■VIETNAM
Tet Offensive remains found
The remains of 44 communist soldiers believed killed during the 1968 Tet Offensive have been found in a mass grave, bringing the number of remains recovered at the site to 74, a military official said yesterday. The soldiers were believed to have been killed during an assault on a US base during what was seen by many as the war’s turning point. Major Colonel Tran Trong Trung said none of the remains had been identified, but the site includes personal effects such as watches, belts and raincoats. Authorities had searched unsuccessfully for the grave in Quang Tri Province for three years based on information provided by US veterans who said about 158 soldiers may be buried there, Trung said.
■AUSTRALIA
Sea lion mauls boy
An 11-year-old boy was recovering yesterday after a sea lion mauled him at a popular Sydney zoo’s aquarium show as horrified visitors looked on. The boy, identified by his stepmother as Jack Lister, had been invited by zookeepers to meet the eight-year-old female sea lion during the Taronga Zoo’s seal and sea lion show on Friday. After feeding the animal, Jack mistakenly followed it off the stage, which spooked it, zoo officials said. The sea lion bit the boy and left several puncture wounds on his stomach. Jack had abdominal surgery that night and was in stable condition at a hospital. Jack’s stepmother, Dalitta Wright, told Sydney’s the Daily Telegraph yesterday that the attack was sudden. Zoo officials said the sea lion had never shown aggressive behavior before and they were investigating the attack.
■GERMANY
Guide offers toilet tours
A Berlin tour guide is offering visitors a tour of Berlin’s public conveniences. Tour guide Anna Haase wanted to take visitors to Berlin off the beaten track and came up with the novel idea of showing them some of the capital’s most famous toilets. She takes groups around the city’s lavatories, telling them about the history of the toilet’s development from biblical times to the present day and showing them toilets ranging from the oldest and most primitive to the newest and most technical. “I thought my colleagues would probably all do tours of parks and churches, but I wanted to break a taboo and explain the history of Berlin’s hygiene and toilet culture,” she said. Haase says that the toilet tours are in demand, especially from clubs and societies, as well as from people with a specialist or professional interest in the topic. In keeping with the tour’s theme, the meeting point is at the 19th century toilet block at the Gendarmenmarkt square, while a restaurant called “The Loo” is the finishing point.
■GERMANY
Erotic pens given to children
To sweeten their first day at primary school, children are normally given a cardboard cone filled with sweets, but schoolchildren in Essen this year opened their cones to find pens that project erotic images. Children attending the Adolf Reichwein School in the northwestern city were handed cones containing the pens by members of the German Communist Party, according to the school’s headmaster. Angry parents who discovered that the pens given to their six-year-old children could project erotic images of women informed the headmaster. In a press release, the party stated that it had purchased the pens from a discount store, which had said the pens lit up at the push of a button. It added that its lawyers were now investigating whether the vendors could be prosecuted.
■NETHERLANDS
Cleric calls for beheading
Dutch anti-Islam MP Geert Wilders, the country’s most heavily guarded politician, has denounced Australian Muslim cleric Feiz Muhammad’s reported call for his beheading for denigrating Islam. “This is really terrible news and a very serious threat, unfortunately,” he said in an e-mail on Friday in response to the threat reported in the popular daily De Telegraaf newspaper. Wilders, who campaigns for an end to Muslim immigration and a ban on the building of new mosques and the Koran in a bid to end the “Islamisation” of the Netherlands, has been under 24-hour protection since 2004.
■VATICAN
Sistine Chapel threatened
Environmental conditions and 20,000 daily visitors are taking a toll on the Sistine Chapel, the head of the Vatican’s museums, Antonio Paolucci, wrote in the Friday edition of Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano. The chapel suffers from pressures inflicted by pollutants, too many visitors and insufficient climate control, Paolucci said. “If we want to preserve the Sistine Chapel in acceptable condition for future generations, this is the challenge that we have to win,” he said. Michelangelo’s frescoes in the chapel show scenes from the Bible, most famously The Creation of Adam and the Last Judgment. It is also where cardinals meet to elect the next pope.
■RUSSIA
Safe driving promoted
Motorists in Moscow on Friday were greeted by the strange sight of zebras walking back and forth across some of the city’s busiest intersections. This was part of a police campaign to call attention to the importance of crosswalks, also known as zebra crossings, which are routinely ignored in the capital. The drivers who slowed down might have noticed that the zebras were actually light gray horses painted with black stripes. On their backs they carried yellow signs reading: “Careful, children are on their way to school.” In the first six months of this year, 378 people were killed and more than 6,600 injured on pedestrian crossings in Russia, according to police. In Moscow alone, 43 people were killed, including two children.
