400,000 of annual revenue in Oakland alone. If adopted statewide, the taxes could be worth billions.
■MEXICO
Arrests sought in fire case
Federal prosecutors say they have obtained nine arrest warrants for the owners and legal representatives of a day care center where a fire killed 48 children. The attorney general’s office says the suspects, including one health sector official, face charges of improper use of authority. Some are also charged with negligent injury and negligent homicide. State prosecutors in the northern state of Sonora previously reported charges against 18 people in the June 5 fire. But the federal office said on Saturday that the number is 14, without explaining the difference.
‘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
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
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
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
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