■UNITED KINGDOM
Police scolded for ‘goofing’
Several police officers have been reprimanded after they used their riot shields as makeshift sleds during a cold snap. A passerby filmed the officers goofing around on a snowy hill in Oxford and posted the clip on YouTube. It shows a policeman barreling downhill while another shouts: “Whatever happens, keep smiling!” Thames Valley Police Superintendent Andrew Murray said on Thursday he had told the officers “that tobogganing on duty, on police equipment and at taxpayers’ expense is a very bad idea.” But he added that snow brings “out the child in all of us.”
■AUSTRIA
Protests halt swine tests
Vehement protests by animal rights activists prompted scientists on Thursday to temporarily stop an avalanche experiment that involved burying pigs in snow and monitoring their deaths. The two-week experiment — taking place in the Western Austrian Alps — was trying to determine what factors make it possible for humans to survive an avalanche in an air pocket until rescued without suffering permanent brain damage. Hermann Brugger, co-director of the experiment led by the Institute of Mountain Emergency Medicine in Bolzano, Italy, and the Medical University of Innsbruck, Austria, said the pigs didn’t suffer because they were sedated and given an anesthetic beforehand. But activists called the experiment cruel and pointless.
■SUDAN
Amnesty claims torture
Authorities may have used tortured to force confessions from six men executed yesterday for killing policemen in clashes in 2005, Amnesty International said. The men were convicted of attacking a police station in 2005 and killing 14 policemen in Khartoum, state-run SUNA news agency said. Between five and 30 civilians living in the Soba Aradi settlement were killed in the clashes that broke out over a forced eviction of an informal settlement, Amnesty said in a statement on its Web site. “These tragic deaths highlight the growing number of executions taking place in the country, many of which are being carried out after unfair trials,” Tawanda Hondora, the deputy director of Amnesty International Africa program, said in the statement.
■SPAIN
Trapped woman rescued
Police and firefighters have rescued a woman who spent eight days trapped in the elevator of her apartment building, police said on Thursday. The 35-year-old was found conscious but disorientated and was taken to hospital after she was found in the private elevator in the town of Sitges, police said. The police were alerted by relatives in Madrid who had reported her missing.
■UNITED STATES
Drug to combat headaches
Researchers in Israel said they had found a solution for headaches for people who have to fast for long periods, such as Jews during Yom Kippur. Reporting in the journal Headache, they said that a study of about 200 participants showed that 36 percent of those who took the drug etoricoxib (Arcoxia) developed headaches, compared with about 68 percent who took a placebo. Those who took etoricoxib also had less severe headaches, and they had an easier time fasting, the study said. Etoricoxib is a cousin of Vioxx (rofecoxib), the drug Merck pulled from the US market in September 2004 because it increased the risks of heart attacks and other serious complications. Etoricoxib is approved in several European countries, as well as Israel, but not the US.
■UNITED STATES
WW II bomb detonated
A World War II relic that was displayed outside an Alaska bar for years turned out not to be a dud. Soldiers on Wednesday detonated the 572kg aerial bomb. Radio station KMXT reports the bomb had lost some of its boom after 60 years, but it did go with a bang. The ordnance was recently donated to the Kodiak Military History Museum by a local resident, but the museum director determined it was more than just an interesting artifact. Soldiers from the Fort Richardson Explosive Ordnance detail inspected the bomb and determined it still had Dunnite, a highly explosive material also known as “Explosive D.” They recorded the detonation and salvaged a piece of the “Da Bomb,” as it was known, for display at the museum.
■UNITED STATES
SpaghettiOs creator dies
Donald Goerke, a Campbell Soup Co executive whose nonlinear approach to pasta resulted in SpaghettiOs, died last Sunday at his home in Delran, New Jersey He was 83. The cause was heart failure, his son David said. Introduced in 1965, SpaghettiOs has been a fixture in the US pantry ever since. Its memorable advertising jingle — “Uh-oh, SpaghettiOs!” — sung by the pop singer Jimmie Rodgers, is indelibly lodged in the public consciousness. More than 150 million cans of SpaghettiOs are sold each year, a spokeswoman for Campbell, based in Camden, New Jersey, said on Wednesday. Goerke, who worked for Campbell from 1955 until he retired in 1990, also created the company’s Chunky soup line.
■UNITED STATES
Shadegg won’t run again
Representative John Shadegg of Arizona won’t seek re-election in November, making him the 14th Republican to give up a House of Representatives seat this year. Shadegg, 60, was first elected in 1994 to his Phoenix-area seat as part of the Republican wave that gave the party control of the House for the first time in 40 years. He has compiled a consistently conservative voting record, aligning with the American Conservative Union 96 percent of the time on key votes in 2008. In 2007, he received a 100 percent rating from the group.
■UNITED STATES
Dr Ruth — love minister
The pioneer of media sex therapists, Ruth Westheimer, has teamed up with the city of Washington to promote a 28-day romance stimulus plan for the US capital. “The word stimulus is a dream. It has something arousing,” Westheimer, who is better known as Dr Ruth, said at a press conference to announce the partnership. Dr Ruth will serve as honorary US Secretary of Love and Relations next month — the month of Valentine’s Day — with the brief to “jump-start the District’s love economy.”
■UNITED STATES
Toddler repossessed
Police in California said a car dealer who repossessed a San Jose woman’s car left with something a bit more valuable: her two-year-old son. The child was sleeping in the back seat on Tuesday night when the car was taken away because the boy’s mother, Isabel Leuvano, was behind on her payments. Leuvano said she was waiting for her daughter outside the running car when someone jumped in and drove off, the San Jose Mercury News reported. Police say the man who drove off was the owner of Alberto’s Auto Sales. Officers located the toddler a half-hour later — about the time Luna told authorities that he noticed the boy.
‘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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