■ JAPAN
Parrot talks his way home
When Yosuke the parrot flew out of his cage and got lost, he did exactly what he had been taught — recite his name and address to a stranger willing to help. Police rescued the African gray parrot two weeks ago from a roof in Nagareyama, near Tokyo. After spending a night at the station, he was transferred to a veterinary hospital. He kept mum with the cops, but began chatting after a few days with the vet. “I’m Mr. Yosuke Nakamura,” the bird told the vet. He also provided his full home address. The police checked the address and found the Nakamura family, who told them they had been teaching the bird its name and address for about two years.
■ MALAYSIA
Thieves in briefs rob house
Five robbers clad only in underwear and face masks broke into a Borneo home and left with money and goods after beating up the owner’s Indonesian maid, the Star daily said yesterday. The five men entered the home in Miri early on Monday and tied up a family of four, the paper said. The robbers then demanded to see the family’s maid and beat her with the handle of a machete. The men then escaped with more than 10,000 ringgit (US$2,940) in cash and belongings.
■ PHILIPPINES
Police told to smile or else
Police officers were told to smile in public or face suspension yesterday in an attempt to spruce up their image. The new guidelines were announced after one of the country’s bloodiest weeks in crime. “We are encouraging policemen to be community-friendly,” police Director Leopoldo Bataoil said. “There is no place for rough and brusque officers in this organization.” He said the order was in response to public complaints over officers’ behavior at road checkpoints. “Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Sorry for the inconvenience. Thank you so much. Sir/Ma’am ... these are words of courtesy which the public wants to hear from us,” Bataoil said.
■ AUSTRALIA
Giant roo signals to space
A giant white kangaroo bounced into the science books on Tuesday as part of a global experiment to measure the amount of light the earth reflects back to the sun. The cardboard cut-out marsupial, which measures 32m by 18m, was laid out in a paddock on the grounds of Monash University in Melbourne. “We call it our kangaroo from space because two satellites flew over [and] what they were doing was measuring the amount of light reflected from our kangaroo,” said Patricia Vickers-Rich, a professor at the school. “And the point of that was to make people aware that reflected light, or lack of reflected light, has a very big effect on climate.” Scientists are concerned that the melting of the polar ice caps is quickly robbing the earth of some of the white spaces which have traditionally reflected the sun’s rays, she said.
■ NEW ZEALAND
On a wing and a prayer
Two pilots had their prayers answered on Sunday when their microlight airplane ran out of fuel and they were able to make an emergency landing in a field — right next to a sign reading, “Jesus is Lord.” “My friend and I are both Christians so our immediate reaction in a life-threatening situation was to ask for God’s help,” Grant Stubbs told reporters yesterday. After landing, the pair noticed they were beside a 6m tall sign that read, “Jesus is Lord — The Bible.” “When we saw that, we started laughing,” Stubbs said. “It was a bit of relief.”
■ AUSTRIA
Winemaker found guilty
A court yesterday found a 56-year-old owner of a vineyard guilty of attempted murder by chocolate. The eight-person jury in the town Krems said it had seen enough evidence that Helmut O. had attempted to poison the mayor of his local village, Hannes Hirtzberger, with a chocolate praline laced with strychnine over a property dispute in February. Hirtzberger, who according to experts ingested a more than fatal dose of poison, is still in hospital in a vegetative state. The mayor had found a popular local cherry brandy praline and a greeting card pinned to his car in February. After eating the chocolate he collapsed with cramps. DNA traces of the accused were found on the greeting card. Police said the mayor had rejected his plans to convert a vineyard property into a spa hotel.
■ GERMANY
Philharmonie catches fire
Berlin firefighters have put out a fire in the city’s iconic Philharmonie, the concert hall that is home to the Berlin Philharmonic, a fire services spokesman said yesterday. Fire officers were continuing to mount a watch in the roof of the asymmetrical golden building to ensure that the fire, which burnt for more than 12 hours after being detected at 2pm on Tuesday, did not break out again, he said. A Philharmonie spokesman said concerts there would be cancelled for the foreseeable future while the structure of the concrete building was examined for lasting damage.
■ ESTONIA
Meri’s cousin on trial
A cousin of a former president of Estonia went on trial on Tuesday on charges of genocide in connection with the deaths of dozens of people deported to Soviet prison camps in 1949. Arnold Meri, 88, a highly decorated Soviet soldier and cousin of former Estonian president Lennart Meri, was charged in August last year of involvement in the deportation of 251 Estonians from a small island off the Baltic state’s west coast. He denies charges of genocide, which carries a sentence of 10 years to life in jail. “The trial started this morning, but I cannot say how long it will take,” said prosecutor office spokeswoman Kulli Kivioja.
