INDONESIA
President cancels trip
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono abruptly canceled a state visit to the Netherlands on Tuesday after overseas separatists demanded his arrest. -Yudhoyono — who was scheduled to leave on Tuesday afternoon — made the announcement after his luggage had already been loaded onto his plane. He told reporters he was insulted by an injunction request filed by exiled Moluccan separatists in a court in The Hague calling for his arrest for alleged human rights abuses. The request was denied yesterday by the court. Law experts in the Netherlands had expected the court to deny the arrest request because it would violate international law.
MALAYSIA
‘Lizard King’ reprimanded
The permits of a rogue wildlife trader dubbed the “Lizard King” have been revoked and the seizure of all his animals has been ordered, including two tigers and a crocodile, a Malaysian official said yesterday. The tough new measures come after Anson Wong, described as one of the world’s most-wanted wildlife traffickers, was last month jailed for six months. Wong was caught in August at Kuala Lumpur International Airport after he attempted to smuggle 95 endangered boa constrictors to Indonesia.
VIETNAM
Flooding isolates villages
Helicopters dropped food aid yesterday to people in villages cut off by high water as the death toll from flooding this week in the central region of the country rose to 26, with nine people missing, disaster officials Nguyen Ngoc Giai said. In the worst-hit Quang Binh Province, 11 people were dead, while authorities searched for five sailors from a sunken barge, Giai said. Giai said two helicopters dropped food and water to several villages still cut off by floodwaters, while rescuers rushed food aid to other villages over land. Forecasters said a tropical depression was expected to bring rains to the region in the coming days, but they were unlikely to cause major floods.
AUSTRALIA
Whale suspected in sinking
Three fishermen were rescued off the country’s west coast after their boat apparently hit a whale and sank in rough seas, police said yesterday. The men abandoned their 14m wooden boat after striking something “solid,” and were eventually rescued by the crew of an oil-drilling vessel. “They hit something hard, solid, they suspect it’s a whale,” senior sergeant Greg Trew of Western Australia’s Water Police said. “They abandoned ship and were in the water for about four hours.” Trew said the trio were all in good health despite their ordeal in “horrendous” seas.
INDIA
Salmonella kills tigers
A four-year-old Royal Bengal tiger died in a south Indian zoo on Tuesday, the third death from a salmonella outbreak that has struck down more than a dozen big cats, a zoo official said. The tigers are thought to have been fed contaminated chicken or beef in the Bannerghatta National Park on the outskirts of Bangalore. It is the second major case of poisoning in Indian zoos in the last month. Thirty-two blackbuck antelopes died and two rhinos fell severely ill after drinking sewage water that flowed into their enclosures at New Delhi’s main zoo last week. Three tigers have died, including Minchu’s elder sister Divya and an unnamed 45-day cub. Fifteen of the remaining 41 tigers have fallen sick and have been kept in isolation to prevent them passing on the illness.
RUSSIA
Putin tackles smoking
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin tackled tobacco addiction on Tuesday as he urged ministers to give up cigarettes and set an example in a country where almost one in three people smoke. At a government meeting, Health Minister Tatiana Golikova said in footage broadcast on national television that 43.9 million people in Russia were smokers, out of a total population of around 142 million. “It is far too much,” Putin said in response, turning to his ministers and asking who smoked. He urged these ministers to “stop smoking and act as an example in the fight against tobacco addiction.”
IRAQ
Journalist deaths rise
More journalists have been killed in the country so far this year than in all of last year, press watchdog the International Press Institute (IPI) said on Tuesday in a statement. Tahrir Kadhim Jawad, a cameraman for the al-Hurra satellite channel, was killed on Monday when a magnetic “sticky bomb” attached to his car detonated in the town of Garma, 50km west of the capital, police in nearby Fallujah said. Violence claimed nine other lives in the country on the same day. Last year, four journalists were killed, against 14 the previous year and 42 in 2007, IPI said.
ITALY
Mobsters’ bazooka found
A bazooka was discovered on Tuesday about 200m from a Reggio Calabria courthouse in what police said was the latest act of intimidation by the ’Ndrangheta mob against prosecutors. The Yugoslavian-made weapon was found after an anonymous call, police chief Renato Cortese said. “It’s the latest attempt by the ’Ndrangheta — fatally wounded by the continued successes of magistrates, law enforcement and the government,” Justice Minister Angelino Alfano said in a statement on Tuesday.
