■AUSTRALIA
MP in hot water
A political leader broke down at a news conference on Tuesday as he admitted that he had sniffed the chair of a female colleague, local media reported. The confession came from the leader of the conservative Liberal Party in Western Australia, Troy Buswell, who has previously owned up to snapping the bra strap of an opposition party staffer. Buswell told reporters at the televised news conference in Mandurah, south of Perth, that he would not resign his post, which puts him in line to become state premier if his party wins elections next year. But tears welled in his eyes and he choked up when asked how his family had reacted to the wide publicity given to the incident since the story became public at the weekend, the national AAP news agency said.
■AUSTRALIA
BASE jumpers arrested
A BASE jumper landed in trouble yesterday when he parachuted from a downtown Sydney high-rise office building into the path of a police car. Two officers on a patrol spotted the man floating to earth before he landed in front of their car at about 3am, state police said in a statement. A second jumper landed around the same time on the same street, it said. Both men, aged 27, were arrested “after a short foot chase,” the statement said. They were charged with risking public safety by abseiling, jumping or parachuting from a building or other structure. The potential maximum penalty was not immediately clear. The two Sydney residents, who were not publicly identified, were released on bail and will appear in a Sydney court on May 22 to enter a plea, police said.
■AUSTRALIA
Gay activists hail bill
Gay rights activists yesterday welcomed a government promise to bring in legislation giving same-sex couples the same rights as opposite-sex couples. Discrimination would be removed in laws covering taxation, pensions, healthcare and veterans’ entitlements. “The recognition of same-sex de facto couples is long overdue and will bring Australian national law into line with all Australia’s states and territories and many other Western nations,” Coalition for Equality spokesman Rodney Croome said. He said that draft legislation should also cover provisions for same-sex marriages. “It’s deeply disappointing that the government is not prepared to accept equality in marriage,” he said. Both major political parties have declared that marriage should only be between a man and a woman.
■■UNITED STATES
Photoshoot stirs up ruckus
A recent Vanity Fair photoshoot of 15-year-old TV and pop wonder Miley Cyrus, who plays in Disney TV’s Hannah Montana, has stirred up a ruckus with Disney fans. Photographer Annie Leibovitz draped her in a satin sheet, back exposed, in a pose that gives the impression she is topless. When news of the shoot broke over the weekend, it caused a hostile reaction from bloggers such as Lin Burress, a morality crusader who called on parents to burn Hannah Montana accessories. After Disney accused Vanity Fair of trying “to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines,” a spokesperson said her parents were at the shoot, calling it “a relaxed family event.”
■UNITED STATES
CBS star in drug scandal
Actor Gary Dourdan, who co-stars on the CBS TV hit CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, has been arrested on suspicion of possessing cocaine, heroin and other drugs, police said on Tuesday. Dourdan, 41, was detained in Palm Springs, California, after he was found asleep in the driver’s seat of a parked car before dawn on Monday, a police press release said. The car had been parked on the wrong side of the street with the interior light left on. The officer found substances believed to be cocaine, heroin, Ecstasy and various prescription drugs, as well as drug paraphernalia, police said. Dourdan was arrested, booked for possession of drugs and jailed for about five hours before he was released on US$5,000 bail, police said.
■UNITED STATES
‘Flasher’ mystery solved?
A middle-of-the-night mystery that rattled and baffled residents for months may finally have been solved with police making a real-world arrest. Deafening blasts accompanied by blinding split-second flashes of light have been rattling residents of a neighborhood in Pikesville, Maryland, for months. Police said they set up cameras and recorded the phenomena last week, but didn’t detect anyone in the area. Based on shadows, police believe the light source was in the air about 9m above the ground. A spokesman said on Tuesday someone had been arrested in connection with the mystery, but did not provide details.
■UNITED STATES
When pigs fly
It’s huge, inflatable and it has lost its way in the California desert. Organizers for the Coachella music festival announced on Monday that the gigantic blowup swine, released into the night sky during Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters’ headlining set on Sunday, was still out there — and they want it back. The festival is offering a US$10,000 reward plus four Coachella tickets for life for the safe return of the pig, a spokeswoman said. As tall as a two-story house and as wide as two school buses, the pig broke free from lines on as Waters played Pigs from the 1977 album Animals.
■BOSNIA
Court convicts war criminals
The country’s top war crimes court convicted two Bosnian Serbs and a Bosnian Croat of war crimes committed during the country’s 1992 to 1995 war. A court statement says former Bosnian Serb soldiers Mirko Todorovic, 54, and Milos Radic, 49, took part in the capture of 14 Muslim Bosniaks in 1992, of whom they killed eight. They were sentenced on Tuesday to 17 years ain prison each. In another trial, 43-year-old Pasko Ljubicic was sentenced to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to commanding a battalion of military police accused of attacking the Bosniak Muslim village of Ahmici in 1993, leaving more than 100 people dead.
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
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
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
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