■INDONESIA
Bengal cub tiger mauls girl
A young Bengal tiger mauled a three-year-old girl after breaking free from its handlers at a zoo, a spokeswoman said yesterday, leaving the toddler with head injuries that required surgery. The 10-month-old male tiger, Ony, attacked Angelica Rosa while it was being transferred between enclosures at Taman Safari Prigen zoo in East Java on Monday morning, park spokeswoman Tisa Ananda said. “It seems that the tiger, who’s only 10 months old, was excited to see the girl and wanted to play with her,” Ananda told reporters.
■MALAYSIA
Military student hazed, dies
A student died at the top military college, on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, after he was allegedly hazed and authorities were investigating five schoolmates, one of whom had been expelled, officials said yesterday. The 17-year-old boys are being investigated for suspected murder in connection with the death of Mohammed Naim Mustaqim Mohamad Sobri, 16, district police chief Abdul Rahim Hamzah Othman said. Media have reported Mohammed Naim apparently collapsed after being kicked in the abdomen while doing push-ups, but police and school officials declined to confirm the details.
■MYANMAR
Rare white elephant seen
A rare white elephant, historically considered an omen of political change, has been captured, state media reported yesterday. The female pachyderm was captured by officials on Saturday in the coastal town of Maungtaw in Rakhine State, the New Light of Myanmar newspaper said. She is aged about 38 and more than 2m tall, the English-language paper said, although it did not mention where she would be kept.
■ICELAND
PM takes same-sex spouse
Icelandic Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir, has married her long-term partner, her office said on Monday, making her the world’s first national leader with a same-sex spouse. Sigurdardottir, 67, married writer Jonina Leosdottir on Sunday, the day a new law took effect defining marriage as a union between two consenting adults regardless of sex. The two had had a civil union for years and changed this into a marriage under the new law, which was approved by parliament earlier this month.
■RWANDA
Two arrested over murder
Rwanda arrested two men on Sunday in connection with the murder of a journalist who had linked the government to the shooting of an exiled general in South Africa last week, police said. Jean Leonard Rugambage, acting editor of the vernacular Umuvugizi newspaper, was shot twice outside his home in Kigali on June 24 and died on the spot. A national police statement dismissed accusations that Rugambage’s death was related to his work as a journalist and suggested that it was probably revenge for alleged crimes committed during the 1994 genocide. President Paul Kagame said Rugambage’s death was unacceptable.
■RUSSIA
Official flings out millions
A fisheries official suspected of accepting bribes tossed 10 million rubles (US$322,000) from his car after a police chase and a crash on a busy Moscow highway, investigators said on Monday. Pursued by police, Federal Fisheries Agency official Boris Simonov crashed his Cadillac on Friday and frantically flung 10 million rubles into the wind, local media reported. State-run First Channel television showed scores of large-denomination ruble notes being collected by police and cast into a torn, grimy cardboard box beside a thoroughfare in south-central Moscow. A spokesman for Russia’s Investigative Committee said Simonov’s boss, Roman Postnikov, who oversaw two Moscow rivers, was arrested on suspicion of forging a contract that allowed a fishing firm to operate without the proper documents. Both fishery officials will be jailed for two months pending further investigation, the committee said.
■SWITZERLAND
Mr Swatch dies at 82
Nicolas Hayek, chairman and former chief executive of the giant Swiss watch-manufacturing firm Swatch, has died. He was 82. Swatch Group said Hayek died unexpectedly of heart failure on Monday at his office in Biel, Switzerland. “Nicolas G Hayek’s greatest merit was his enormous contribution to the saving of the Swiss watch industry and the foundation and the commercial development of the Swatch Group,” the company said in a statement. The self-styled Mr Swatch is credited with reinventing Swiss watch-making in the 1980s by introducing radical cost-saving moves after he was asked to help close it down. SMH started to produce a plastic wristwatch — the Swatch — which revolutionized the industry.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Flight attendant charged
A South African Airways flight attendant has been charged with trying to smuggle 3kg of cocaine into Britain through London’s Heathrow airport, the UK Border Agency said on Monday. Elphia Dlamini, 42, was arrested after arriving on a flight from Johannesburg on Saturday. The UK Border Agency said officers found the cocaine, worth an estimated £120,000 (US$181,000), on Dlamini during crew clearance checks.
■MEXICO
Famous singer shot dead
A singer famous for ballads lauding drug traffickers has been shot dead on the way to a concert in the northwest of the country, officials said on Monday. Unidentified attackers fired several times on Sergio Vega, or “El Shaka,” in his car late on Saturday as he was traveling to a concert in Sinaloa State, deputy local prosecutor Ramon Ignacio Rodrigo told journalists. Moments earlier, the 40-year-old singer had asked a friend to call the police because his car was being followed, according to the national Reforma daily. “When help arrived, it was already too late,” Ana Luisa Gomez told Reforma. The singer died at the scene after being hit by five bullets, Rodrigo said. Although the motive for the attack was unclear, El Shaka had the risky profession of singing narcocorridos — ballads lauding the exploits of drug traffickers — in Sinaloa, the state at the heart of Mexico’s illegal drugs industry.
■UNITED STATES
Fan beats toddler to death
A Texas man accused of fatally beating his two-year-old stepdaughter when she wouldn’t stop crying as he watched a World Cup game has been charged with capital murder. McAllen Police Sergeant Joel Morales said 27-year-old Hector Castro was charged on Monday after his arrest on Saturday. Castro is being held on US$1 million bond at the Hidalgo County jail, where a booking clerk said he does not yet have an attorney. Police Chief Victor Rodriguez said Castro told investigators the toddler wouldn’t stop crying while he was trying to watch the US-Ghana match on Saturday. Rodriguez said the child was severely beaten and suffered several broken ribs. Police said a screw or bolt was forced down her throat in an apparent attempt to make it look like she choked to death.
■UNITED STATES
Man convicted of hate crime
A New York City jury has convicted a man of murder as a hate crime in the beating death of an Ecuadorean immigrant. Jurors deliberated for about seven hours on Monday before convicting Keith Phoenix in the December 2008 death of Jose Sucuzhanay. Phoenix was also convicted of attempted assault as a hate crime in the attack on Sucuzhanay’s brother. He was retried on the charges after the first jury ended in a mistrial. Prosecutors said Phoenix and Hakim Scott mistook the brothers for gay men and yelled slurs. Scott was convicted in May of manslaughter, but was acquitted of a more serious murder charge.
■UNITED STATES
Actor Klein facing jail term
Los Angeles prosecutors said they have charged American Pie actor Chris Klein with drunken driving. City Attorney spokesman Frank Mateljan said Klein faces two misdemeanor driving under the influence charges and will be arraigned on July 9. Mateljan said Klein faces a minimum of three days in jail and up to a year sentence if convicted because of a prior drunken driving case. Klein played Chris “Oz” Ostreicher in 1999’s American Pie and in the 2001 sequel.
■UNITED STATES
Former champ misses out
Serious eaters are getting ready to scoff their way to glory in New York’s 95th annual hot dog eating contest on Sunday, but a famous contestant will be missing. Japan’s Takeru Kobayashi has won the contest six times. Major League Eating president Richard Shea said contract negotiations broke down this year. Kobayashi was champion from 2001 to 2006. He lost the last three years to Joey Chestnut of San Jose, California.
‘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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