UNITED KINGDOM
Prince rescues rig worker
Prince William has completed his first mission as a search-and-rescue helicopter co-pilot, plucking a stricken worker from an offshore gas rig. William’s London office said on Tuesday that the 28-year-old prince was among the crew of a Royal Air Force Sea King helicopter called to the rig in Morecambe Bay, off the coast of northwestern England, on Saturday.
GERMANY
Cooking more convenient
Cookery fans fed up with buying large packets of exotic ingredients for a one-off attempt at a new dish can now buy recipes together with the necessary ingredients — all weighed out — from a shop in Berlin. Matthew Renneberg and his friends opened the shop in the capital’s Schoeneberg district after spending months working on the recipes, getting friends to try them out to ensure they were quick and absolutely foolproof, even in the hands of a novice.
IRELAND
Message crosses Atlantic
A message in a bottle sent by a Florida high school student as part of his marine science class has come ashore in Ireland. Corey Swearingen put the bottle into the Atlantic Ocean in April last year and it followed the current all the way to the small fishing village of Kilbaha in County Clare on the western coast. A 17-year-old boy and his father found the bottle during a family holiday there. Stephen Flannery of Athlone and his son, Adam, responded via e-mail to the letter, which had urged the reader to write with details of the bottle’s location.
United States
Man shoots strangers
A man shot three strangers — killing one — in Illinois and Indiana on Tuesday after trying to talk to them about honeybees, officials said. The first shooting occurred when a heavy-set man drove up to a house near Beecher, Illinois, and started talking to a man working outside. “He engaged our victim in a conversation about bees, honeybees, and as soon as the guy started walking away he shot him,” Pat Barry, a spokesman for the sheriff’s department in Will County, Illinois, said. The gunman then walked into the house and opened fire on two other workers. The first died and the second was taken to hospital in critical condition, he said. A farmer in Lowell, Indiana, was also shot by a man who tried talking to him about bees and fitted the same description, Barry said.
CANADA
Officer sacked for killing
An army officer was sacked on Tuesday for the shooting of an unarmed and severely wounded Afghan insurgent in what prosecutors at his trial alleged was a mercy killing. Captain Robert Semrau was convicted in July of behaving disgracefully for shooting a presumed Taliban fighter, in the first Canadian prosecution of its kind. However, prosecutors failed to prove their key accusation that the soldier killed the insurgent in a misguided and illegal act of battlefield euthanasia. At sentencing, Judge Jean-Guy Perron ordered Semrau’s dismissal from the military at the reduced rank of second-lieutenant. “Your actions may have been motivated by a sense that you were doing the right thing. Nonetheless you committed a serious breach of discipline,” the judge said.
BRAZIL
Clown must prove literacy
The clown who got more votes than any other candidate for Congress will have to convince authorities he can read and write if he wants to take office. In a ruling posted on the Sao Paulo electoral court’s Web site on Tuesday, a judge found there is sufficient doubt about whether comic performer Tiririca meets a constitutional mandate that federal lawmakers be literate. Tiririca, whose real name is Francisco Silva, will have 10 days after being notified of the ruling to prove his literacy through a written defense. If it fails, he will be barred from taking up his seat representing Sao Paulo in Congress. A week before the election, Epoca magazine reported that people who worked with Silva on his TV shows and a book credited to him say he is illiterate.
BRAZIL
Google shows grisly images
Google Street View has provided viewers with something they probably would rather not have seen: close-up images of dead bodies. An image posted last week on the Web site of television station Globo G1 shows a body covered up and surrounded by blood spots on a busy avenue in Rio de Janeiro. Other local news media and blogs have reported that bodies also showed up in street images of other cities. It wasn’t clear how many bodies were spotted all together, but Google said in a statement on Tuesday that “all images of the bodies were removed” from its mapping service.
BRAZIL
Minidress girl wins payout
A Sao Paulo court has ordered a university to pay US$23,600 to a student who was expelled after she wore a minidress to school. Geisy Arruda — whose dress provoked jeers and insults by fellow students last November — was readmitted to Bandeirante University after the institution reversed a decision to expel her under pressure from the education ministry and negative media attention.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
CYBERCRIME, TRAFFICKING: A ‘pattern of state failures’ allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, it said Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Cambodia’s government of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centers and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including in the Southeast Asian nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
RSS