■AUSTRALIA
Arsonist database planned
Canberra plans to establish a national database of convicted and suspected arsonists in hopes of preventing destructive wildfires. The initiative is in response to last year’s fires that killed 173 people and destroyed more than 2,000 homes. Attorney-General Robert McClelland announced the initiative yesterday after chairing an annual arson prevention meeting. The yearly meetings began after a series of fires, some suspected of being deliberately lit, devastated much of the southern region in February last year. McClelland said the database would give authorities up-to-date names and addresses of potential arsonists. About half of the thousands of wildfires that blaze in the country each year are deliberately lit or suspicious.
■PHILIPPINES
‘Son of God’ supports ‘Gibo’
A self-proclaimed “son of God” has thrown his influential support behind outgoing President Gloria Arroyo’s chosen successor in next week’s election. Television evangelist Pastor Apollo Quiboloy, whose Kingdom of Jesus Christ sect boasts 6 million followers, endorsed ex-defense secretary Gilbert Teodoro during the group’s annual thanksgiving concert on Sunday night. “Tonight let it be known, and to all Filipinos, that the Almighty Father has appointed the president for this nation. He is no other than Gilbert ‘Gibo’ Teodoro,” Quiboloy said in comments screened on GMA television. “With this proclamation, I may either sink or swim, but I know this decision is best for the nation.”
■SOUTH KOREA
Quarantine stepped up
Authorities stepped up major quarantine efforts yesterday as a highly contagious animal disease threatened the center of its livestock industry. The agriculture ministry said more roadblocks and quarantine posts were set up after the foot-and-mouth outbreak hit a state livestock research institute at Cheongyang, 160km south of Seoul, on Saturday. The Livestock and Veterinary Science Institute had raised 1,549 beef cattle and hogs for research and breeding. These were culled to contain the disease. The outbreak there was the 10th since April 9 and was close to Seosan and Yesan counties, which have major cattle farms. Agriculture Minister Chang Tae-pyong visited the institute on Sunday and called for intensive efforts to contain the outbreak.
■SRI LANKA
Tamil editor pardoned
The government pardoned a convicted Tamil editor whose 20-year prison term last year for supporting “terrorism” drew international criticism, the foreign minister said yesterday. J.S. Tissainayagam, who edited North Eastern Monthly magazine in Colombo, has been pardoned by President Mahinda Rajapakse to coincide with World Press Freedom Day, Foreign Minister Gamini Lakshman Peiris said. In January, Tissainayagam was freed on bail and was asked to surrender his passport, pending a full appeal hearing.
■MACAU
Labor organizer arrested
Police have arrested a trade union leader for allegedly assaulting an Australian man during May Day protests on Saturday that left 41 people injured, a report said yesterday. Hong Kong daily the Standard said police charged Lei Sio-kuan, president of the Macau Workers Power Union, with wounding the Australian following the Saturday clashes, which saw riot police use water cannon and pepper spray on demonstrators.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Activists project Swastika
Campaigners against the far-right yesterday projected an image of a swastika on the side of parliament in London, amid fears extremists could be voted in Thursday’s general election. The anti-fascist group, the EMMA Trust, beamed the picture of the red and white swastika alongside the phrase: “Decision Time. Keep the far-right out.” A spokesman said EMMA wanted “to protect this iconic building that is the bastion of our democratic values around the world against the invasion of the far-right.” The far-right British National Party has about 330 candidates in the election.
■SPAIN
Pilgrims can light up online
Catholic faithful without the time or energy to make the most famous and arduous Christian pilgrimage in Europe now need only a credit card and an Internet connection to light a candle at the shrine of St James in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. A service for armchair pilgrims has been set up by the 12th century cathedral with the help of an Internet start-up called mivela.com (mycandle.com). Those who book the first 20 candles on the board get 31 minutes of candle time in which to say their prayers, while latecomers get just 11 minutes. “That is enough to say a prayer,” said David Donas of mivela.com. Worshippers can also send text offerings via mobile phone.
