■PHILIPPINES
Four kidnappers shot dead
Four men who kidnapped an Indian man were shot dead in a gunbattle with police near Manila, a police official said on Tuesday. The four seized Jatindar Pal Singh, 23, in Bocaue town just outside Manila late on Monday and took him aboard a van, but a bystander informed the police and they set up a roadblock in the neighboring town of Marilao, provincial police director Senior Superintendent Allen Bantolo said. When they were stopped at the roadblock, the still-handcuffed Singh leapt from the van and ran to the police while the suspects opened fire, triggering a gunbattle that left the four men dead and one policeman wounded, Bantolo said.
■NEW ZEALAND
Rare tiger kills zookeeper
An animal keeper was mauled to death yesterday by a rare white tiger at a wildlife park in New Zealand while visitors watched in horror, police said. The tiger was killed because it wouldn’t release the keeper’s body. The keeper was attacked after he and a colleague entered the cage at Zion Wildlife Park near the northern city of Whangarei on New Zealand’s North Island to clean it, police spokeswoman Sarah Kennett said. The keeper died at the scene before help could reach him, with serious injuries to his abdomen and lower legs.
■HONG KONG
Ex-sailor kills wife, self
A retired Hong Kong sailor leapt to his death after killing his wife with a hammer, knife and chisel, police said yesterday. The 70-year-old is believed to have jumped from the window of his 10th-floor window after attacking his 72-year-old wife. His body was found lying on a third-floor podium of his apartment building late on Monday night. Police broke into his flat and found his wife dead lying in a pool of blood with the three bloodstained tools close by. Both husband and wife were declared dead at the scene by paramedics.
■JAPAN
Kurosawa archive launched
Fans of director Akira Kurosawa now have access to an online treasure trove of thousands of photos, sketches and other materials from the filmmaker’s life. A digital archive of 20,000 items went live on the Internet this week, ranging from private photos and newspaper clippings to notes and sketches of movie scenes, the Web site’s operator said yesterday. The archive includes scripts with his scribbles and drawings of scene ideas as well as photos taken on the sets of Kurosawa classics such as The Seven Samurai, Kagemusha and other award-winning films. The director died in 1998 aged 88. The Japanese-language archive can be accessed on www.afc.ryukoku.ac.jp/Komon/kurosawa/index.html.
■AUSTRALIA
Watchdog bans TV sex ad
The Advertising Standards Bureau yesterday banned a television commercial promising “longer-lasting sex” because it suggested premature ejaculation was a criminal offense. The advertisement featured police breaking into a couple’s bedroom and cautioning the husband that he risked a fine for short sex sessions. The actor in a police uniform said: “Excuse me, sir, do you realize how fast you are going in this bed? We are the bedroom police, and we clocked you at one minute, 30 seconds.” The advertising watchdog ruled the commercial “vilified and shamed” men who could not maintain their erections. The bureau sided with those who complained that the ad suggested “you are not a real man unless you can last hours and hours and hours having sexual intercourse.”
■EGYPT
Man hurled from window
Security officers threw a man from a fourth-floor apartment after he asked them to produce a search warrant, a human rights group said on Monday. Officers from the domestic intelligence agency, State Security Investigations, threw Faris Barakat from his friend’s apartment on the fourth floor of a building in the town of Damanhur, the Nadim Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence said. The officers came to arrest Barakat’s friend, apparently on suspicion of belonging to the banned Muslim Brotherhood, during the friend’s daughter’s seventh birthday party, the center said. The center said Barakat sustained multiple fractures to his back, leg, hip and nose.
■ISRAEL
Man admits to four murders
A suspected Arab Israeli serial killer has admitted to killing four people over the past 15 years, including a US-Israeli teenager and a Czech tourist, police said on Tuesday. Adwan Yehiya Farhan, 33, also admitted to a failed murder attempt, police said at a news conference following the lifting of a gag order. Farhan, who has served much of his adult life behind bars for murder, rape, theft and other crimes, was already in prison when he made the confession. One of the murder victims was a friend of Farhan. Farhan also confessed to trying to poison his sister in what he called a failed “honor killing.”
■GERMANY
Cannibal film ban lifted
A 2006 horror film based on the real story of an engineer who killed and ate a willing victim may be shown, a court ruled on Tuesday, overturning a ban. Armin Meiwes had sued to prevent the film by director Martin Weisz from being shown in Germany, claiming it would violate his rights. A court in Karlsruhe said that public interest in the film, together with Meiwes’ own previous efforts at marketing the gory deed, outweighed his complaint that the film would cause him emotional damage. The film, Rothenburg, stars Keri Russell as a US exchange student studying criminal psychology who chooses the case for her thesis.
