■ AUSTRALIA
Surgeon denies fraud
One of Australia's most celebrated trauma surgeons yesterday denied claims that he made extra money by operating unnecessarily on dozens of road accident victims. German-born Thomas Kossmann was suspended on Tuesday from his post of director of trauma surgery at the Alfred Hospital and Melbourne's Monash University, and could face criminal charges. Kossmann, who was associate professor of surgery at University Hospital in Zurich before arriving in 2001 in Australia, denies the allegations. "If I've got it wrong, I'm pretty sure other people have got it wrong," Kossmann said. "If you look retrospective, things are looking different, but if you want to save somebody's life and you do it under, let's say, under such extreme conditions, you decide on the spot."
■ JAPAN
Man worked to death
A Toyota employee died of overwork after logging more than 106 hours of overtime in a month, a judge ruled on Friday, reversing a ministry's earlier decision not to pay compensation to his widow. The Toyota Labor Standards Inspection office, a local branch of Japan's labor ministry, refused to pay the widow compensation for a spouse's work-related death, saying the man had only logged 45 hours of overtime in the month before he died, Japanese media reported. But the court ruled that the employee had worked far more than that, said Yomiuri Online, a Japanese news Web site. The Nagoya District Court in central Japan said the ruling overturned the labor ministry's decision. The employee, who was working at a Toyota factory in central Japan, died of irregular heartbeat in February 2002 after passing out in the factory at around 4am.
■ VIETNAM
Death sentences read
Twelve people were sentenced to death after a court found them guilty on Friday of trafficking more than 70kg of heroin, state media said yesterday. Judges in the five-day trial in the northern province of Quang Ninh also handed life prison terms to eight others, while another nine members of the same gang were jailed for between 18 months and 30 years, the daily Nhan Dan newspaper said. The defendants, several of whom were related, were convicted of trafficking the heroin from several northern provinces between 2005 and May last year.
■ SINGAPORE
Air force pollutes farms
A test by the air force of a red plume of smoke for an acrobatic display has backfired after a cloud of the dye polluted nearby farms' vegetable plots. The air force was testing the dye on the ground, but strong winds carried the smoke away from the base, the ministry of defense said in a statement yesterday. Nearby farms had to destroy 200 tonnes of vegetables -- about 10 truck loads -- since the dye is not approved for food use, the Straits Times paper said. The ministry of defense said it would not cause adverse health effects if inhaled.
■ SRI LANKA
Rebels killed in clashes
Thirteen Tamil Tiger rebels were killed in clashes in the island's embattled northeast, the military said yesterday, marking the latest violence in the long-running ethnic conflict. The clashes occurred overnight, the military said in a statement. In separate fighting near the guerrillas' stronghold in the north of the island, the military said it destroyed a rebel bunker during a 24-hour period that ended early yesterday but suffered no casualties. The pro-rebel Tamilnet.com Web site said air force fighter jets dropped "several bombs" late on Friday around guerrilla-controlled areas in the northern peninsula of Jaffna.
■ CHINA
Temperatures rising
Average temperatures in the country rose this year to their highest level since 1951, national meteorological officials said in state media yesterday. "It is the 11th straight year for the country to experience an abnormally high temperature against the global backdrop of climate change," a meteorological spokeswoman, Jiao Meiyan, was quoted as saying in the China Daily. From January to last month the average temperature was 11.3oC, 1.2oC than an average year, she said. The economy has boomed over much of the past 25 years and it is now one of world's biggest emitters of the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.
■ AFGHANISTAN
Netherlands extends mission
Kabul welcomed yesterday the Netherlands' decision to extend its military presence in the country but said the long-term solution to security lay in building the army. The Netherlands' center-left coalition government announced on Friday it would extend until December 2010 the mandate of its 1,650 troops serving under a 38-nation NATO-led force. It had been due to expire in August. "This is a positive step and we welcome it," Afghan defense ministry spokesman General Mohammad Zahir Azimi said. "But for a long-term solution, we want the Dutch government and the international community as a whole to focus on building our own Afghan National Army," Azimi said.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
MI5 warns of China spying
The head of Britain's domestic security service has warned business leaders that China has been carrying out state-sponsored espionage against vital parts of the economy, the Times said yesterday. The director-general of MI5, Jonathan Evans, wrote to 300 chief executives and security heads at banks, accountancy and legal firms, warning them they were under attack from "Chinese state organizations" via the Internet, it said. The newspaper quoted a security expert as saying that among the techniques used by Chinese groups were "custom trojans" -- software that hacks into a firm's network and feeds back confidential information.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Detainee wins appeal
The brother of an Algerian airline pilot who was wrongly accused of training the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers won an appeal on Friday for damages against police. Mohamed Raissi, 35, brought a High Court legal action for £150,000 (US$308,460) for unlawful arrest from the Metropolitan Police after he was detained and held for about 42 hours on Sept. 21, 2001. But the French-born wife of pilot Lotfi Raissi, Sonia, 31, failed in her bid to be awarded the same amount after she was held for five days, then released without charge. Lotfi Raissi had his own claim for compensation rejected in February this year. A judge at the court said the extent of the damages for Mohamed Raissi would be determined at a later date.
