■ BANGLADESH
Abducted workers released
Two development workers abducted in Afghanistan were released in the east-central province of Ghazni, officials said yesterday. “The unidentified abductors left them in front of our Gazni office Saturday evening, 10 days after they were picked up,” said Zia Hashan, communications manager of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, a Dhaka-based non-governmental organization. Akhter Ali and Mohammad Shahjahan Ali, who have been working for the committee in Afghanistan for three years, were kidnapped by unidentified gunmen on October 23 from their office at Moi Mubarak in Ghazni. Committee officials in Dhaka said the two were in good health and were brought back to Kabul yesterday. They talked to their families by telephone immediately after they were released. “We will bring them back home as early as possible,” Hashan said.
■MALAYSIA
Surveyors rescued in Borneo
Two surveyors involved in a gas pipeline project in the dense jungles of Borneo island have been rescued by tribesmen after getting lost for five days, a report said yesterday. The two surveyors went missing in northern Sarawak state while carrying out demarcation work for the proposed 3 billion ringgit (US$850 million) Sabah-Sarawak Gas Pipeline. The Penan tribesmen, who live a semi-nomadic lifestyle, found Ismail Salleh, 31, and Rano Sani, 26, while hunting in the jungle on Saturday. The pair went missing on Tuesday. They were part of a 50-strong team who were drawing up a land route to lay a 500km gas pipeline from Kimanis to Bintulu. “How they got lost is still a puzzle. We will interview them soon, but the good news is that they are not hurt,” local police chief Jonathan Jalin was quoted as saying by the Sunday Star newspaper.
■PHILIPPINES
Troops shoot communist
Troops killed one communist rebel in a clash in an eastern province, the military said yesterday. The firefight erupted on Saturday in the village of Burgos in Casiguran town, Sorsogon Province, 375km southeast of Manila. A military report said soldiers were on patrol when they encountered a group of about 15 communist rebels, triggering the clash. Troops recovered the body of the slain rebel as well as one rifle and an improvised landmine, the report said. Communist rebels have been fighting the government since the late 1960s, making the movement one of the longest-running leftist insurgencies in Asia.
■NEW ZEALAND
‘Joe the Plumber’ arrives
Prime Minister Helen Clark found her own “Joe the Plumber” on the campaign trail on Friday. Clark was campaigning at a retirement home in Auckland when a visiting plumber, Morgan Luxton, asked her how her Labour Party would help the self-employed. Clearly aware of the now-famous American tradesman Joe the Plumber, Clark slipped the word “plumber” into her response nearly a dozen times. Luxton later said he was “a bit embarrassed” because he was the only plumber in the room.
■VIETNAM
Twenty-two die in flooding
Floods and heavy rain have left at least 22 people dead in the last two days in central and northern areas of the country, with the capital Hanoi hardest hit, officials said yesterday. The dead, among them four children, drowned or were killed by falling trees, houses collapsing, being electrocuted or struck by lightning, said Hoang Quang Dung from the National Flood and Storm Prevention Committee. Authorities also said around 55,000 houses and 180,000 hectares of crops had been flooded and estimated material losses at tens of millions of dollars.
■BANGLADESH
Bad alcohol poisons 18
At least 18 people died on Saturday after unlicensed spirits made them sick but they were afraid to report it in the Muslim country, police said. Police said the victims in the northern Bogra district bought the spurious liquor with a high alcohol content from an unlicensed brewer and fell sick shortly after consuming it. They did not report immediately to police or hospitals because drinking alcohol is a punishable offence, except in big hotels and some licensed bars. Relatives informed police and reporters after the deaths. “We confirmed 18 deaths but some more may have gone unreported,” said a police officer in Bogra, 200km from the capital Dhaka.
■CHINA
Japanese general criticized
Officials were strongly critical on Saturday of an essay by Japan’s former air force chief of staff who said Japan was not an aggressor in Asia in World War II and was later dismissed for airing those views. “We are shocked by and express our strong indignation over the senior Japanese military officer’s denial of Japan’s aggression and overtly glorifying its history of invasion,” Xinhua news agency quoted Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu (姜瑜) as saying. General Toshio Tamogami, in an essay posted on the Web site of a Japanese hotel and apartment developer, said Japan was ensnared into World War II by the US and that Japan’s military actions in China were based on treaties. Japanese Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada said on Friday he would dismiss Tamogami, adding it was improper for the general to publicly state a view clearly different from that of the government.
■MOROCCO
Police seize hashish
The Interior Ministry said it had seized about 6.4 tonnes of hashish during a raid in the south of the country. A ministry statement on Saturday said police arrested four suspects during the sweep in the province of Inezegane-Ait Melloul. It said the drugs were meant to be smuggled to Europe through the tourist resort of Agadir. They were intercepted on Friday. The country is one of the world’s largest producers of cannabis resin, used to make hashish.
