Sat, Jun 07, 2008 page5

• World News Quick Take

  • AGENCIES
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  ■ PHILIPPINES

  Wild storms kill one

  One person drowned and hundreds were displaced when wild storms lashed the southern island of Mindanao, causing flooding and landslides, the civil defense office said yesterday. The storms hit the coastal town of Bansalan late on Thursday, displacing about 1,000 people, the office said. One unnamed resident is missing and the body of another person was later found downstream, it said. Meanwhile, a tornado struck three villages near the northern city of Lingayen on Wednesday, destroying 32 houses and a school building, it said. The twister also toppled five power pylons, blacking out the area, though there were no casualties.

  ■JAPAN

  IEA costs halving emissions

  Halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 would cost US$45 trillion, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said yesterday. The Paris-based agency released a report upon request from the G8 member states and proposed that innovative technology be required to achieve the goal. In the Energy Technology Perspectives 2008 report, the IEA said every year 25 gas-fired and 35 coal-fired power plants would need new carbon dioxide capture and storage technology, which would cost US$1.5 billion each. The world also needs about 17,500 wind power turbines and 32 new nuclear power plants every year, while not fully prevalent technology, such as 215 million square meters of solar panels and a billion electric or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, should also be introduced, the IEA report said.

  ■VIETNAM

  Heroin smuggler hospitalized

  An Australian woman of Vietnamese origin was in stable condition yesterday at a hospital in Ho Chi Minh City after a bag of heroin she was smuggling in her anus broke, a hospital official said. The 35-year-old woman was unconscious and had stopped breathing when she was admitted to Saigon General Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City on Wednesday, said Nguyen Van Xuyen, director of the hospital. “We found two small plastic bags containing heroin in her anus and one of the bags had broken,” Xuyen said. “This is the first case in which we have found heroin in a person’s anus. We have treated people having swallowed heroin before.”

  ■PAKISTAN

  Police seize car bombs

  Pakistani police seized three vehicles packed with nearly 500kg of explosives near Islamabad, just days after a deadly car bomb at the Danish embassy, officials said yesterday. Four people were also arrested after the massive car bombs were discovered in the army headquarters city of Rawalpindi on Thursday following an anonymous tip-off, senior security officials said. The two cities were placed on red alert following the discovery of the explosives.

  ■INDIA

  Tibet talks postponed

  Talks between Tibetan envoys and Chinese officials set for Wednesday have been postponed because of last month’s earthquake, an aide to the Dalai Lama said yesterday, adding he hoped the two sides would meet later this month. Talks in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen in early May were the first since an anti-Beijing riot in Lhasa and widespread unrest in Tibet and nearby areas, and ended with an agreement to hold a further meeting, with Wednesday set as a tentative date. But Tenzin Taklha, a senior aide to the Dalai Lama, said the talks had been put off because of last month’s earthquake in Sichuan Province that killed more than 69,000 people.

  ■ IRELANDL

  Support slides for treaty

  The “no” side has surged ahead a week before Ireland holds a referendum on the EU’s Lisbon Treaty, a poll showed yesterday. The TNS/mrbi survey of 1,000 voters carried by the Irish Times showed opponents of the treaty 5 percent ahead of those in favor. All polls up until now had shown the yes side in the lead. The no side now stands at 35 percent, up 17 percent since three weeks ago, while the yes side has lost five points to 30 percent. Some 35 percent of voters still haven’t made up their minds. Ireland votes on the treaty on June 12, the only one of 27 EU member states to hold a public referendum on the treaty aimed at simplifying decision-making in the bloc. An Irish no would mean the treaty, a replacement for the failed EU constitution rejected by French and Dutch voters, could not go into effect.

  ■ISRAEL

  Mofaz warns Iran

  A deputy prime minister yesterday warned that Iran would face attack if it pursues what he said was its nuclear weapons program. “If Iran continues its nuclear weapons program, we will attack it,” said Shaoul Mofaz, who is also transportation minister. “Other options are disappearing. The sanctions are not effective. There will be no alternative but to attack Iran in order to stop the Iranian nuclear program,” Mofaz told the Yediot Aharonot daily. He stressed such an operation could only be conducted with US support. A former defense minister and armed forces chief of staff, Mofaz hopes to replace embattled Ehud Olmert as prime minister and at the helm of the Kadima party.

