■SRI LANKA
Woman riddled with nails
A maid returned from her job in Saudi Arabia with 24 nails inside her body — the result of torture by the family who employed her, a doctor and government official said on Wednesday. L.G. Ariyawathi’s body is riddled with needles and nails, which were scheduled to be removed today, a doctor said on Wednesday. Ariyawathi, 49, returned to Sri Lanka on Saturday and was hospitalized the next day with severe pain at a facility about 160km away from the capital, Colombo, media reports said. She told a local newspaper that her employers tortured her with the nails as punishment. “The woman at the house had heated the nails and then the man inserted them into my body,” Ariyawathi was quoted as saying in the newspaper Lakbima. H.K.K. Satharasinghe of Kamburupitiya hospital said X-rays show Ariyawathi had 24 nails and needles in her body. A spokesman for Sri Lanka’s Foreign Employment Bureau, said that Ariyawathi had been too afraid to complain about the abuse to Saudi authorities, fearing that her employers might not let her return home.
■INDONESIA
Jakarta wants compensation
Jakarta is seeking more than a US$1 billion compensation for environmental damage from an oil spill at a Thai-run rig off Australia’s northwest coast, a report said yesterday. Government representatives were said to be ready to table the demand during talks with PTT Australasia, a unit of Thailand’s PTT Exploration and Production PCL, in Perth yesterday. The leak in the Timor Sea from Aug. 21 to Nov. 3 was the worst at an offshore oil platform in Australian history. The West Timor Care Foundation, which supports poor fishermen in eastern Indonesia, estimates the spill affected the livelihoods of some 18,000 fishermen.
■AUSTRALIA
Star can’t leave country
Actor Paul Hogan, star of the Crocodile Dundee movie trilogy, has been barred from leaving the country until he pays a disputed tax bill, his lawyer said on Thursday. The actor, who lives in Los Angeles, arrived in Sydney last week to attend his mother’s funeral. He was served with an Australian Taxation Office order after landing last Friday that prevents him from leaving Australia until he settles a multimillion dollar tax bill, lawyer Andrew Robinson said. Australian tax and crime investigators have fought Hogan in a five-year legal wrangle to investigate evidence that he used offshore bank accounts. Tax authorities last month claimed Hogan owed tax on A$38 million (US$34 million) in allegedly undisclosed income.
■ SRI LANKA
Authorities block porn sites
Authorities have blocked over 100 porn Web sites that allegedly feature local men and women, the government said yesterday. The Sri Lankan Telecommunications Regulatory Commission has been asked to prevent users in the country accessing some 107 adult Web sites, the government information department said. Other adult sites featuring non-Sri Lankans will remain available, however.
■KAZAKHSTAN
Lion sleeps in parking lot
Where better to leave a lion overnight than in a van in a parking lot? At least that’s what a circus owner in the town of Kostanai thought when he went off for a catnap at the end of a day’s driving after buying the lion. Police on Wednesday said that a parking lot customer was shocked to see the lion lying in the van. Police seized the lion but plan to return it. The owner will escape punishment.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Cat trasher apologizes
The woman at the center of an Internet hate campaign after being caught on camera dumping a cat into a garbage can said on Wednesday she was “profoundly sorry” for her actions. Mary Bale, a 45-year-old bank worker, said she had been guilty of a “split second of misjudgment.” The cat, Lola, was stuck in the plastic garbage can for 15 hours, but was discovered after her owners heard her mewing. They found out what happened after checking footage from a closed-circuit TV camera. A Facebook campaign was launched against Bale, with some contributors even making death threats. “I want to take this opportunity to apologize profusely for the upset and distress that my actions have caused. I cannot explain why I did this, it is completely out of character and I certainly did not intend to cause any distress to Lola or her owners,” Bale said.
■ SOUTH AFRICA
Nine killed at train crossing
A driver taking children to school went around a closed railroad crossing gate on Wednesday, then was hit by an oncoming train that killed at least nine pupils and injured five others, police and witnesses said in the Blackheath area of Cape Town. A police spokesman said three girls and six boys were killed. “The other five children, all boys, sustained serious to critical injuries,” he said. “Nobody was injured inside the train during the incident.” Police are investigating a case of homicide against the van driver, who is in hospital in critical condition. A preliminary investigation indicated that the crossing gate was down when the van crossed the railway track, police said.
■ SPAIN
‘Tomatina’ leaves town red
Tens of thousands of revelers from around the world pelted each other with tonnes of tomatoes on Wednesday in a mushy annual festival in the town of Bunol. The one-hour bloodless battle, known as the Tomatina, left the town awash in a sea of tomato pulp. The town council brought in about 100 tonnes of ripe tomatoes for the estimated 40,000 tourists who descended on the town of just 9,000 inhabitants. The tomatoes cost the council about US$35,000, about a third of the overall budget for the festival, most of which goes to pay for security, cleaning services, mobile toilets and civil protection. The “Tomatina” is held each year on the last Wednesday in August.
■ DR CONGO
Crash exposes smugglers
Police have seized 116 elephant tusks and arrested two men following a truck crash. Colonel Sylvain Tshikez said on Wednesday that the ivory was found inside jerry cans that tumbled off a truck involved in a crash near the town of Kisangani, Orientale Province. The owner of the vehicle was seriously injured, but was also expected to face charges.
■ FRANCE
Lake mission begins
Authorities set about draining a lake trapped beneath a glacier in the Mont Blanc Alpine range on Wednesday to protect thousands of people in the valley below from a flood. Workers at 3,200m poured hot water on the ice to make a hole through which they will push a pump and start tapping off the water that has accumulated below one of the glaciers. Some 65,000m³ of water has gathered in a cavity which is under immense pressure from the ice above. If the water bursts out it could flood the nearby valley of Saint-Gervais in half an hour and “nearly 900 families could be affected,” Saint-Gervais-les-Bains Mayor Jean-Marc Peillex said.
■ CANADA
Suspected terrorists arrested
Police arrested two Ottawa residents on terror-related charges on Wednesday and expected to arrest more, a government official said. Police descended on a west-end home in Ottawa early on Wednesday and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said in a news release they were executing search warrants in connection with the case. Officials declined to provide details on the identity of the suspects publicly or specify the allegations other than to call them terrorism-related.
■ UNITED STATES
Body left in hearse
Police and state regulators are investigating why a woman’s body was left in a hearse for nine days. Police found the body of Linda Walton last week after they were asked to investigate a foul odor in the city of Graham, North Carolina. The 37-year-old died earlier this month in her apartment and police were unable to locate her next of kin. They called David B. Lawson Mortuary to pick up the body. Lawson has been a licensed funeral director for more than 30 years and is part of a rotation of funeral homes used by police. The funeral service’s disciplinary committee meets next week to discuss the complaint.
■ UNITED STATES
Shoplifters nabbed by 60 cops
Two men were arrested in Oregon for shoplifting during a “Shop With a Cop” event for school children thinking that the 60 police officers would be distracted helping children pick out school supplies for the school year. They were wrong, however, as store security officers at the Fred Meyer store in Portland weren’t caught off guard on Wednesday. Security watched the two young men packing their backpacks with blenders, shoes, clothes and tools before they were arrested, the Oregonian reported.
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
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
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
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