■DUBAI
Cargo plane crashes
A Boeing 747-400 cargo plane owned by US courier United Parcel Service caught fire shortly after take-off and crashed into a military base on the outskirts of this Gulf city on Friday, killing both crew members, civil aviation authorities said. Plumes of smoke rose from inside the military base where the plane came down. An Emirati official said that the accident “has not affected air traffic in Dubai or road transport,” and that there were no casualties on the ground.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Anger over papal visit cost
An online poll of 2,005 adults for public theology think tank Theos found that 76 percent of respondents did not think the taxpayer should pay for Pope Benedict XVI’s state visit from Sept. 16 to Sept. 19, on the grounds that he is a religious leader. The trip is expected to cost £10 million (US$15 million) to £12 million. On top of which the policing bill will run into millions of pounds. Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, said: “This profligate visit has been planned without any consideration for its cost in a time of austerity.” The trip to Edinburgh, Glasgow, London and Birmingham is the first papal visit to Britain since pope John Paul II, in 1982.
■UNITED STATES
Doctor sparks terror scare
The suspicions airport security officials had when they saw the metal canister grew when they learned about the man who brought it in from the Middle East: a scientist who sparked a bioterrorism scare after he reported missing vials of plague samples seven years ago. Officials shut down most of Miami International Airport overnight, roused nearby hotel guests from their beds and detained Thomas Butler until Friday morning, when he was released without charges, a senior law enforcement official said. Tests on the canister found nothing dangerous, according to a release from the FBI’s Miami field office. Homeland Security spokesman Nicholas Kimball said the item resembled a pipe bomb. Butler’s former lawyer said the incident appeared to be a “fantastic overreaction.” Butler, 70, is a world-renowned plague researcher who quickly became the focus of a federal investigation in 2003 when he reported that 30 vials of plague samples possibly had been stolen from his Texas Tech University lab.
■MEXICO
Six die in Cessna crash
At least six people, including two federal lawmakers and a governor, were killed when their small plane crashed in a southern state on Friday, the attorney general’s office said. The plane left Mexico City and went down as it was approaching the airport at the Pacific beach resort of Huatulco, in southwestern Oaxaca state, the officials said. Two lawmakers, a regional mayor of Oaxaca, the pilot and two other yet unidentified people died in the crash, they said. It was caused by either adverse weather conditions or pilot error, the attorney general’s office said.
■CANADA
Mosque heads north
A small mosque being shipped to the Arctic to serve a growing Muslim population in the far north will travel 4,000km over land and water, a trip organizer told reporters. The number of Muslims in Inuvik, a town of 4,000 inhabitants in the Northwest Territories, has grown steadily in recent years to about 80 and they no longer fit in an old 3m-by-7m caravan used until now for prayers. The congregation could not afford to build a new mosque in the town, where prices for labor and materials are substantially higher than in southern parts of the country, project leader Ahmad Alkhalaf said. A supplier of prefabricated buildings in Manitoba said it could ship a structure to Inuvik for half the price of building a mosque from scratch on site. At the end of last month, the tiny yellow mosque’s voyage began on the back of truck, winding through the vast prairies and woods of Western Canada toward Hay River on the shores of Great Slave Lake, Northwest Territories. There it will be transferred onto a barge that will be floated down the McKenzie River to Inuvik, about 200km north of the Arctic Circle.
■UNITED STATES
Live shrimp off menu
A Sacramento restaurant agreed to stop serving live shrimp after an animal-rights group said the practice was cruel to the shellfish. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said the restaurant, Nishiki Sushi, suggested squeezing lemon juice on the shrimps’ exposed flesh so they would writhe as they were eaten. The dish is commonly referred to as “dancing shrimp,” a delicacy in Japan. PETA contacted the restaurant after receiving dozens of complaints about the practice. The animal rights group objected to the practice based on a 2007 study that explored shrimp pain from Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland.
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
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
RUSSIAN INPUT: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov called Washington’s actions in Asia ‘destructive,’ accusing it of being the reason for the ‘militarization’ of Japan The US is concerned about China’s “increasingly dangerous and unlawful” activities in the disputed South China Sea, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ASEAN leaders yesterday during an annual summit, and pledged that Washington would continue to uphold freedom of navigation in the region. The 10-member ASEAN meeting with Blinken followed a series of confrontations at sea between China and ASEAN members Philippines and Vietnam. “We are very concerned about China’s increasingly dangerous and unlawful activities in the South China Sea which have injured people, harm vessels from ASEAN nations and contradict commitments to peaceful resolutions of disputes,” said Blinken, who
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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