■GERMANY
Group rescues parakeets
An animal rights group said on Tuesday they had rescued 464 birds, mostly parakeets, from a Berlin apartment measuring less than 50m². The birds were found in “unimaginable conditions” in an apartment in the Marzahn district and have been taken to an animal rescue center, the Berlin Animal Protection Association said. “Originally people acquire or rescue animals out of love. But the reproduction of the animals means it quickly gets out of control,” the group said in a statement.
■ISRAEL
Lawmakers honor Yiddish
Long disparaged in Israel as the native tongue of Diaspora Jews, Yiddish made a comeback on Tuesday with the first Yiddish Culture Day. Marking 150 years since the birth of Sholem Aleichem, a Russian-Jewish author of Yiddish literature, and 20 years since the establishment of the Yiddish theater in Tel Aviv, lawmakers gathered to discuss ways to preserve and promote the German-based language written with the Hebrew alphabet. It was the language of the Jews of Eastern Europe, who were decimated in the Holocaust, leaving the language without a wide base. Yiddish traces its origins to the 10th century and flourished until the Holocaust. Sholem Aleichem’s stories about Tevye the Milkman were the inspiration for the 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof.
■UNITED STATES
Patient loses fingerprints
When a cancer patient from Singapore traveled to the US last year, he discovered an unusual side effect of his medication: missing fingerprints. The 62-year-old man was taking capecitabine, or Xeloda, to treat head and neck cancer. Upon arriving in the US, immigration officials asked him for his fingerprints. But the drug had caused so much redness and peeling to his fingers that the patient, identified only as Mr S, had none. Customs officials held Mr S for four hours before deciding he was not a security threat, said a letter published yesterday in the Annals of Oncology journal. Once patients stop taking the drug and apply ice to their hands, their fingerprints will return in about a month.
■CHILE
Father accused of rape
A workman has been arrested after being accused of raping his daughter over a 14-year period and fathering four of her children, police said. Manuel Jesus Bartierra was accused by his daughter, Viviana, now 26 years old, in the latest case to echo that of Austria Josef Fritzl, who was sentenced to life in prison in March after being convicted for 24 years of abusing his daughter. Viviana said she had been repeatedly raped since she was 12, and gave birth to four children now aged four, five, seven and eight years old. Her father, a workman from an area in the north of Santiago was arrested on Monday. “We have been able to establish that she was sexually abused from the age of nine, the actual rape took place at 12 years old,” police chief Mauro Pino said. Authorities are investigating whether the man’s wife was implicated in the abuse.
■UNITED STATES
Court rules on phone drugs
The US Supreme Court says people who buy drugs over the telephone should not get more prison time than people who buy face-to-face from dealers. The court unanimously overturned a decision by the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia. The law made it a felony to use a communication device in “committing or in causing or in facilitating” a drug purchase. Prosecutors said that Salman Khade Abuelhawa’s use of a cellphone for a misdemeanor purchase of around US$120 of cocaine fell under the statute.
■CANADA
Broadcaster reprimanded
A broadcast industry council slammed the nation’s French-language radio broadcaster for airing a comedy sketch that suggested US President Barack Obama would be easy to assassinate because as the first black American president, he would stand out against the White House. The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council issued a public reprimand of Radio-Canada on Monday after the government’s regulatory agency asked the private industry council to look into the matter before it begins its own investigation. Canada’s broadcast regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, received 210 complaints about the sketch.
■IRAN
Facebook restored
Iran restored access to Facebook on Tuesday after a block on the social networking Web site last week generated accusations that the government was trying to muzzle one of the main presidential campaign tools of the reformist opposition. Facebook was cut off on Saturday, depriving challengers to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of a critical means of reaching out for the youth vote in the June 12 election.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
PROBE: Last week, Romanian prosecutors launched a criminal investigation against presidential candidate Calin Georgescu accusing him of supporting fascist groups Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in Romania’s capital on Saturday in the latest anti-government demonstration by far-right groups after a top court canceled a presidential election in the EU country last year. Protesters converged in front of the government building in Bucharest, waving Romania’s tricolor flags and chanting slogans such as “down with the government” and “thieves.” Many expressed support for Calin Georgescu, who emerged as the frontrunner in December’s canceled election, and demanded they be resumed from the second round. George Simion, the leader of the far-right Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR), which organized the protest,
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