■ AUSTRALIA
Dream leads police to body
An Aboriginal elder who claimed to have seen the location of a missing child in a dream has led police to a body — however, it was not the corpse of a child but that of an adult woman. Police believe the dismembered torso found wrapped in plastic at the Nurragingy Reserve in Doonside, western Sydney, a sacred Aboriginal site, is that of a Sydney woman who was reported missing in June. The search is continuing for six-year-old Kiesha Abrahams from Mount Druitt in Sydney whose mysterious disappearance from her bedroom almost two weeks ago has become nationwide news. Cheryl Carroll-Lagerwey, the Aboriginal elder, said she was not psychic, but had a third sense that she could lead police to the body of Kiesha Abrahams. “I can’t explain this,” she told local media. “I had a dream about a little girl being murdered and that her body was about here.”
■CHINA
Planner sentenced to death
A court sentenced a former senior city economic planner to a suspended death sentence yesterday for taking bribes and abusing his power, state news agency Xinhua said, the latest in the government’s war on corruption. Pi Qiansheng (皮黔生), who headed a high-profile economic development zone near Beijing and was fired last year, was found guilty of extorting money and accepting bribes of 7.55 million yuan ($1.12 million) from 1995 to 2005, Xinhua cited the ruling as saying. His “illegal actions” while heading the Tianjin Economic and Technology Development Zone administrative committee from 1996 to 1998 resulted in 220 million yuan of losses in state assets, Xinhua reported, quoting the court ruling. The Tianjin development zone is 120km southeast of Beijing and was established to boost north China’s economy and to become a logistics hub for northeast Asia. Pi’s downfall adds a stain to the hopes of Tianjin, which has spent billions of dollars revamping its infrastructure, to emerge as a regional financial and economic center despite its past success in attracting foreign investment. The court also ordered all of Pi’s property be confiscated.
■ MALAYSIA
Baby dumpers may be hung
Malaysian parents who abandon their newborns and leave them to die could face the gallows, as authorities step up their response to a series of gruesome cases of abandoned babies. The government has reportedly agreed that baby dumping will now be probed under the offense of attempted murder or murder, which is punishable by a mandatory death sentence on conviction. Several recent cases are being investigated under more lenient criminal codes, such as abandonment, that carry up to 10 years imprisonment. Authorities are alarmed over a jump in baby dumping cases, with 60 recorded so far this year, compared with 79 for the whole of last year. There have been 241 babies abandoned since 2008.
■ SINGAPORE
More jail sought for vandal
A Singapore prosecutor asked a court to increase the five-month jail term of Swiss executive Oliver Fricker, who was also sentenced to three strokes of the cane for vandalism and trespassing. The sentence from the lower court was inadequate given that Fricker had previously been convicted of property damage in Switzerland in 2001, Deputy Public Prosecutor Kan Shuk Weng told the Court of Appeal yesterday, asking for a further two to four months in jail. Fricker, 32, has paid the costs of cleaning the graffiti he spray painted on a commuter train with an accomplice after breaking into a depot.
■ CYPRUS
Ancient sailor diet uncovered
A huge quantity of olive stones on an ancient shipwreck more than 2,000 years old has provided valuable insight into the diet of sailors in the ancient world, researchers said on Thursday. The shipwreck, dating from about 400BC and laden mainly with wine amphorae from the Aegean island of Chios and other north Aegean islands, was discovered deep under the sea off the southern coast. Excavation on the site, which started in November 2007, has determined that the ship was a merchant vessel of the late classical period. “An interesting piece of evidence that gives us information on the conditions under which the sailors of antiquity lived, are the large numbers of olive pips that were found during excavation, since these pips must have been part of the crew’s food supply,” the Department of Antiquities said in a news release on Thursday.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Jump in Facebook ‘panics’
Facebook has seen a sevenfold increase in young people reporting suspicious behavior online since it introduced a so-called panic button last month, investigators said on Thursday. A total of 211 Facebookers have used the button since July 12, compared with 28 who reported alleged abuse through the site in the month before its introduction. The application, which is optional and advertised to Facebook users aged 13 to 18, aims to prevent predatory adults from “grooming” unsuspecting young people online. Calls for a panic button grew after a 33-year-old convicted sex offender was jailed in March for the rape and murder of 17-year-old Ashleigh Hall, who he met on Facebook by pretending to be a teenage boy.
■ SRI LANKA
Court martial convicts general
A court martial convicted former army general Sarath Fonseka yesterday of dabbling in politics and stripped him of his rank and medals, a senior military source said. Fonseka’s hearing before the three-member tribunal began five months ago. “The court has ruled that he should be cashiered,” the military source said. “So he will be stripped of his rank and all the medals he had earned during his 40-year career.” As the battlefield architect of the military victory over Tamil Tiger rebels in May last year, Fonseka had seemingly secured his legacy as the commander who crushed the 37-year insurgency for an independent Tamil homeland. However, it was his bid to translate that success into political power that was to prove his undoing as he took on his former ally, President Mahinda Rajapakse, at the ballot box in elections in January.
■ THE NETHERLANDS
Gymnast teaches orangutans
In an evolutionary twist, a zoo is calling on the services of an Olympic gymnast to teach orangutans how to swing through the trees. The zoo, Ouwehands Dierenpark Rhenen, said it had renovated its orangutan enclosure to allow the long-limbed, hairy, auburn-colored primates to swing from tree to tree in an outdoor setting above the viewing public — but the animals appear to have lost the knack of it. Yesterday, Olympian Epke Zonderland hoped to re-teach them. “It is said that we can learn from apes how to climb, but this time they’ve asked me to get the apes back into the trees,” Zonderland told radio station BNR on Wednesday night. In the wild, orangutans rarely come down to the ground, the zoo said, and in the improved enclosure the primates will be able to climb up one tree screened from the public to an outdoor enclosure with seven other trees 10m high.
