AFGHANISTAN
Traffic accident kills 51
A bus and truck collided and burst into flames yesterday, killing at least 51 people. The collision occurred in Ghazni Province on a highway that links Kabul with Kandahar. At least 51 of the 56 passengers on the bus were killed, said General Zarawar Zahid, the provincial police chief. “It is very sad,” he said. “When you see the bodies, some of them are not recognizable.” Zahid said the cause of the crash has not yet been determined, but he ruled out the possibility of an attack.
JAPAN
Robot being built for exams
Researchers are working on a robot they hope will be smart enough to ace entrance exams at the nation’s top university, which test everything from maths to foreign languages. “It has to analyze the exam questions and convert formulations and equations to a form that it can process before solving it through computer algebra,” said Hidenao Iwane from Fujitsu Laboratories, the Japanese information-technology giant’s research unit. Fujitsu and Japan’s National Institute of Informatics said the target is to have their robot score high marks on the exam for Tokyo University by 2021. Before then, they’re hoping the robot can sail through national entrance exams.
SOUTH KOREA
Lee confidant sentenced
One of president Lee Myung-bak’s most trusted confidants was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in jail yesterday after being convicted on corruption charges. The Seoul Central District Court also ordered Choi See-joong, former head of the state-run Korea Communications Commission, to pay 600 million won (more than US$535,000) in fines. The 75-year-old was found guilty of accepting 600 million won in bribes from a construction company in return for influence peddling. In court, Choi admitted to receiving the money, but denied he had exerted any influence. He was acquitted on charges of receiving a separate 200 million won bribe.
NEW ZEALAND
Lucky ticket found in trash
A man threw away a winning lottery ticket worth NZ$27 million (US$22.5 million) after reading the wrong results and thinking it was useless. It was not until the following day, when he heard the prize had not been claimed, that he searched for the ticket and found he had won. The man, in his 20s, had bought the ticket on a whim, spending money he had set aside for a haircut after he went to his hairdresser and found the shop closed. “I originally checked the results on my phone, but I must have got the wrong draw so I thought my ticket was a loser. I chucked it aside and thought ‘that was that’ and went to work,” he told Fairfax News yesterday. “It was only when there was so much talk in the town about the unclaimed prize that I thought it might pay to recheck the ticket.”
CZECH REPUBLIC
Alcohol poisoning rises
Police said on Thursday they had found a cache of bootleg spirits as the death toll from methanol poisoning rose to 18 in what experts called the worst wave of alcohol poisonings in three decades. About 500 bottles of “suspect unstamped alcohol” were found in a garage in the city of Zlin, 300km southeast of Prague, local police spokesman Petr Jaros told reporters. Police found the cache after they detained a distributor on Wednesday who “had mixed bootleg spirits in the garage, probably without knowing it was so dangerous,” local police chief Bedrich Koutny told the DNES daily. The death toll from the week-old wave of methanol poisoning cases rose to 18, media reports said. More than 20 people were in hospitals, some of them now blind and some in artificial comas. Health Minister Leos Heger warned he expected further casualties. On Wednesday, the government banned spirits sales at stands and mobile shops and threatened to impose blanket prohibition if the situation worsens. The country has the world’s second-highest adult alcohol intake, according to WHO data.
? MEXICO
Teenage hitman investigated
Prosecutors on Thursday said they were investigating a 16-year-old suspected hitman who was believed to have participated in at least 50 murders while working for a drug gang. A spokesman for prosecutors in the northeastern state of Sinaloa said the teenager, identified as Francisco Miguel N., was part of a gang known as Los Mazatlecos, a criminal group attached to the Beltran Leyva drugs cartel. Police arrested the teen for carrying a loaded gun and drugs. He later confessed to working as a hitman for the group, local prosecutors said in a statement. The teenager said he had taken part in executions of police, farmers since February. The boy said he was given an AK-47 rifle and a pistol to carry out the various attacks in Sinaloa.
UNITED STATES
Hackers hit back at FBI
The hacker group known as Anonymous on Thursday publicized credit card numbers in retaliation for what it claimed was an FBI raid to arrest one of its members. The group said Barrett Brown was arrested in an FBI raid while participating in an online chat Wednesday. In retaliation, the group posted “these 13 credit cards details as teaser,” saying they were “potentially belonging” to government officials. A Twitter posting said an offshoot of the group called Antisec “retaliates on Barrett Brown arrestation.” According to a report on the Web site The Hacker News, Brown came to notoriety when he threatened to release the names of 75 collaborators of the Mexican Zetas cartel for kidnapping an Anonymous member. The report also said he founded Project PM, which collects information about the intelligence industry and what it claims are threats to privacy and democratic institutions
BOSNIA-herzegovina
Porn serves political purpose
A mayoral candidate in the country’s fourth-largest city, Zenica, is using one of the Internet’s greatest lures, pornography, for his campaign. Mirad Hadziahmetovic is an independent candidate with a relatively slim chance of winning next month’s election and so has uploaded pornographic clips to his official campaign Web site to help his bid. To view the material, visitors must answer questions, such as “What is more important for Zenica, job creation or increasing the municipal budget through taxes?” At the end of each clip there is a separately recorded video of Hadziahmetovic saying: “If you liked this clip, vote for me.”
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
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