■HONG KONG
Lawyer’s conviction quashed
The High Court yesterday quashed the conviction of one of the city’s most high-profile lawyers, who had been jailed for disclosing the identity of a protected witness to a journalist. The Court of Appeal freed Kevin Egan, who was sentenced to two and a half years in prison in 2006 for leaking the identity of Becky Wong to a South China Morning Post reporter. Wong was a witness in a financial criminal case and being held in protective custody of the city’s anti-graft body, the Independent Commission Against Corruption. The lawyer’s conviction was overturned yesterday by Judge Robert Tang, who said the trial judge’s finding that Egan knew Wong was on the witness protection program when he spoke to the journalist could not be supported.
■NEW ZEALAND
Kiwi arrested in Pakistan
Wellington said yesterday it was making urgent inquiries into the arrest of a 35-year-old New Zealander by Pakistani security forces as he tried to enter an al-Qaeda and Taliban stronghold on the Afghan border. The man, identified on his passport as Mark Taylor, was reportedly detained at a paramilitary checkpoint near the town of Tank, about 280km southwest of Islamabad. Dressed in local clothing and wearing a beard that he did not have when his passport photograph was taken, he was traveling in a bus headed for a tribal region that is off-limits to foreigners, where he said he was going to get married.
■THAILAND
Bombing kills three
Three policemen were killed and one was seriously injured in a bomb attack in the latest violence in a five-year separatist rebellion in the south of the country, police said yesterday. The 20kg bomb was buried along a rural road in Nongjik in Pattani, one of three southern provinces where more than 3,000 people have been killed since the violence erupted in 2004.
■AUSTRALIA
Diver loses hand to shark
A diver who fought off a shark in a rare attack in Sydney Harbour was in high spirits despite losing a hand and facing the prospect of losing a leg, his family said yesterday. Able Seaman Paul de Gelder, 31, was taking part in a defense exercise near an upmarket residential area of the harbor in Australia’s largest city when he was attacked on Wednesday. “As a result of the attack Paul has lost his right hand above the wrist and may lose his right leg, however he is in high spirits,” de Gelder’s family said in a brief statement issued through the Australian Defense Force. The attack took place near the Garden Island Naval Base in Woolloomooloo Bay, which is lined with seafood restaurants and celebrity apartments. Experts said no one had been bitten by a shark in Sydney Harbour for more than a decade and the last fatal attack was in 1963.
■HONG KONG
Infection halts transplants
A top hospital yesterday suspended bone marrow transplant operations after a rare infection killed a six-year-old boy and sickened two other patients. Three other patients at the Queen Mary Hospital are also being tested for the infection, which doctors have identified as a rare intestinal disease called gastrointestinal mucormycosis. The boy died 23 days after contracting the infection in November and two other leukemia patients — a boy aged 11 and a man aged 38 — were found to be infected last month and this month. After the third infection was confirmed Wednesday, the hospital decided to suspend bone marrow transplants for a week.
■SPAIN
Contestant’s past revealed
Blue-eyed, curly-haired Cyril Jacquet was the perfect reality show participant. Young, attractive, outgoing and ambitious, he and his girlfriend, Paola Alberdi, were determined to win a new reality TV show called Around the World. It promised adventure, a 200,000 euro (US$257,000) prize and, inevitably, fame. Jacquet did not seem to realize, however, that fans of the show would inevitably start putting his name into their Internet search engines and find out a little bit more about him. So it was that, on Sunday night, he abandoned the show after program-makers questioned him about Internet rumors that as a 15-year-old he had murdered his mother and father. Antena 3 said it had no idea that one of its contestants was a parricide. “The program did not know,” a presenter said.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Queen’s Web site revamped
Queen Elizabeth II is offering Internet-savvy subjects the option of applying for a job at the palace through her newly revamped Web site, royal officials said yesterday. First launched in 1997, the British queen’s purple-toned site provides pictures, news and background on the monarch and her family. Officials said the improved site would now have a direct link to the videos carried on YouTube’s royal channel, integration with Google Maps and a new section on the queen’s pets. Those interested in seeing her majesty up close will have the chance to submit their job applications to Buckingham Palace and book interviews over the Internet.