■ GAZA
Israeli air strike kills four
Three militants from Hamas' military wing and a civilian were killed in an Israeli air strike on the Gaza Strip overnight, Palestinian hospital workers said. Two other members of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Islamist movement, were injured in the attack near the southern Gaza town of Khan Yunis. The deaths bring to 5,950 the number of people killed in Israeli-Palestinian violence since the start of the second Palestinian uprising in September 2000, the vast majority of them Palestinians.
■ UKRAINE
Vet to inspect crocodile
Ukrainian officials summoned a vet on Friday to determine whether a crocodile, captured after six months on the run, was comatose or dead. "The crocodile is showing no signs of life. We are not specialists and, to be honest, we don't know whether it's dead or alive," Nikolai Ranga of Ukraine's Emergencies Ministry said in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk. "The vet is coming to see the crocodile [on Saturday]." The crocodile, nicknamed Godzilla or Godzi, was captured alive this week after escaping from a traveling circus in May.
■ ITALY
Reality mimics art
Police burst into the room of a suspected Mafia mobster in Sicily and arrested him as he watched a TV show about the arrest of a Mafia boss, investigators said on Friday. Police said Michele Catalano was watching the concluding chapter late on Thursday of the TV mini-series The Boss of Bosses, recounting the arrest in 1993 of real-life Cosa Nostra leader Salvatore "Toto" Riina, when he was detained. They said Catalano, 48, was suspected of being a senior commander serving under the latest "boss of bosses" Salvatore Lo Piccolo, who was arrested this month after nearly 25 years on the run. Catalano faces charges of drug trafficking and extortion.
■ UNITED STATES
`Atlantis' clear for launch
NASA has cleared Atlantis for a Thursday launch, one month after the last space shuttle flight and a flurry of work since getting the international space station ready for a new laboratory. NASA has one week this month to get Atlantis off the ground. Otherwise, the launch must be postponed until next month because of unfavorable sun angles and to avoid flying a shuttle at the end of the year. The concern is that the computer software might not switch over properly to next year.
■ UNITED STATES
Bird species threatened
Relentless sprawl, invasive species and global warming are threatening an increasing number of bird species in the US, pushing a quarter of them toward extinction, according to a new study by the National Audubon Society and the American Bird Conservancy. The study, called WatchList 2007, categorized 178 species as threatened, an increase of about 10 percent from 2002, when Audubon's last study was conducted. Among the most endangered is the rare Bicknell's thrush, a native of the Catskill highlands whose winter habitat in the Caribbean is disappearing.
■ UNITED STATES
Jordan cooperated with CIA
The CIA has used its ties with its Jordanian counterparts to detain and interrogate at least 12 terrorism suspects in Jordan, the Washington Post reported yesterday. Citing unnamed documents, former prisoners and human rights advocates, the newspaper said the detention center located on the outskirts on Amman was mostly used as a covert transit point for CIA prisoners captured elsewhere. Some were detained during stopovers at Amman International Airport, the report said. After the holding center in Amman, the prisoners were usually sent to the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, the paper said.
■ UNITED STATES
House to vote on fuel rule
Congressional Democrats reached a compromise to boost automobile fuel economy by 40 percent, clearing the way for a House vote, probably next week, on an energy bill that Democratic leaders are pushing. The agreement came late on Friday after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reached an accord with Representative John Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan who is a longtime protector of the auto industry that dominates his home state. Automakers would be required to meet an industrywide average of 15 kilometers per liter for cars and light trucks, including SUVs, by 2020, the first increase by Congress in car fuel efficiency in 32 years.
■ UNITED STATES
Salt must go, doctors say
The American Medical Association (AMA) has urged the US federal government to take immediate action to reduce excess salt in food, which it believes will help save thousands of lives in the future. "Excess sodium greatly increases the chance of developing hypertension, heart disease and stroke," said Stephen Havas, AMA vice president for science, quality and public health. "Most Americans consume two to three times the amount of sodium that is healthy, with an estimated 75 to 80 percent of the daily intake of sodium coming from processed and restaurant foods," he said on Thursday. Reducing salt intake by 50 percent over the next 10 years could save at least 150,000 lives a year, the association said. Havas said Finland and Britain were good models as they have taken action on salt and seen promising results.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
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