  ■RUSSIA

  Ship blaze kills three

  Media reports say a fire broke out on a ship in a dry dock on the Baltic Sea and that three people are dead and seven are missing. News agencies and television networks quote officials as saying the fire apparently broke out after a fuel tank exploded. Three other people were reportedly injured in the blaze on Thursday in the naval port of Baltiisk in Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave.

  ■UAE

  Activists petition king

  Dozens of Saudi pro-reform activists in Dubai urged King Abdullah on Thursday to release a prominent Saudi reformist who was detained last month, or ensure that he gets a fair trial. “Signatories to this appeal exhort the custodian of the two holy mosques [Abdullah] to order the release of Matruk al-Faleh or his referral to a public and fair trial,” 137 activists, including several women, said in a statement. Faleh, who was arrested on May 19, has been on hunger strike, “and this puts his life at risk ... since he suffers from diabetes and blood pressure,” said the statement. The charges against Faleh are unknown, but rights activists have linked his arrest to his defense of jailed reformist Abdullah al-Hamed.

  ■RUSSIA

  Second reactor shut down

  Moscow has shut down the second of its three plutonium-producing reactors as part of a nuclear nonproliferation program with the US, the Energy Department said. The remaining reactor at the once-closed city of Seversk in south-central Russia was shut down on Thursday, ending 43 years of plutonium production there for Russia’s nuclear weapons. The other Seversk reactor stopped operating last April. Russia continues to produce plutonium from a third reactor in the central Siberian town of Zheleznogorsk. It is scheduled to be shuttered by 2010.

  ■ UNITED STATE

  Park to inaugurate bio toilet

  Mount Rainier National Park in Ashford, Washington, is holding a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Monday to activate a new bio toilet at Cougar Rock Campground. The US$70,000 toilet was donated by Groundwork Mishima, a group that promotes volunteerism at Mount Fuji, which has a “sister mountain” relationship with the park. The toilet was installed with the help of students from the Japanese Volunteers-in-Parks Association. The toilet uses cedar chips and natural composting to operate with little water or odor. Heavy snow has delayed the opening of the campground itself until next Friday.

  ■UNITED STATES

  County may ban marijuana

  Mendocino County’s reputation as a marijuana haven of California may be going up in smoke. Voters on Tuesday leaned toward repealing a law allowing home marijuana growing, preliminary results of a ballot measure vote released on Wednesday showed. Critics say a cottage industry had grown out of control. California in 1996 voted to allow possession and cultivation by residents of marijuana for medical purposes, despite federal law which declares it illegal. Mendocino approved in 2000 marijuana cultivation for recreational use as well, voting to let residents grow up to 25 marijuana plants, compared with the state limit of six.

  ■UNITED STATES

  O’Connor unveils game

  The nation’s first female Supreme Court justice unveiled a video game project on Wednesday to teach children how courts work, saying she wanted to counter partisan criticism that judges are “godless” activists. Sandra Day O’Connor, 78, who served as US Supreme Court justice from 1981 until her retirement in 2006, said she got involved with developing the project called “Our Courts” out of concern over public ignorance about the judiciary and partisan attacks on what should be an independent institution. “We hear a great deal about judges who are activists — godless, secular, humanists trying to impose their will on the rest of us,” she said. “Now I always thought an activist judge was one who got up in the morning and went to work.”

  ■UNITED STATES

  People creatures of habit

  Researchers who tracked 100,000 people using their cellphone signals confirmed on Wednesday that most human beings are indeed creatures of habit. Most of us go to work, to school and back home in surprisingly predictable patterns, something the researchers said would be useful in city planning and preparing for emergencies. “This inherent similarity in travel patterns could impact all phenomena driven by human mobility, from epidemic prevention to emergency response, urban planning and agent-based modeling,” Albert-Laszlo Barabasi of Northeastern University in Boston and colleagues wrote in their report, published in the journal Nature. They used data collected by a European mobile phone carrier for billing and operational purposes.

  ■UNITED STATES

  Stamps sold for US$2m

  A rare Brazilian stamp series known as the “Pack Strip” sold for US$2,185,000 at a Manhattan auction of early South American postage stamps. The Siegel Auction Galleries said that the 1843 series of “Bull’s Eyes” stamps — considered the rarest among Brazilian collector stamps — was sold on Thursday to a buyer bidding by phone. It contains two 30-reis denomination stamps joined with one 60-reis.
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