■SUDAN
Ponzi clashes kills four
At least four people died on Sunday in clashes between security forces and protesters angry over a failed Ponzi or pyramid investment scheme in Darfur. Automatic gunfire erupted after about 1,000 people marched on the center of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, UN officials and aid workers said. Two members of the crowd said security forces opened fire on protesters. One humanitarian aid source said some protesters were also armed and there were exchanges of fire. “There is a lot of confusion ... We don’t know if it is police shooting, or civilians, or the Arab militias in town. They lost a lot of money and are very unhappy,” one aid worker said by telephone.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Japanese asked to donate
Japanese visitors to the Lake District will be asked to donate £5 (US$7.60) to help with conservation efforts, conservation charity Nurture Lakeland said. Tens of thousands of Japanese flock to the region every year, attracted by its natural beauty and links to children’s author Beatrix Potter, creator of The Tales of Peter Rabbit. Visitor payback schemes have run for some years to cope with the damage caused by millions of visitors to the region every year, but this is believed to be the first to target one specific nationality.
■ITALY
East Europeans win contest
A 28-year-old Bulgarian soprano, Sonya Yoncheva, and a 23-year-old Romanian tenor, Stefan Pop took the top prizes on Sunday in the prestigious Operalia competition founded and conducted by the Spanish tenor Placido Domingo. The prize serves as a launching pad into an opera career not only for the winners, but also for the 40 contestants who participated in the weeklong event, held this year at Milan’s famed La Scala opera house. “I already told them, win or lose, you get to go home and say you sang at La Scala,” Domingo told the audience. Yoncheva and Pop will each take home prizes of US$30,000.
■MEXICO
Dozens killed in drug wars
A new spate of killings hit the country from late Saturday into Sunday, with 25 people fatally shot in the northern state of Chihuahua. Seven of the deaths occurred in violence-plagued Ciudad Juarez, bringing to 62 the number of people killed in the city over the past week. The 18 other slayings overnight included four people fatally shot by automatic weapons fire in a bar in the town of Camargo, near the state capital Chihuahua City, and two women whose bodies were found stuffed in the trunk of an abandoned car in the same town, prosecutors said.
■VENEZUELA
Chavez party picks candidates
President Hugo Chavez’s ruling party rallied hundreds of thousands of members to a congressional election primary vote on Sunday — a key step in preventing infighting as they battle a resurgent and united opposition. Chavez said about 2 million primary voters picked among more than 3,000 candidates seeking to represent the party in September in congressional voting, which he said could determine the fate of his “Bolivarian Revolution.” Major opposition parties boycotted the last election, saying the electronic voting system was susceptible to fraud, but this time around the opposition is fielding a united slate of candidates chosen at a primary last week.
■UNITED STATES
Tennessee floods kill 11
Flooding caused by torrential rains has killed at least 11 people in central Tennessee and forced scores of people to evacuate homes and businesses, the Nashville Tennessean reported yesterday. At least two more people were listed as missing. The newspaper said thousands of cars, homes and basements were filled with water and entire neighborhoods were submerged across the state. Late on Sunday, Nashville announced that it was shutting down a water treatment plant and that a levee along the Cumberland River had begun to leak, the report said. After an aerial survey, Mayor Karl Dean said the damage was worse than he thought.
■SOUTH AFRICA
Malema likely to plead guilty
African National Congress (ANC) youth leader Julius Malema, in trouble for singing banned apartheid-era songs, was expected to plead guilty at a disciplinary hearing of bringing the ruling party into disrepute, local media said. While Malema’s Youth League has denied knowledge of any disciplinary action, the ruling party has asked for “privacy” to deal with its internal matters. Deputy Science Minister Derek Hanekom, who heads the ANC’s internal disciplinary committee, is expected to chair the hearing. The Sunday Times newspaper said Malema, whose inflammatory rhetoric has unnerved foreign investors and many white South Africans, was likely to plead guilty.
■UNITED STATES
Met Opera sales hit record
The Metropolitan Opera has sold a record 2.2 million tickets for its nine high-definition telecasts to theaters this season, an increase of 400,000 from 2008 until last year. The company said on Sunday the Saturday broadcast of Rossini’s Armida starring soprano Renee Fleming and tenor Lawrence Brownlee was seen by an estimated audience of 105,000 in North America and 84,000 in Europe and Latin America. With delayed telecasts in Asia, Latin America, Oceania and South Africa, plus repeats in North America and Europe, the Met expects its Armida audience to reach 250,000. There will be 11 telecasts next season, beginning with Wagner’s Das Rheingold on Oct. 9.
‘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
RSS