■THAILAND
Muslim civilians shot dead
Suspected separatist militants have shot dead five Muslim civilians in the restive south, police said yesterday. Gunmen entered the home of a 51-year-old man and shot him dead late on Friday in Yala province, one of three troubled provinces in the far south. Police said the man had been working as a government informant. Two other men, aged 18 and 34, were also shot and killed in neighboring Pattani province, while a 61-year-old man was killed in a drive-by shooting as he traveled to Friday prayers at a local mosque. A 31-year-old farmer was also shot dead in an ambush in Narathiwat province as he returned home from work.
■NEW ZEALAND
Family reunited after years
An illegal Indian immigrant for the last 23 years has been reunited with his wife and son after finally getting permission to stay, the New Zealand Herald reported yesterday. “I thought I would be going to my grave without ever seeing them again,” Abdul Jalil Patel, 58, told the newspaper, as his wife Amina, 55, and son Salman, 24, flew into Auckland airport on Friday. Patel emigrated to New Zealand in 1986, but his first immigration consultant misplaced his passport and failed to submit his residency application, making him an illegal alien. A string of immigration blunders followed and he worked illegally over the years. “I didn’t know I was breaking the law, I just knew I had to earn some money to survive,” he told the paper. A new consultant made a last-ditch appeal to the immigration minister in September and he was granted permanent residence, which allowed his wife and son to join him.
■HONG KONG
Bruce Lee museum planned
Plans to build a museum dedicated to the life of fabled kung fu actor Bruce Lee are moving ahead with proposals for an international design competition, the South China Morning Post said yesterday. The project involves the restoration of Lee’s former house in the Kowloon Tong district of Hong Kong, plus the possibility of building an adjacent cinema and library, the newspaper said. The competition has been agreed upon after talks between the government and the two-story villa’s owner, Yu Panglin, who has agreed to donate the property, which is valued at HK$100 million (US$12.8 million). The actor spent the last years of his life there before dying in 1973 at the age of 32.
■NEW ZEALAND
Ex-model works at abattoir
Nina Schubert, 25, a German fashion model who strutted the catwalk in London, Paris, Milan and New York for six years, is working at local abattoir, the Taranaki Daily News said. “I need to learn a trade. I only know modeling,” she told the newspaper. The 1.8m, long-legged, blue-eyed blonde who has been pictured in swimsuits in the world’s leading fashion magazines, said it was hard, strenuous, physical work. “We sort boned-out meat that comes down on the conveyor hot and still pulsating,” she said. “I’ve shown some skill and they’re going to give me some knife training for a trimming job.” She told the paper she did her last modeling job early last year and quit when she woke up one day and realized it was an unhealthy lifestyle. She moved to New Zealand in November and is now living in the small North Island town of Hawera with a distant relative and completed her first triathlon a week ago.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Charity cool on adoption
Save the Children yesterday stressed that the best place for a child was with their family in their home country, as US pop queen Madonna prepares to adopt a second Malawian child. The British-based charity urged celebrities to ensure that all other options had been exhausted before taking a child out of a foreign orphanage. “If [a] celebrity really wants to help children in poor countries, they should support charities ... to improve the quality of children’s lives in their own countries and communities,” Save the Children spokesman Dominic Nutt said in a statement.
■GUYANA
Former president dies
US-born former president of Guyana Janet Rosenberg-Jagan died yesterday at the country’s state-run Georgetown Public Hospital, officials said. She was 88. The Chicago-born Rosenberg-Jagan was president of the South American country from 1997 to 1999 when she resigned due to ill health. Authorities said Rosenberg-Jagan died of an abdominal aneurism, just over five hours after she was admitted to hospital complaining of severe abdominal pains. Rosenberg moved to Guyana in 1943 at the age of 23 with her husband, Cheddi Jagan, a descendant of Indian indentured laborers, and helped form the country’s first mass-based political party in 1950.
■CYPRUS
‘Oldest’ temple unearthed
An Italian archeologist says she has discovered a temple that is about 4,000 years old. The find at the Pyrgos-Mavroraki site close to the southern city of Limassol predates any other discoveries in the country by about 1,000 years, archaeologist Maria Rosaria Belgiorno said. “This is the first evidence of religion in Cyprus at the beginning of the second millennium BC,” she was quoted as telling the Cyprus Weekly newspaper. The Cyprus Antiquities Department said further examination would be required before the find could be verified. Belgiorno said she had found the outline of a triangular-shaped temple, comprised of two rooms, on the site. It was probably destroyed in an earthquake and abandoned in 1800BC.
■GERMANY
Man crushed in garbage
A man sleeping in a dumpster was seriously injured on Friday after being crushed in the jaws of a waste collection truck, police said. As workers in the northwestern town of Paderborn were emptying the four-wheel bin into the crusher at the back of their vehicle they heard cries and immediately hit the emergency stop button. Medics attended to the man while firemen and a technician worked at switching off the hydraulics on the crusher so that its huge metal jaws could be manually prized apart. The 31-year-old was described as in critical condition.
■GERMANY
DNA mix-up ends search
Investigators’ search for a mysterious suspected killer has ended with an embarrassing discovery: identical DNA traces common to dozens of crime scenes stemmed from contaminated cotton swabs. The DNA had been found at the scenes of about 40 crimes over recent years in Germany, Austria and France, ranging from restaurant break-ins to the shooting of a policewoman. The common DNA prompted police to search for a woman German media called the “phantom killer.” However, officials said on Friday they had determined that the DNA came from an innocent woman at an unidentified Bavarian packaging company involved in producing the cotton swabs used to collect evidence.
