INDIA
Owl crisis blamed on books
Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has blamed fans of Harry Potter for the demise of wild owls in the country as children seek to emulate the boy wizard by taking the birds as pets. The hit books and films, which are popular in India, feature a snowy owl called Hedwig who is a feathered sidekick for the Potter character and used to deliver mail. “Following Harry Potter, there seems to be a strange fascination even among the urban middle classes for presenting their children with owls,” Ramesh said yesterday, according to comments reported by the BBC.
CHINA
Chopstick out after 28 years
Surgeons in Shanghai have operated on a 50-year-old man to remove a chopstick that he swallowed 28 years ago, state media reported yesterday. The man, identified by his surname Zhang, had gone decades without having the chopstick removed because it had not caused him any trouble, the China Daily reported. Zhang thought he had completely digested the chopstick until he started having stomach problems and sought medical attention after he passed out, the Oriental Morning Post newspaper reported. The surgeons extracted it through a small incision in his stomach, the report said.
AUSTRALIA
Houses for rent for A$1
An outback town is bucking the country’s cut-throat housing market by offering farmhouses for rent at A$1 (US$0.99) a week to families prepared to move to the country. The town of Trundle, with a population of about 380, is seeking people from all over the country to fill six homes, some of which have been vacant for years as the region suffered a long and devastating drought. However, with the town enjoying its best season in a decade and wheat and cereal crops flourishing, locals have banded together to bring in new people to reinvigorate the community. There is a catch though — some of the houses have been vacant for a long time and are in need of renovation so applicants should ideally be handy with a paint brush and hammer.
SINGAPORE
Baby, ‘dad’ DNA differ
A baby conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF) at a private hospital has different DNA to the supposed father, a lawyer representing the clients said yesterday. The couple made the shocking discovery after they were told that the baby’s blood type was B while they were groups O and A, a scientific impossibility if they were the two biological parents, S. Palaniappan said. The couple, a Chinese Singaporean woman and a Caucasian man whose identities the lawyer kept confidential, also started to notice the baby has a distinctly different complexion. A DNA test carried out last month at the couple’s request showed the baby, who was born on Oct. 1, had the mother’s DNA, but not the official father’s, Palaniappan said.
INDIA
Elephant ‘smugglers’ caught
Police in the northeast said yesterday they had busted an elephant smuggling ring suspected of selling nearly 100 animals across the country and to Nepal. Two elephants, a mother and a calf, were seized when a police team swooped on a truck traveling across the state border from Assam to West Bengal over the weekend. A police spokesman estimated 91 elephants had been smuggled during the past five years. The gang is thought to have captured wild elephants and tamed them, before passing them off as offspring of trained elephants.
SERBIA
Quake kills two, injures 50
A moderate earthquake shook central Serbia early yesterday, killing two people when the roof of their home collapsed and injuring at least 50, officials said. The European Mediterranean Seismological Center said the tremor had a magnitude of 5.4 and its epicenter was 2km north of the city of Kraljevo, about 150km southwest of the capital, Belgrade. “I can confirm two deaths. A couple died in the village of Grdica [just outside Kraljevo] when the ceiling collapsed,” Interior Minister Ivica Dacic said as he visited the area by helicopter. A duty officer at the local medical center in Kraljevo, a city of about 70,000, said at least 50 people were injured in the quake, many of them with minor cuts and bruises.
RUSSIA
Stowaway survives flight
A 17-year-old foster child survived a 50-minute flight hidden in a plane’s landing gear in Siberia, investigators said on Tuesday. The stowaway crawled into a space above the wheel of the Soviet-built Antonov An-24 turboprop at a small town’s airfield on Saturday, a statement issued by the Investigative Committee of the General Prosecutor’s Office said. Local TV said he survived the 50-minute flight to the regional center of Irkutsk in just a light coat, despite temperatures of minus 30oC. He was being treated for frost bite, the reports said.
SPAIN
Ten-year-old gives birth
A 10-year-old girl has given birth in the southern city of Jerez de le Frontera, and authorities are evaluating whether to let her and her family retain custody of the baby, an official said on Tuesday. The baby was born last week in the city of Jerez de la Frontera, said Micaela Navarro, the Andalusia region’s social affairs minister. Navarro told reporters the father of the baby is also a minor. Her department declined to give further details, such as the sex of baby. Local newspapers said the mother is of Romanian origin. The daily Diario de Jerez quoted medical staffers who treated the girl as saying they were told by her mother that giving birth at such a young age is common in their country.
FRANCE
Toddler survives fall
An 18-month-old boy survived after falling seven floors and bouncing off a Paris cafe awning into the arms of a passerby, witnesses said on Tuesday. “My son saw a little boy on a balcony. He had gone right outside the railing ... I said to myself I mustn’t miss him,” said the toddler’s savior, local doctor Philippe Bensignor, recounting Monday’s drama. “I had time to move from side to side to get in the right position,” he added. “The little boy was fine. He cried a little bit, but calmed down straightaway.” An official involved in investigating the incident said the boy had been left alone in the apartment with his sister by their parents, who were taken into custody afterwards.
NETHERLANDS
‘NSB’ car plates recalled
Authorities have recalled about 100 number plates issued to new cars with the letters “NSB” — the acronym of the World War II-era fascist National Socialist Movement, a spokesman said on Tuesday. “There appears to have been a programming error that was discovered on Monday morning,” Dutch Vehicle Authority spokesman Hans van Geenhuizen said. NSB is one of several letter combinations, which also include KKK (for Ku Klux Klan) that have been programmed not to come up when new plate numbers are automatically generated, he said. New plates have been issued to all affected cars.
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
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
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
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