■ SINGAPORE
Sex drug kills second man
A second man has died after taking sexual enhancement pills laced with high amounts of a drug intended for diabetics, news reports said yesterday. The 50-year-old had been hospitalized in a coma after taking fake Cialis pills, one of four products found to have the drug glibenclamide at levels of up to five times the maximum therapeutic dosage, the Straits Times said. The others were identified by the Health Sciences Authority (HSA) as Power 1, Walnut, Santi Bovine Penis Erecting Capsule and Zhong Hua Niu Bian. Five other men are seriously ill, the report said. One has been left brain-damaged after a stroke. Another remains unresponsive after emerging from a coma. Two others are in comas, while another is suffering from brain damage. While aware of the dangers, many patients continue taking the pills since they have not suffered any ill effects and believe they will not in the future, said Chan Cheng Leng, assistant director of the HSA’s pharmacovigilance, communications and research division.
■ THAILAND
Boys interviewed over rape
Three boys are being interviewed by police after allegedly gang raping a seven-year-old girl, a report said yesterday. The boys, who range in age from eight to 12, reportedly claimed they were inspired by graphic sex scenes observed online at a local Internet cafe where they had gone to play computer games. A doctor confirmed that sexual intercourse had taken place. Police not only arrested the children, but also brought their parents in for questioning.
■ BANGLADESH
Poor want rotten rice
Troops were deployed at a dumping site near the country’s main Chittagong port yesterday to stop poor people from collecting rotten rice, officials said. “The dumping site has been cordoned, and the relevant authorities have been asked not to dump rotten rice at unrestricted spots anymore,” a security official said. Hundreds of poor people thronged the dumping site as the Food Department started ditching some 500 tonnes of damaged rice on Friday. Nearly half of Bangladesh’s 140 million people live on an income less than US$1 per day and their plight has worsened since rice and other food prices started rising this year.
■ PAKISTAN
Eight die in land dispute
Police say assailants killed a farmer and seven members of his family over a land dispute. Officer Pervez Iqbal says the attackers used machetes and guns to kill the 45-year-old farmer, his wife, his son, daughter-in-law and four grandchildren, who were between four and 10 years old, before dawn yesterday. No one has been arrested for the slayings in Punjab province.
■ CAMBODIA
Officials try to quell hysteria
Officials have moved to quell growing hysteria sparked by a rumor that a ghostly red number was appearing on mobile phones and killing people, local media and police said yesterday. Officials have urged calm in the mobile phone-crazy country, where rumors spread nationally like wildfire thanks to cheap calls and text messages, and have denied any red number exists. Posts and Telecommunications Minister So Khun said the rumor was probably due to growing tension prior to scheduled national elections in July, the English-language Cambodia Daily reported. “Anyone can make this up. In a moment we will hear that fish will grow legs and run away,” the paper quoted the minister as saying.
■ TURKEY
UNHCR deplores expulsions
The UN refugee agency reprimanded Turkey on Friday for forcibly expelling 18 Syrian and Iranian migrants across a river to Iraq, four of whom were swept away and drowned. The incident took place on Wednesday near the Silopi (Habur) border crossing in Sirnak Province in southeastern Turkey, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said. “Four men, including an Iranian refugee, drowned after a group of 18 people were forced to cross a fast-flowing river by the Turkish police,” the UNHCR said in a statement which quoted eyewitness accounts. The UNHCR had recognized five Iranians among the group as refugees in need of international protection. It said it had asked Turkey not to deport the five, who were detained after attempting to cross into Greece. In all, Turkish authorities had tried to forcibly deport 60 people to Iraq through the official border crossing, the UNHCR said. Iraqi authorities only allowed 42 Iraqis to enter, and refused to admit the 18 Iranian and Syrian nationals. Turkish police then took the group of 18 to a place where a river separates Turkey and Iraq “and forced them to swim across,” the UNCHR said. Four bodies could not be recovered.
■ NETHERLANDS
‘Magic mushrooms’ banned
The Dutch government has decided to ban “magic mushrooms” and announced that it would put a bill before parliament under a proposal put forward by the ministers of health and justice, Ab Klink and Hirsch Ballin. The decision, backed by a majority of members of parliament, was taken late on Friday after a number of accidents mostly involving tourists. The health ministry said the number of incidents following use of hallucinogenic mushrooms had risen from 55 in 2004 to more than 100 last year, mainly in Amsterdam.