■EGYPT
Document sparks bust furor
Egypt will demand Germany return an ancient bust of Queen Nefertiti if a document suggesting it was fraudulently spirited out of the country is authentic, antiquities chief Zahi Hawass said on Wednesday. British newspaper the Times reported this week that a document found in the archives of the German Oriental Institute showed that a German archeologist swindled an inspector in Egypt into allowing him to take the bust. The archeologist, Ludwig Borchardt, wrapped the 3,400-year-old bust and put in a dimly lit room to fool the inspector into thinking it was a banal find.
■RUSSIA
Medvedev orders jail reform
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday ordered his officials to reform a prison system that is chronically overcrowded with inmates who are mostly ill or serving harsh sentences for minor offenses. Decades after the Soviet Union’s Gulag prison camps were abolished, Russia still has a vast network of penal institutions housing nearly 900,000 prisoners — the world’s second highest rate relative to the population after the US. Medvedev is a former corporate lawyer who has spoken often about the need to respect human rights, though campaigners say they have yet to see real change.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Parliament sees painter row
In their weekly debate on Wednesday in the House of Commons, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and opposition leader David Cameron clashed over — of all things — how old the Renaissance painter Titian was when he died. Titian came up at Prime Minister’s Question Time as Cameron asserted that Brown never got his facts right. “You told us the other day you were like Titian aged 90. The fact is Titian died at 86,” the leader of the Conservative Party told the Labour prime minister. Academics are unsure at what age Titian died; most believe he was born between 1486 and 1490 and died in 1576.
■UNITED STATES
Wrong city on transit cards
Philadelphia’s primary mass transit agency is embarrassed about a discount pass it sold that features a picture of New York City. The pass is marked with the logo for Philly Beer Week, a festival celebrating local breweries and taverns. The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority is selling the pass to discourage people from driving from one event to another during the festival. A spokeswoman for the agency said officials didn’t realize the photo was of the wrong city. New passes are being printed.
■UNITED STATES
Eight-year-old drove van
Police in southwest Florida arrested a man they say let his eight-year-old son drive a van. Police in Bradenton arrested 34-year-old Mark Belanger just before midnight on Sunday on charges of child abuse and permitting an unlicensed driver to drive. A police report said the boy hit two trees and nearly hit two people in a parking lot. Belanger told police he had taken Xanax, used to treat anxiety and panic attacks, and was “feeling woozy and didn’t want to drive.” The boy told police his father took “liquid medicine” to feel better, pointing to an empty whiskey bottle in the vehicle.
■MEXICO
Seven arrested in murders
Seven members of the drug cartel hit squad Los Zeta have been arrested in connection with the torture and murder of three people, including a retired general, in Cancun, law enforcement officials said on Wednesday. The arrests include Los Zeta leader Octavio Almanza, “who along with his brother Ricardo took part in the execution of general Mauro Enrique Tello,” as well as an army lieutenant and a civilian, Attorney General Special Investigations chief Marisela Morales said. The murders were carried out with complicity of Cancun municipal police chief Francisco Velasco Delgado, she told a press conference.
■UNITED STATES
Doctor ordered to stand trial
A doctor who is the son of Bermuda’s leader was ordered to stand trial on Wednesday on 33 counts of molesting female patients at Los Angeles medical clinics where he practiced. The decision by Superior Court Judge William Hollingsworth came after a week of testimony from 12 women, including an undercover vice officer and a 15-year-old girl. They testified that Kevin Antario Brown, the 37-year-old son of Bermudan Premier Ewart Brown, touched them inappropriately. One woman said he raped her. Brown is charged with 33 felony sex counts involving 12 alleged victims over five years. Last year, he pleaded not guilty to all the charges. He faces the possibility of life in prison if convicted.
■BRAZIL
Legalizing drug proposed
Three former Latin American presidents said on Wednesday that regional policymakers should consider decriminalizing marijuana because long-standing attempts to curb the production and trafficking of illicit drugs have failed. In a report by the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, former presidents Cesar Gaviria of Colombia, Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico and Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil said “we are farther than ever from the announced goal of eradicating drugs.” The report was posted on the commission’s Web site following its release in Rio de Janeiro. Writers Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru and Paulo Coelho of Brazil, are also members of the drug commission, which comprises politicians, academics and writers.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
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,
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
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
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