PAPUA NEW GUINEA
PM’s son to be indicted
Police yesterday were preparing to charge the son of Acting Prime Minister Sam Abal with murder after the body of a 29-year-old waitress was found at the family home. Theo Abal, 21, is to make his first court appearance today, when he is to be indicted on murder charges in the killing of the woman, police spokesman Dominic Kakas said. A guard at the house told police he saw Theo Abal and the woman arrive home in the early hours of Monday. Police said that the guard later heard the woman scream and that Abal confessed to killing her.
PAPUA NEW GUINEA
Malaysian ‘assassinated’
Police yesterday vowed to track down the killers of a Malaysian businessman, who they said was “assassinated.” Acting Deputy Police Commissioner Fred Yakasa said the man was shot dead while driving in the capital, Port Moresby, on Wednesday. “We have reason to believe that this was an assassination due to the manner in which the shooting was carried out,” Yakasa said in a statement. The victim had lived and worked in the country for more than 20 years. Yakasa said he had reason to believe the killing was carried out by foreigners linked to “organized crime,” but added that police do not have “the evidence to prove this at this point in time.”
MALAYSIA
Couple charged with murder
A couple has been charged with the murder of the family’s 26-year-old Indonesian maid, a lawyer said yesterday, in the latest case of alleged abuse against foreign workers. Indonesia recently promised to lift a 2009 ban on sending maids after the two countries inked a new deal for better working conditions to curb abuse and torture. Lawyer Guok Ngek Seong said Fong Kong Meng, 55, and his wife, Teoh Ching Yen, 53, were charged on Wednesday in a magistrate’s court with killing their maid, Isti Komariyah. Guok, who is representing Fong, said Isti had worked for the couple since July last year.
AUSTRALIA
Gay marriage on PM’s menu
Gay and lesbian couples will try to change Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s opposition to same-sex marriage when they dine at her official residence after activists won a charity auction to attend a private dinner party. Gillard had offered to host the dinner for any six guests at her official address in Canberra at an auction during the National Press Gallery’s annual charity ball on Wednesday night. The highest bidder was the activist group GetUP!, which offered A$31,000 (US$33,000) for the table. GetUp! spokesman Paul Mackay said yesterday that he hoped the dinner would sway the prime minister and lead the Labor Party to change its policy on gay marriage.
AFGHANISTAN
‘39’ becomes mark of shame
The nation’s booming car industry has been thrown into chaos by a growing aversion to the number “39,” which almost overnight has become an unlikely synonym for “pimp” and a mark of shame. Drivers of cars with number plates containing 39 are mocked and taunted across Kabul. “Now even little kids say: ‘Look, there goes the 39.’ This car is a bad luck, I can’t take my family out in it,” Mohammad Ashraf said. Other “39” owners flew into a rage or refused to speak when asked whether their car was a burden. No one is quite sure why the number became so contaminated so fast, but Kabul gossip blames a pimp in neighboring Iran. His flashy car had a 39 in its number plate, the story goes, so he was nicknamed “39” and the tag spread.
UNITED KINGDOM
Library hosts space talk
“You want to know about spaceships?” the voice on the phone says. “Well, one day Bootsy [Collins] and I were in a car. It was 11 in the morning, broad daylight, and we were only a few miles from home. Suddenly a beam of light from a UFO hit us and we couldn’t see a thing. It felt like only a few moments later when I got to my house, but my daughter said it was late and she was ready for bed. I’m telling you, time disappeared on that journey. We were taken to a weird place!” This Saturday, the British Library is hosting a sold-out talk by legendary cosmic funkster George Clinton about his lifelong obsession with space. He says: “We’re all looking to the stars. The Dogon from Mali say they’ve had contact with extraterrestrials from Sirius and I can see that. I truly believe our planet was seeded and now we’re getting ready to seed other planets.”
UNITED KINGDOM
Joss Stone plot thwarted
Police said on Wednesday they had arrested two men near the home of soul singer Joss Stone on suspicion of conspiracy to murder and rob. Officers detained the men, aged 30 and 33, in Cullompton, southwest England, at 10am on Tuesday near her isolated country home and reportedly found them in possession of swords, rope and a body bag. They also had detailed maps and aerial photos of the 24-year-old British singer’s property, the Sun newspaper reported. The arrests came after neighbors spotted two men driving slowly round remote country lanes in Cullompton and reported them to police, the paper said.
UNITED KINGDOM
Penelope puppet for sale
She was an aristocrat, a secret agent and, frankly, the subject of many a schoolboy crush in the late 1960s and 1970s. Now a Lady Penelope puppet from the Thunderbirds TV series is to be sold at auction, and is expected to fetch up to ￡10,000 (US$16,100). The marionette was one of the standout characters in Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s adventure series. Since the mid-1960s, the 50cm puppet, which has a head full of electronics allowing the mouth to move, had been in the care of her maker, Christine Glanville, who died in 1999.
IRAN
Necklaces banned
Men have been banned from wearing necklaces in the latest crackdown by the Islamic regime on “un-Islamic” clothing and haircuts. Thousands of special forces have been deployed in Tehran’s streets, participating in the regime’s “moral security plan” in which loose-fitting headscarves, tight overcoats and shortened trousers that expose skin will not be tolerated for women, while men are warned against glamorous hairstyles and wearing a necklace. Last summer authorities in Tehran also released a list of approved hairstyles in an attempt to offer Islamic substitutes to “decadent” Western cuts, such as the ponytail and the mullet.
CANADA
Man arrested for house theft
Police on Wednesday charged a man in central Ontario with stealing a house. The owner arrived home to find his 10-year-old mobile home in the community of Dundalk, northwest of Toronto, was missing. He alerted police who located the “45-foot [13.7m], double-wide” prefabricated building worth an estimated C$30,000 (US$30,500) on a rural property “a relatively short distance from where it was taken,” police said.
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
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
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
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
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