PAKISTAN
Four naval personnel killed
Four navy personnel were killed yesterday when attackers bombed a bus taking them to work, the third such assault in days in Karachi. More than a dozen people were wounded in the attack on Faisal Avenue, one of the main roads in the politically tense economic capital and port city, which NATO uses to ship supplies to troops in Afghanistan. A passing motorcyclist was also killed in the blast. Two other navy buses were attacked on Tuesday, dealing a blow to the military just days after Pakistan’s army chief General Ashfaq Kayani claimed his forces had “broken the back” of Taliban and al-Qaeda-linked militants. Four other navy personnel died on Tuesday.
AFGHANISTAN
Prison governor arrested
Police have arrested the prison governor and fellow police officers after a massive jail break in Kandahar, a source said yesterday. Kandahar provincial spokesman Zalmay Ayubi told reporters that local police had made a number of arrests in relation to the case. “There are several people arrested on accusations of either negligence or cooperating with the jail break,” he said, without giving details on who they were or how many were held. But a senior Kandahar police source, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity, said: “The chief of the prison, two of his deputies ... and four guards who were on duty on the night of the jail break have been arrested.”
INDIA
Activists deride Web rules
Free speech advocates in Mumbai and Internet users are protesting new regulations restricting Web content that, among other things, can be considered “disparaging,” “harassing,” “blasphemous” or “hateful.” The new rules, quietly issued by the Department of Information Technology earlier this month and only now attracting attention, allow officials and private citizens to demand that Internet sites and service providers remove content they consider objectionable on the basis of a long list of criteria. Critics of the new rules say the restrictions could severely curtail debate and discussion on the Internet, whose use has been growing rapidly in the country. The list of objectionable content is sweeping and includes anything that “threatens the unity, integrity, defense, security or sovereignty of India, friendly relations with foreign states or public order.”
INDIA
Child becomes maharaja
A 12-year-old boy has been crowned Maharaja of Jaipur, becoming head of what was once one of the country’s most glamorous and wealthy royal families. In a grand marble hall, Kumar Padmanabh Singh was blessed by priests at the coronation ceremony before he walked slowly through the city palace to receive a military guard of honor.
IRAN
Public executions stepped up
Tehran has sharply stepped up its use of public executions, hanging 13 men this year, nearly as many as in all of last year, in an attempt to intimidate its citizens, Amnesty International said on Wednesday. Eight of the hangings have taken place since the middle of this month, including two juveniles convicted for a rape and murder committed when they were 17, the human rights group said. Tehran executed at least 252 people last year, 14 in public, Amnesty said. Human rights groups often criticize Tehran, saying the Islamic republic has one of the highest execution rates in the world.
RUSSIA
Genius started with Jesus
The reclusive mathematical genius who solved one of the world’s most perplexing mysteries said in a rare interview yesterday that he began his training by figuring out how Jesus walked on water. Grigory Perelman shot to international fame by solving the seemingly intractable Poincare conjecture and then turning down the million-dollar prize awarded in the mathematics world’s version of the Nobel. The 44-year-old lives with his mother in a working-class Saint Petersburg high-rise and studiously avoids the press. However, he told the mass-circulation Komsomolskaya Pravda daily that he and other Soviet-era students developed their prowess by learning to think in abstract terms at a very young age. Perelman said his elementary-school class never encountered an “unsolvable” problem, but faced a tricky one when asked to solve the Biblical mystery of how Jesus managed to walk on water. Asked if he managed to solve the problem, Perelman replied that “if the legend still exists today, that means I was not wrong.”
UNITED STATES
Ensign successor named
Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval has named a replacement Senator John Ensign, who announced last week he was resigning in the face of investigation into an extramarital affair. Republican Representative Dean Heller will replace Ensign, who said he would step down on May 3. State law says a special election must be held within 180 days of a vacancy in a House of Representatives seat. Ensign’s resignation came nearly two years after acknowledging an extramarital affair with a former staffer. The ethics probe has explored Ensign’s handling of the affair and whether he tried to illegally cover it up.
UNITED STATES
Fryer grease rustling rises
Rises in fuel prices have led to an increase in the number of used fryer grease rustlers roaming restaurant alleys, just as they have whenever fuel prices have climbed over the past four years. “It’s on the rise and it’s because of higher oil prices,” said Tom Cook, president of the National Renderers Association. “I have one member who told me it’s costing his business US$1 million a year.” Recyclers typically contract with restaurants to pick up the waste product for about US$0.18 a pound (0.45g). After processing, it can be sold for US$0.42 to US$0.45 pound, Cook said. The cleaned grease, called yellow grease, can be used as biofuel, livestock feed and other products. Many restaurant owners don’t realize what they are losing and local law enforcement agencies have other crime-fighting priorities, Cook said. “The price [of yellow grease] is real good right now,” he said. “And those who steal it are really getting a good deal because they’re not paying for it.”
BRAZIL
More Air France parts found
Deep-sea searchers picking through wreckage of an Air France plane that crashed in 2009 have found a part that held one of the flight’s data recorders, but without the memory unit that could provide crucial clues to the crash. France’s BEA air accident inquiry office said in a statement on Wednesday that the chassis of the “black box” flight data recorder had been found surrounded by debris during the first dive by an underwater remote vehicle. A BEA spokeswoman said that the flight data recorder, if found, could still be in a condition to be read, despite its separation from the chassis. “The memory module is like a sarcophagus — the information is very well protected,” she said.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
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
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
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
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