■CHILE
Obama wants fresh start
US President Barack Obama wants a fresh start with Latin America and is ready to talk about any issue, US Vice President Joe Biden told Argentine President Cristina Fernandez on Friday. Meeting Fernandez as a group of center-left leaders gathered in the Chilean coastal resort of Vina del Mar ahead of this week’s G20 summit in London, Biden promised relations with Latin America would improve, Argentine Foreign Minister Jorge Taiana said. Relations between Washington and many countries in Latin America cooled under Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, as the US foreign policy focus turned toward the Middle East and the “war” on terrorism, and several South American governments shifted to the left. “[Biden] highlighted that the United States’ traditional approach regarding Latin America had changed, and is going to change,” Taiana said.
■VENEZUELA
Iranian minister visits
The foreign ministers of Venezuela and Iran met on Friday to discuss bilateral relations in preparation for an upcoming visit to Iran by President Hugo Chavez. Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Iran’s Manouchehr Mottaki “have achieved sustained progress in integrating joint industrial and financial projects,” said Rodolfo Sanz, president of a joint technical Venezuelan-Iranian cooperation commission. “We are ready to launch a joint Iranian-Venezuelan bank,” he said. “We also plan to create a bilateral investment fund.” Chavez is expected to travel to Iran following an Arab-Latin American summit that will take place in Doha on Tuesday.
■UNITED STATES
Bobcat walks into a bar
A bobcat attacked three people in a community in central Arizona, including two men who were bitten when the animal wandered inside a bar. Officers called to the Chapparal Bar in Cottonwood arrived to find the bobcat in the parking lot, where they shot and killed it, KVRD-FM radio reported. Tests were ordered to determine if the animal was rabid. It wasn’t clear how seriously the victims had been wounded.
■UNITED STATES
No sense of smell, no job
A court in Pennsylvania said a township could discharge a police officer because he lost his sense of smell in an off-duty motorcycle accident. The appeals court ruling issued on Thursday upheld Collier Township’s decision to honorably discharge David Agostino. The township near Pittsburgh said his lack of smell created a safety hazard. It said officers need to be able to detect drugs, alcohol, hazardous materials and natural gas leaks. Agostino said was able to perform the job and a sense of smell isn’t tested as part of the physical examination required to become a police officer.
■UNITED STATES
Kosher tequila planned
A New York businessman is launching a kosher tequila in time for Cinco de Mayo. Martin Silver said Agave 99 would be on the market in time for the holiday, which celebrates Mexico’s defeat of French forces on May 5, 1862. Silver, president of Long Island-based Star Industries, said he wants to satisfy the craze for high-end tequila with one that observant Jews can drink. Silver said a half million cases of the 99-proof kosher tequila were being produced at a Mexican plant using methods certified by a rabbi. It will retail for US$41.95 a bottle.
People with missing teeth might be able to grow new ones, said Japanese dentists, who are testing a pioneering drug they hope will offer an alternative to dentures and implants. Unlike reptiles and fish, which usually replace their fangs on a regular basis, it is widely accepted that humans and most other mammals only grow two sets of teeth. However, hidden underneath our gums are the dormant buds of a third generation, said Katsu Takahashi, head of oral surgery at the Medical Research Institute Kitano Hospital in Osaka, Japan. His team launched clinical trials at Kyoto University Hospital in October, administering an experimental
IVY LEAGUE GRADUATE: Suspect Luigi Nicholas Mangione, whose grandfather was a self-made real-estate developer and philanthropist, had a life of privilege The man charged with murder in the killing of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare made it clear he was not going to make things easy on authorities, shouting unintelligibly and writhing in the grip of sheriff’s deputies as he was led into court and then objecting to being brought to New York to face trial. The displays of resistance on Tuesday were not expected to significantly delay legal proceedings for Luigi Nicholas Mangione, who was charged in last week’s Manhattan killing of Brian Thompson, the leader of the US’ largest medical insurance company. Little new information has come out about motivation,
‘MONSTROUS CRIME’: The killings were overseen by a powerful gang leader who was convinced his son’s illness was caused by voodoo practitioners, a civil organization said Nearly 200 people in Haiti were killed in brutal weekend violence reportedly orchestrated against voodoo practitioners, with the government on Monday condemning a massacre of “unbearable cruelty.” The killings in the capital, Port-au-Prince, were overseen by a powerful gang leader convinced that his son’s illness was caused by followers of the religion, the civil organization the Committee for Peace and Development (CPD) said. It was the latest act of extreme violence by powerful gangs that control most of the capital in the impoverished Caribbean country mired for decades in political instability, natural disasters and other woes. “He decided to cruelly punish all
NOTORIOUS JAIL: Even from a distance, prisoners maimed by torture, weakened by illness and emaciated by hunger, could be distinguished Armed men broke the bolts on the cell and the prisoners crept out: haggard, bewildered and scarcely believing that their years of torment in Syria’s most brutal jail were over. “What has happened?” asked one prisoner after another. “You are free, come out. It is over,” cried the voice of a man filming them on his telephone. “Bashar has gone. We have crushed him.” The dramatic liberation of Saydnaya prison came hours after rebels took the nearby capital, Damascus, having sent former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad fleeing after more than 13 years of civil war. In the video, dozens of
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