■ SWEDEN
Nuclear plant threatened
Police said yesterday they were interrogating a man who had entered a nuclear plant on the nation’s southeast coast carrying highly explosive material. Sven-Erik Karlsson, spokesman for Kalmar County Police, said police received a call from the Oskarshamn plant at 7:58am. “They told us a welder who was going to perform a job there had been stopped in a random security check. He had been carrying small amounts of the highly explosive material TATP,” Karlsson said. TATP, or triacetone triperoxide, is an organic peroxide which is more powerful than dynamite but is not on the Swedish Rescue Services Agency’s list of banned substances.
■ BELGIUM
Russia-EU pact reached
EU states finally agreed yesterday on a mandate for launching talks with Russia on a wide-ranging partnership pact, EU President Slovenia said. Agreement was reached at a meeting of EU ambassadors and will be rubber-stamped by foreign ministers next Monday, a presidency statement said. The deal, reached after 18 months of internal wrangling, means that the 27-member bloc should be in a position to launch talks on energy, political and other ties with Moscow ahead of an EU-Russia summit in Siberia next month.
■ UNITED STATES
Kennedy has brain tumor
Legendary Democratic patriarch Senator Edward Kennedy has a malignant brain tumor, doctors said on Tuesday, sending a wave of sadness and shock through the US political establishment. The 76-year-old liberal lion’s cancer diagnosis, days after he was airlifted to a Boston hospital following a seizure, cast a pall over Congress, where the Massachusetts senator has been a dominant figure for nearly half a century. “Preliminary results from a biopsy of the brain identified the cause of the seizure as a malignant glioma in the left parietal lobe,” physicians Lee Schwamm and Larry Ronan said in a statement.
■ UNITED STATES
Hotel blast an accident
Construction was suspended on a San Diego, California, hotel after a gas explosion injured 14 workers, but the Hilton tower still may open on schedule, the builder said on Tuesday. A damage assessment report by city engineers found no apparent damage to the main structural concrete frame and the steel-braced frame at the area of the blast. The damage was primarily limited to the northwest corner of the building on the fourth floor and the mechanical room on the fifth floor, the report said. The explosion on Monday occurred in a fifth-floor boiler room where pipes feed natural gas into a water heating system.
■ UNITED STATES
Woman forgotten in jail
A Mexican woman mistakenly incarcerated for four days without food or water will not be prosecuted on the charge that originally landed her in the system, a prosecutor said. Adriana Torres-Flores, 38, spent a March weekend in a holding cell in the Washington County Courthouse after a hearing on a charge of unauthorized copying or sale of recordings. She was found on March 10 when court resumed for the work week. Deputy Prosecutor Mark Booher said Torres-Flores did not go to trial yesterday as previously scheduled because the prosecution was able to verify her alibi and the charge will be dropped. Booher said the decision not to prosecute Torres-Flores was not related to a lawsuit she may file over a sheriff deputy’s mistake in forgetting to have her transferred to the county jail.
■ UNITED STATES
Paper money discriminatory
The appeals court says paper money discriminates against blind people. The court has upheld a ruling that could force the country to redesign its money so blind people can distinguish between values. Such changes could include making bills different sizes, including raised markings or printing oversized numbers for people who see poorly. The appeals court ruled 2-1 on Tuesday that the government did not explain why such changes would be an unreasonable burden, especially since many other countries have done so.
■ URUGUAY
Fossil debate rages on
Paleontologists are exchanging finely chiseled blows over the mightiest rodent to bestride the Earth. The rat-like beast, dubbed Josephoartigasia monesi, leapt into the headlines in January, when Uruguayan experts said it weighed just over 1 tonne. Their estimates were based on a massive skull, found on a beach in Uruguay’s River Plate region, that was dated to some 4 million years ago. The fossil measures 53cm and boasts gigantic incisors several centimeters long. But if Virginie Millien of McGill University, Montreal, is right, J. monesi’s estimated mega-size is horribly wrong.
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
BEYOND WASHINGTON: Although historically the US has been the partner of choice for military exercises, Jakarta has been trying to diversify its partners, an analyst said Indonesia’s first joint military drills with Russia this week signal that new Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto would seek a bigger role for Jakarta on the world stage as part of a significant foreign policy shift, analysts said. Indonesia has long maintained a neutral foreign policy and refuses to take sides in the Russia-Ukraine conflict or US-China rivalry, but Prabowo has called for stronger ties with Moscow despite Western pressure on Jakarta. “It is part of a broader agenda to elevate ties with whomever it may be, regardless of their geopolitical bloc, as long as there is a benefit for Indonesia,” said Pieter
US ELECTION: Polls show that the result is likely to be historically tight. However, a recent Iowa poll showed Harris winning the state that Trump won in 2016 and 2020 US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris courted voters angered by the Gaza war while former US President and Republican candidate Donald Trump doubled down on violent rhetoric with a comment about journalists being shot as the tense US election campaign entered its final hours. The Democratic vice president and the Republican former president frantically blitzed several swing states as they tried to win over the last holdouts with less than 36 hours left until polls open on election day today. Trump predicted a “landslide,” while Harris told a raucous rally in must-win Michigan that “we have momentum — it’s
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
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