■SOUTH KOREA
Aid team heads for Haiti
Seoul has dispatched 190 troops to Haiti to help rebuild the Caribbean country following its devastating earthquake. The Defense Ministry said yesterday the troops, mostly army engineers, would provide humanitarian assistance to and rebuild areas in Leogane, just west of the capital, Port-au-Prince. The ministry said the soldiers will join an advance team of 30 troops in Leogane.
■RUSSIA
Abandoned tanks found
Some people were amazed to discover dozens of T-80 battle tanks seemingly abandoned in a forest, but army officials insisted there was nothing unusual about it. The tanks — nearly 100 in all — were found near the Elanovskaya railroad station about 100km outside the Urals Mountains city of Yekaterinburg, the Kommersant daily reported yesterday. Their presence was revealed after a local news website posted a video of the tanks, covered in a deep layer of snow and resting peacefully between the railroad and the woods with no military personnel in sight. “There are tanks all over the forest, abandoned. If you need one, come and get it,” an unnamed person behind the camera says in the video posted on E1.ru.
■AUSTRALIA
EMI appeals ruling
Record company EMI has lodged an appeal against a ruling that band Men At Work ripped off a popular children’s song in their worldwide 1980s hit Down Under, court papers showed. The company is claiming a flute riff that draws on Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree was simply an “amusing” tribute to the ditty, penned by a teacher for a Girl Guides jamboree in 1935. EMI said on Thursday the similarity between the two pieces of music “might be amusing or of interest to the highly sensitized or educated musical ear,” but would probably not be picked up “by the ordinary listener.”
■SOUTH AFRICA
School shuts ‘lesbian dorm’
A girls’ boarding school outside Durban has closed down a dormitory after accusing 27 residents of being lesbians, local media reported on Friday. Two girls were caught kissing in the dormitory, which houses 300 students, the Mercury newspaper reported. When confronted by school officials, they identified 25 other lesbians in the dorm. “Twenty-seven learners were involved in this kind of relationship and the school took a decision to close down the hostel,” provincial education department spokesman Mfundi Sibiya said. The department has appointed a panel to investigate the issue, but the education department said schools did not have the right to remove students because of sexual orientation.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Court plans trial for dealer
An antiques dealer pleaded not guilty to stealing a rare first edition of the works of William Shakespeare. Raymond Scott appeared on Friday in a court in Newcastle. He is charged with theft, handling stolen goods and removing criminal property. His trial was set for June. The 53-year-old is accused of taking the rare volume from Durham University in 1998. His arrest came after a man took the edition to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, claiming he had found it in Cuba. Scott, who arrived at a previous court hearing in a horse-drawn carriage, appeared on Friday in military fatigues and an expensive pair of Tiffany sunglasses.
■ITALY
Nation ‘in hands of Taliban’
A band of prosecutors and judges are trying to overthrow the democratically elected government, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said on Friday, likening part of Italy’s judiciary to the Taliban. Speaking at an electoral rally in Turin, the 73 year-old media tycoon, who is on trial in two separate cases, said there was “a subversive aim” to bring down his less than two-year old government. “If the prosecutors don’t like a law then they challenge it and it gets rejected by the courts,” Berlusconi said. “We are in the hands of this band of Talibans, today our democracy is in this situation.” The National Association of Magistrates said Berlusconi’s words marked “an intolerable escalation of insults and aggression.”
■MOROCCO
Midwife jailed for trafficking
A court sentenced a former midwife on Friday to six years in jail for trafficking newborns, a judicial source said. Zoubida Kheddar, 65, a retired midwife from a maternity hospital in Casablanca, had been involved since 2002 in trafficking newborns from consenting single mothers, the prosecution said. Kheddar, who denied all charges, supervised the births at her home before “selling them to women” wanting to adopting them. Each baby was “sold for around 38,000 dirhams [US$4,630],” the Moroccan press reported.
■ITALY
Luxury fair opens
Shoppers wondering how to deal with the afterlife found an answer on Friday — a cellphone-equipped golden coffin, one of many items on display at the opening of an international luxury fair in Verona. The coffin was priced at a mere 280,000 euros [US$381,000], while a diamond-studded, cancan-style wedding gown in pink chinchilla fur could be scooped up for 220,000 euros. More traditional items include a boat running on a Ferrari engine and a crystal-covered piano, whose price was undisclosed. The economic crisis does not appear to have dulled luxury tastes — visitors turned out in hordes to the opening day of the fair, which runs until tomorrow.
■UNITED STATES
Motivator out on bail
A motivational speaker charged with manslaughter in the deaths of three people at a sweat lodge ceremony is out of jail. Yavapai County Jail Sergeant Dee Huntley said James Arthur Ray was released on Friday, one day after a Yavapai County Superior Court judge reduced his bond from US$5 million to US$525,000. Ray had to surrender his passport. He also cannot organize, supervise or conduct any activities that might harm others. Ray has pleaded not guilty to three counts of manslaughter stemming from an October sweat lodge ceremony in Arizona that was supposed to be the highlight of a five-day “Spiritual Warrior” retreat.
■UNITED STATES
Rapper charged over pot
The rapper Juvenile and his music producer have been arrested for possession of marijuana after neighbors told police they could smell pot coming from a house being used as a recording studio in Louisiana. The 34-year-old rap star, whose real name is Terius Gray, was booked on Thursday at a jail in St Bernard Parish southeast of New Orleans. Gray and his 42-year-old producer, Leroy Edwards, were released later that night on bond. Juvenile is best known for the song Back That Thing Up.
■UNITED STATES
Radcliffe talks of suicide ad
Daniel Radcliffe is explaining why he has just filmed a public service announcement for The Trevor Project, the leading organization focusing on suicide prevention efforts among gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth. Because his parents were both actors, “I grew up knowing a lot of gay men and it was never something that I even thought twice about — that some men were gay and some weren’t,” the Harry Potter megastar said on Friday. “And then I went to school and [for] the first time ... I came across homophobia. ... I had never encountered it before. It shocked me.” He said he had “always hated anybody who is not tolerant of gay men or lesbians or bisexuals,” adding that “now I am in the very fortunate position where I can actually help or do something about it.” The announcement is scheduled to air in spring.
■UNITED STATES
Woman sues 50 Cent
A Florida woman has sued rapper 50 Cent in New York City, claiming he unlawfully distributed her homemade sex video over the Internet after editing himself into it as a wig-wearing narrator. Lastonia Leviston filed a lawsuit on Wednesday in Manhattan claiming unauthorized use of her name or image and emotional distress caused by the public release of a video she made with a lover in 2008. The lawsuit claims 50 Cent posted the video on his Web site last year after blurring out the lover’s face. The rapper’s real name is Curtis Jackson.
■UNITED STATES
Victim may sue California
Rescued kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard and her family have filed claims against the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation alleging the parole of her alleged captor was botched. Officials said on Friday that the claim argues the department failed to effectively monitor convicted sex offender Phillip Garrido, probably prolonging Dugard’s time in captivity. The filing of the claim is seen as likely to lead to a lawsuit against the state office. Garrido and his wife, Nancy, have pleaded not guilty to charges of kidnapping and raping Dugard, who last August was discovered alive nearly two decades after she was snatched her outside her home aged 11 in 1991.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
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
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
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
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