Sun, Apr 04, 2010 page7

• World News Quick Take

  • AGENCIES
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  ■NEW ZEALAND

  Hillary ashes Everest-bound

  Plans to place the ashes of Mt Everest conqueror Sir Edmund Hillary on the summit of the world’s tallest mountain this week were welcomed yesterday by his family and friends. “It’s a good move, I’d be totally happy with it,” his son Peter Hillary told the New Zealand Press Association. Fellow mountaineer Graeme Dingle told Radio New Zealand it was more appropriate that the remaining ashes were scattered on Mt Everest than kept in a Buddhist monastery. After his death in 2008, most of Hillary’s ashes were scattered in the sea off Auckland, with some kept in the monastery in the Himalayan village of Kunde in eastern Nepal.

  ■AUSTRALIA

  Lady McMahon dies

  Lady Sonia McMahon, the glamorous widow of former prime minister Sir William McMahon and mother of ­Hollywood-based actor Julian, has died in Sydney, a hospital spokesman said yesterday. McMahon, who created headlines in 1971 when she wore a daring white dress with splits up both sides to a White House dinner with then-US president Richard Nixon, had been suffering from cancer. “Lady Sonia McMahon passed away late last night,” a spokesman for St Vincent’s Private Hospital said. “She died peacefully with her family by her side.”

  ■AUSTRALIA

  Population minister named

  Prime Minister Kevin Rudd yesterday announced the country’s first population minister, citing concerns about sustainability as the number of people is tipped to balloon within decades. Rudd, who has previously talked of a “Big Australia,” said the government needed to plan for an ageing and growing population which a recent report forecast would jump from 22 million to 35.9 million within 40 years. “Many Australians have legitimate concerns about the sustainability of the population levels in different parts of the country,” the prime minister told reporters in Canberra. “Particularly its impact on urban congestion, its impact on the adequacy of infrastructure, its impact on the adequacy of housing supply, its impact on government services, its impact also on water and agriculture.”

  ■VIETNAM

  Strike at Taiwanese firm

  Thousands of workers went on strike at a Taiwanese-owned shoe factory in the south, demanding better pay and bonuses, reports said yesterday. The workers from Pou Chen Vietnam company in Dong Nai Province refused to work on Friday and threw shrimp sauce and pig’s blood onto workers that failed to participate in the strike, the Nguoi Lao Dong newspaper said. Up to 10,000 workers had gone on strike, the Tuoi Tre newspaper said. The workers, paid an average of US$70 a month, are demanding more monthly pay and bonuses on national holidays.

  ■FRANCE

  Pakistan arms sale frozen

  A plan to sell 1.2 billion euros (US$1.6 billion) in military equipment for Pakistan’s JF-17 combat aircraft has been held up, a source at President Nicolas Sarkozy’s office said on Friday. Newspaper Le Monde had reported earlier that Paris decided to suspend the sale of electronics and missiles — the first section of a 6 billion euro contract — under pressure from India and uncertainty over Pakistan’s finances. “It’s a deal that’s not ready from the Pakistani side,” the source said, without giving further details. “For now, the state of the dossier doesn’t allow us to carry on with it.”

  ■BELGIUM

  Terror suspects on trial

  A Brussels court went into deliberations on Friday in the trial of a terror cell allegedly linked to al-Qaeda with a judgment due on May 10. The central figure in the trial is 50-year-old Belgian-Moroccan Malika El Aroud, accused of inciting four young Belgians and two French youths to go to terror training camps in Afghanistan or Pakistan. El Aroud repeated during the last hearing that she was “against all forms of terrorism, but for jihad.” The prosecutor has sought a prison sentence of “at least eight years” for El Aroud, who is the widow of one of the killers of Ahmed Shah Massoud, head of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, in 2001. She is on trial along with six young Muslim men, three of whom admit they received explosives and arms training in al-Qaeda camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan.

  ■UNITED STATES

  Turkey reinstating envoy

  Washington on Friday welcomed Turkey’s decision to return its ambassador after a row over moves in Congress to brand the World War I massacre of Armenians as genocide. “We welcome that decision,” State Department spokesman Philip Crowley told reporters. “Turkey and the United States have a significant strategic relationship. There’s lots of work that we can jointly accomplish, and that work becomes more effective when we have an able interlocutor here in Washington,” he said. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan earlier said “positive developments” in the month-old spat had permitted the return of the ambassador, adding he would go to Washington to attend a nuclear security summit on April 12 and April 13.