■SWITZERLAND
Diver dies aged 86
Underwater explorer Jacques Piccard, who dove deeper beneath the ocean than any other man, has died at the age of 86. His company Solar Impulse said Piccard died on Saturday at his home in Switzerland. Piccard helped his father, the famous physicist Auguste Piccard, invent the bathyscaphe, a vessel which allows humans to descend to great depths. On Jan. 23, 1960, the Belgian-born Piccard and US Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh took a boat into the Pacific’s Mariana Trench and dove to a depth of nearly 11km below sea level. It remains the deepest dive ever carried out. After the dive, Piccard continued to research the deep seas and worked for NASA. Piccard’s son Bertrand achieved fame as a round-the-world balloonist.
■BURKINA FASO
Aid contains melamine
Milk powder sent from Japan as aid for malnourished children was found to be contaminated with the industrial chemical melamine, health authorities said on Saturday. “Our services have seized milk in [the western town of] Bobo Dioulasso on Oct. 20, 2008 which we analyzed. We found that the milk had been contaminated with melamine,” the director of Burkina Faso’s National Laboratory for Public Health, Daouda Traore, told journalists. Traore said the powdered milk contained eight times more melamine than the maximum dose allowed. “This is a product that should not be consumed,” he said. The milk came from a gift made to a children’s health center.
■EGYPT
Leader vows more reform
President Hosni Mubarak has promised to continue economic reform and step up efforts to combat poverty despite the impact of the international financial crisis. In a speech to his ruling National Democratic Party convention on Saturday, Mubarak also ordered the government to develop strategies to mitigate the effect of the crisis on the country’s main sources of income, such as tourism and exports. The convention is being held amid increasing skepticism of the government, political uncertainty and worsening economic woes. Opponents say the party will do nothing to bring real change and dismiss the convention as another bid to consolidate the power base of the president’s son.
■IRAN
Delay blamed on India
The oil minister called on India to play a more active role in development of a multi-billion dollar gas pipeline from Iran to Pakistan and India, the Mehr news agency reported. “In the light of the many wasted opportunities in the pipeline project because of stalling by India, we asked this country to be more active,” Gholam Hossein Nozari said after meeting Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee. The US$7.5 billion project for the pipeline was launched in 1994 but has been held up by disagreements between India and Pakistan. Mukherjee, who was in Tehran, said India “has no intention of quitting the project,” Mehr reported.
■UNITED STATES
Baggage handler gets shock
A Delta baggage worker got a bit of a fright before Halloween when she opened a jetliner’s cargo door and found a cheetah running loose amid the luggage. Two cheetahs were being flown in the cargo area of a Boeing 757 passenger flight from Portland, Oregon, to Atlanta on Thursday when one escaped from its cage, Delta spokeswoman Betsy Talton said on Friday. “They told us a large animal had gotten out of a container in the cargo hold and they were having to send someone to tranquilize it,” said one passenger, Lee Sentell of Montgomery, Alabama. He said his luggage was delayed, but baggage handlers had promised to send his bags to him in Alabama. The airline summoned help from Zoo Atlanta and experts rushed to a closed airport hangar and tranquilized the escaped animal and took both big cats to the zoo. Both one-year-old female cheetahs were on their way from the Wildlife Safari Park in Winston, Oregon, to the Memphis Zoo in Tennessee.
■UNITED STATES
Cop confiscates video
Police confiscated video footage from an Oakland Tribune photographer who was filming students protesting federal immigration policy. Tribune employee Jane Tyska was outside the Fruitvale subway station on Friday when she was detained and her tape taken away by an Oakland Unified School District police officer, the newspaper said. Oakland schools spokesman Troy Flint said officer Art Michel was escorting the protesters and that the officer took the footage as evidence that Tyska was interfering with his ability to perform his duties. He said the incident began when Tyska ran into Michel’s patrol car, scratching the vehicle and bending a side mirror. But Tyska told the Oakland Tribune that Michel’s car grazed her as she was walking backward. She said the officer yelled profanities at her and threatened to arrest her. “I immediately identified myself as a photographer for the Oakland Tribune, showed him my press pass and said I was just doing my job,” she told the paper. Tyska was eventually released without being cited, the newspaper said.
■UNITED STATES
No treat for Democrats
A woman in Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan, refused Halloween candy to children whose parents support Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama. Shirley Nagel passed out candy on Friday on the scary US holiday, but only to those who shared her support for Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain and his vice presidential pick Sarah Palin. Television station WJBK says a sign posted outside Nagel’s house in suburban Detroit served this notice to children seeking treats: “No handouts for Obama supporters, liars, tricksters or kids of supporters.” Nagel told WJBK that “Obama’s scary.” When asked about children who were turned away empty-handed and crying, she said: “Oh well. Everybody has a choice.”
■UNITED STATES
Killer mistook boy for thief
Police in South Carolina say a 12-year-old out trick-or-treating for the US Halloween holiday was killed when a convicted felon fearing a robbery fired nearly 30 rounds with an assault rifle from inside a house. Quentin Patrick has been charged with murder and assault and battery with intent to kill. Police say the 22-year-old ex-convict told them he had been robbed and shot before. The boy’s family attended a Halloween celebration and then stopped at the house to ask for candy because the porch light was on.
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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