■ NORWAY
Viking woman not murdered
Tests of the bones of two Viking women found in a buried longboat have dispelled 100-year-old suspicions that one was a maid sacrificed to accompany her queen into the afterlife, experts said on Friday. The bones indicated that a broken collarbone on the younger woman had been healing for several weeks — meaning the break was not part of a ritual execution as suspected since the 22m-long Oseberg ship was found in 1904. “We have no reason to think violence was the cause of death,” Per Holck, professor of anatomy at Oslo University, told reporters after studying the two women who died in 834 aged about 80 and 50. “The fracture could have been caused by stumbling or whatever. She could have been seriously hurt, got brain damage. But this fracture alone is no sign of killing,” he said.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Trio bitten by rabid puppy
Three people were bitten by a rabies-infected puppy dog in British quarantine, a Health Protection Agency (HPA) spokeswoman said yesterday. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said a case of rabies had been confirmed in the puppy. The dog died on Thursday and had been held in quarantine in southeast England since April 18 after being brought into Britain from Sri Lanka. Officials said Britain remained rabies-free and the risk of it spreading was highly unlikely, while those bitten required swift treatment. “This animal died whilst in quarantine, which has effectively contained any public health risk,” said Dilys Morgan, an HPA rabies expert. Checks were underway on animals which might have come into contact with the puppy, including those which have since left the center.
■ UNITED STATES
Fake testicles face ban
Senate lawmakers in Florida have voted to ban the fake bull testicles that dangle from the trailer hitches of many trucks and cars throughout the state. Republican Senator Cary Baker, a gun shop owner from Eustis, Florida, called the adornments offensive and proposed the ban. Motorists would be fined US$60 for displaying the novelty items, which are known by brand names like “Truck Nutz” and resemble the south end of a bull moving north. The Florida Senate voted last week to add the measure to a broader transportation bill, but it is not included in the House version.
■ GUATEMALA
Smuggling ads probed
Authorities are investigating radio advertisements seeking former elite soldiers, who have been known to work for drug cartels, to smuggle goods into Mexico, officials said on Thursday. The ads were broadcast in the lawless northern jungle region of Peten, home to a tough military training center for Kaibil soldiers, infamous during the civil war as a brutal guerilla-fighting, special forces unit. “We invite all citizens who have served in the military and graduated as Kaibils to work securing vehicles transporting merchandise to Mexico,” the radio spot said. Former Kaibil soldiers have been recruited to work as assassins and run security for powerful drug lords, a Kaibil commander said.
■ MEXICO
Aide fired over alleged theft
A press aide at the president’s office has been dismissed after allegations he took BlackBerrys belonging to US officials at a summit in New Orleans, an official said on Friday. Rafael Quintero Curiel acknowledged picking up two of the telephone and e-mail devices at the summit of the leaders of Mexico, the US and Canada this week, but said he thought they had been left behind and was trying to return them. A Mexican government spokeswoman said Quintero Curiel was dismissed from his year-old job coordinating logistics for reporters covering President Felipe Calderon’s international trips.
■ UNITED STATES
Shooting victim loses twins
A prosecutor said a pregnant bank teller has lost the twins she was carrying when she was shot in an Indianapolis bank robbery. Katherin Shuffield, who was five months pregnant, was critically wounded in the robbery on Tuesday morning at a Huntington Bank branch. Police have been searching for the gunman. Marion County chief trial prosecutor David Wyser says one of the twins died on Thursday night and the other on Friday morning. Authorities and the family had said the 30-year-old Shuffield had been wounded in the abdomen and was in critical but stable condition.
■ UNITED STATES
Noose threats punished
A Louisiana teenager pleaded guilty to using nooses to threaten marchers after a civil rights demonstration last year, federal prosecutors said. Jeremiah Munsen, 19, could get up to a year in prison and a US$100,000 fine, authorities said. Sentencing was scheduled on Aug. 15. “The defendant today took responsibility for committing a federal hate crime by using a powerful symbol of hate to intimidate a group of interstate travelers because of their race,” Attorney Donald Washington said in a statement. On Sept. 20, Munsen and a friend hung nooses off the back of a pickup truck and drove around near a crowd of demonstrators. Some 20,000 people demonstrated in Jena during a controversial case involving six black teenagers in the beating of a white classmate.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
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