■ PERU
Bats attack hundreds
Bats infected with rabies have attacked more than 500 Aborigines and four children likely lost their lives in an outbreak of the disease, the Health Ministry said on Thursday. The attacks occurred in the village of Urakusa, in the northeast of the country, where the Aguajun tribe lives. Jose Bustamente, a ministry official, said medical supplies have been sent to the tribe. Rabies, a virus that causes acute inflammation of the brain, is usually spread to humans by dog bites and has an incubation period that can last several months. Health teams are looking for people in communities within 10km of the outbreak who were attacked by bats any time in the last six months.
■ UNITED STATES
Suspected killer arrested
A man suspected of killing five people in a rash of 20 stabbings in three US states over three months was arrested in Atlanta as he tried to board a flight to Israel, US officials said on Thursday. Law enforcement agents detained the suspect, who has been named as Israeli national Elias Abuelzam, late on Wednesday at the departure gate for a flight to Tel Aviv, an Atlanta police official told a news conference. The suspect was paged by name and came to the ticket desk, where he was detained by Atlanta police officers.
■ UNITED STATES
Attendant hopes to fly
The fed-up flight attendant who set a new standard for quitting when he abandoned his job via an emergency chute apparently isn’t as much of a quitter as everyone thought. Steven Slater, 38, said through his lawyer on Thursday that he loves flying and wants to go back to work. Slater’s career appeared to end on Monday when he went onto the public address system after a JetBlue flight from Pittsburgh, cursed out a passenger he said had treated him rudely and then exited down an emergency chute at Kennedy Airport. Passenger Marjorie Briskin, 53, told the Wall Street Journal Slater had blurted out an expletive during an otherwise normal conversation with a passenger over luggage just after the plane landed in New York. A young woman asked Slater which overhead bin her bag was in, and the conversation quickly and unexpectedly turned nasty. “I didn’t think she was rude in the least,” Briskin told the Journal.
■ UNITED STATES
Rubik’s puzzle solved
An international team of researchers has found that the popular Rubik’s Cube can always be solved in 20 moves or less from any given configuration. “Every solver of the Cube uses an algorithm, which is a sequence of steps for solving the Cube,” said the team of mathematicians, who included Morley Davidson from Kent State University, Google engineer John Dethridge, German math teacher Herbert Kociemba and Tomas Rokicki, a California programmer. “There are many different algorithms, varying in complexity and number of moves required, but those that can be memorized by a mortal typically require more than forty moves. One may suppose God would use a much more efficient algorithm, one that always uses the shortest sequence of moves; this is known as God’s Algorithm. The number of moves this algorithm would take in the worst case is called God’s Number. At long last, God’s Number has been shown to be 20.” The research, published online, ends a 30-year search for the most efficient way to correctly align the 26 colored cubes that make up Erno Rubrik’s 1974 invention.
RARE EVENT: While some cultures have a negative view of eclipses, others see them as a chance to show how people can work together, a scientist said Stargazers across a swathe of the world marveled at a dramatic red “Blood Moon” during a rare total lunar eclipse in the early hours of yesterday morning. The celestial spectacle was visible in the Americas and Pacific and Atlantic oceans, as well as in the westernmost parts of Europe and Africa. The phenomenon happens when the sun, Earth and moon line up, causing our planet to cast a giant shadow across its satellite. But as the Earth’s shadow crept across the moon, it did not entirely blot out its white glow — instead the moon glowed a reddish color. This is because the
DEBT BREAK: Friedrich Merz has vowed to do ‘whatever it takes’ to free up more money for defense and infrastructure at a time of growing geopolitical uncertainty Germany’s likely next leader Friedrich Merz was set yesterday to defend his unprecedented plans to massively ramp up defense and infrastructure spending in the Bundestag as lawmakers begin debating the proposals. Merz unveiled the plans last week, vowing his center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU)/Christian Social Union (CSU) bloc and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) — in talks to form a coalition after last month’s elections — would quickly push them through before the end of the current legislature. Fraying Europe-US ties under US President Donald Trump have fueled calls for Germany, long dependent on the US security umbrella, to quickly
Romania’s electoral commission on Saturday excluded a second far-right hopeful, Diana Sosoaca, from May’s presidential election, amid rising tension in the run-up to the May rerun of the poll. Earlier this month, Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau barred Calin Georgescu, an independent who was polling at about 40 percent ahead of the rerun election. Georgescu, a fierce EU and NATO critic, shot to prominence in November last year when he unexpectedly topped a first round of presidential voting. However, Romania’s constitutional court annulled the election after claims of Russian interference and a “massive” social media promotion in his favor. On Saturday, an electoral commission statement
Chinese authorities increased pressure on CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd over its plan to sell its Panama ports stake by sharing a second newspaper commentary attacking the deal. The Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office on Saturday reposted a commentary originally published in Ta Kung Pao, saying the planned sale of the ports by the Hong Kong company had triggered deep concerns among Chinese people and questioned whether the deal was harming China and aiding evil. “Why were so many important ports transferred to ill-intentioned US forces so easily? What kind of political calculations are hidden in the so-called commercial behavior on the
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