  ■IRAQ

  Men in uniform kill 25

  Gunmen in army uniforms swooped on a village south of Baghdad at dawn yesterday, stormed three houses and shot dead 20 men and five women from families linked to an anti-Qaeda militia, officials said. “Men wearing uniforms and driving vehicles similar to those used by the army stormed three houses in the village of Sufia, in the region of Hour Rajab, and killed 25 people, including five women,” an interior ministry official said on condition of anonymity. The official said the killers tied up their victims before carrying out the massacre. A defense ministry official confirmed the details of the attack and the toll.

  ■SOMALIA

  Eleven killed in clashes

  Artillery exchanges in Mogadishu during clashes between Islamist militants and government forces have killed at least 11 civilians, witnesses and medical sources said. Both sides exchanged artillery fire during the fighting, which broke out on Friday in the south and the north of the city. “Seven of them died in northern Mogadishu while the other four died in Bakara,” said Ali Muse, head of Mogadishu ambulance services, adding that 26 people were injured.

  ■SUDAN

  US wants multiparty polls

  The US is hoping opposition parties will participate in Sudan’s first multiparty elections in a quarter-century, which is set for this month. The call comes as Sudan’s major opposition parties threaten a boycott of the April 11 polls because of what they say are irregularities and government bias. State Department spokesman Philip Crowley told reporters on Friday that while legitimate worries about the elections exist, including media access and problems with polling places, the US hoped the parties would reach agreement.

  ■UNITED STATES

  ‘Dynasty’ patriarch dies

  John Forsythe, the suave, smooth-voiced actor who portrayed patriarch Blake Carrington in the television soap Dynasty, has died at age 92 after a struggle with cancer, his publicist said. Forsythe died on Thursday from complications due to pneumonia, publicist Harlan Ball said in a statement. During his six-decade long career, Forsythe won numerous Emmy nominations as well as two Golden Globes for his role in Dynasty. Throughout the 1981-1989 run of the popular soap, Forsythe played the head of the wealthy but troubled Carrington family plagued by the machinations of his ex-wife Alexis, played by Joan Collins. Forsythe was also the voice of the mysterious Charlie in the popular television series Charlie’s Angels.

  ■UNITED STATES

  Doctor rails against Obama

  A central Florida urologist has posted a sign on his office door urging supporters of President Barack Obama to find a different doctor. The notice on Jack Cassell’s Mount Dora practice says: “If you voted for Obama, seek urologic care elsewhere. Changes to your healthcare begin right now, not in four years.” Cassell told the Orlando Sentinel on Thursday he wasn’t questioning patients or refusing care, because that would be unethical. “But if they read the sign and turn the other way, so be it,” he said. Cassell, 56, also provides Republican reading material in the waiting room — probably not a risky move, given that Mount Dora’s 10,000 residents and the surrounding area lean heavily conservative. Above a stack of Republican health care literature, a sign reads: “This is what the morons in Washington have done to your health care. Take one, read it and vote out anyone who voted for it.”

  ■UNITED STATES

  Sentence too harsh: judge

  A convicted sex offender should not have been forbidden to use or possess a computer for 30 years after he was released from prison, a federal appeals court ruled on Friday. A three-judge panel agreed with prosecutors and the man’s lawyer that the restriction was too harsh because it could never be modified over three decades. Mark Wayne Russell of Columbia, Maryland, had been caught in a 2006 sex sting trying to meet someone he found through the Internet and thought was a 13-year-old girl. The judges noted it is often necessary to use a computer to apply for a job, even menial ones. Russell had served several years in prison and challenged the conditions of his release. The panel ordered a lower court to modify the conditions. As part of his sentence, Russell was ordered not to own or use a computer “for any reason.”

  ■UNITED STATES

  Puppy basher sentenced

  A retired Los Angeles County assistant fire chief was sentenced on Friday to 90 days in jail for using a rock to beat a puppy so severely it was euthanized. Glynn Johnson apologized to the dog’s owners, who urged the judge to give him the maximum sentence of more than four years in prison. Besides jail time, Johnson must perform 400 hours of community service working with dogs and repay the owners’ vet bills. The 55-year-old Hillcrest man was convicted in January of animal cruelty using a deadly weapon for the 2008 attack in which he repeatedly bashed a six-month-old German-shepherd mix in the head. Johnson said he was freeing himself after the neighbor’s dog, Karley, clamped its mouth on his hand and nearly severed his thumb tip as he walked her home.
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