■NEW ZEALAND
Pilot killed in crash
An air force pilot in the elite display team was killed yesterday when his plane crashed as he practiced acrobatic maneuvers, officials said. The pilot, who has not been named, was a member of the Red Checkers display team and was on a solo run in an Air Force CT4 Airtrainer when he crashed near the Ohakea Air Force base in the south of North Island. Prime Minister John Key described the accident as a tragedy.
■PAPUA NEW GUINEA
Forty dead in bus crash
Around 40 people have died after two buses crashed head-on in one of the nation’s worst ever road accidents, reports said yesterday. The buses were traveling at speeds above 100kph and swerving to avoid potholes when they hit each other in a remote area of the northeast. Most of the victims were killed instantly while others died before they could receive treatment, with eight people in intensive care.
■SOUTH KOREA
FMD case confirmed
Officials confirmed an additional outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) yesterday, one week after the country reported its first case in nearly eight years. Cows at a farm in Pocheon, just north of Seoul, tested positive for the disease early yesterday, the Agriculture Ministry said in a statement. Quarantine workers plan to slaughter about 1,790 cows, pigs and deer within a 500m radius of the site of the outbreak, to prevent the spread of the disease, ministry official Kim Dae-gyun said. The site is about 3.5km away from another Pocheon farm where six cows were confirmed to have been infected with the disease last Thursday — South Korea’s first outbreak since May 2002, Kim said.
■THAILAND
Three killed in attacks
A series of drive-by shootings and bombings killed three people and wounded 17 in the restive Muslim south, police said yesterday. Unknown assailants shot dead and burned the bodies of a Buddhist couple who were riding to work on a motorcycle in the morning in Pattani Province, police said. A Buddhist family of three, including a 12-year-old girl, were wounded in another drive-by attack in the same province. On Wednesday, a group of government electricians were ambushed as they worked on electrical wiring along a road, also in Pattani. One was killed and four others wounded. A bomb was later detonated outside a tea shop in the same province, wounding four civilians, and in neighboring Yala a bomb exploded outside an open-air market, wounding three soldiers and three civilians.
■HONG KONG
Acid suspects detained
Police have arrested two suspects in connection with a recent acid attack in the densely populated financial hub. Police said in a statement late on Wednesday that the 18-year-old and 23-year-old men were allegedly linked to an acid attack in the Causeway Bay shopping district on Dec. 12, when corrosive liquid was tossed from a building, injuring six people. Police spokeswoman Michelle Mak said the two weren’t immediately charged and that the 18-year-old was freed on bail. She said it still wasn’t clear if the suspects were involved in other similar acid attacks. In the most recent attack on Saturday night, two bottles of acid were hurled from a building overlooking Temple Street in Kowloon peninsula, a popular tourist spot known for its outdoor market and snack stalls. At least 30 people were injured.
■UNITED STATES
US drops case against Gotti
US prosecutors announced on Wednesday an end to their long-running but futile case against John “Junior” Gotti, son of New York’s most famous modern gangster. “In light of the circumstances, the government has decided not to proceed with the prosecution against John A. Gotti,” Preet Bharara, US Attorney in Manhattan, said in a statement. The move marks a dramatic victory for Gotti. His last racketeering and murder trial ended on Dec. 1 when the jury failed to reach a verdict on any count. Prosecutors had been desperate to put away Gotti, who admits to a life in the Gambino family of the Mafia, but denies murder allegations.
■UNITED STATES
NYC’s ‘skinniest’ house sold
A town house dubbed New York City’s skinniest house has sold for US$2.1 million. The red 3m-by-12m brick building in Greenwich Village was built in 1873 on land used as an alley between homes. The two-bedroom, two-bath Bedford Street house was listed for sale last August at US$2.7 million. It last sold in 2000 for US$1.6 million. A plaque on the house notes poet Edna St. Vincent Millay once lived there, as did anthropologist Margaret Mead.
■UNITED STATES
Cabbie returns thousands
A Bangladeshi taxi driver in New York City said he returned a lost purse containing more than US$21,000 in cash and expensive jewelry because his mother always advised him to be honest. “I’m broke, but I’m honest,” 28-year-old Mohammad Asadujjaman said on Tuesday. Felicia Lettieri, of Pompeii, Italy, and six relatives had taken two cabs from midtown Manhattan to Penn Station on Christmas Eve. The 72-year-old Lettieri left her purse behind, with more than US$21,000, jewelry worth thousands more and some of the group’s passports. Asadujjaman called a friend with a car and drove about 80km to a Long Island address in the purse. No one was home, so he left his cellphone number and a note. His phone rang a short time later and he drove back to return the bag. Felicia Lettieri’s sister Francesca told Newsday that Asadujjaman had saved her family’s vacation, adding: “We really love what he did.” Asadujjaman is a full-time college student who began driving a cab a few days a week after his hours were cut back at a former factory job. He turned down a reward, saying he could not accept it as an observant Muslim.
■UNITED STATES
Singer Pendergrass dies
Teddy Pendergrass, who became R&B’s reigning sex symbol in the 1970s and 1980s with his forceful, masculine voice and passionate love ballads and later became an inspirational figure after suffering a car accident in 1982 that left him paralyzed, died on Wednesday at age 59 at Bryn Mawr Hospital in suburban Philadelphia. The singer’s son, Teddy Pendergrass II, said his father underwent colon cancer surgery eight months ago and had “a difficult recovery.”
■UNITED STATES
‘Mastermind’ charged
A woman suspected of being the mastermind behind a series of break-ins at the Hollywood homes of several celebrities has been charged with felony burglary and receiving stolen property. Rachel Lee, 19, was charged on Wednesday. She joins five other young men and women charged with the burglaries. Lee turned herself in on Wednesday afternoon and was released after posting US$150,000 bail. Lee and Nicholas Prugo, who faces seven counts of first-degree burglary, are accused of spearheading the burglaries.
‘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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