■PAKISTAN
Gunmen kidnap Greek man
Gunmen kidnapped a Greek man who has lived in northern Pakistan since 1995. Police official Akbar Khan said the man in his 50s ran a welfare center and school catering to Kalash residents of Chitral district. About 30 masked gunmen invaded the building early on Tuesday and abducted him and a servant. They killed a guard during the encounter. No group has claimed responsibility for the kidnapping.
■AUSTRALIA
Pizza delivery goes wrong
A fast food delivery man tried to hold a four-year-old boy hostage in a row over a pizza supreme, media reported yesterday. The driver seized Darwin resident Lisa Paardekooper’s nephew, Cain Paardekooper, when she refused to pay for the pizza because it was more than an hour late, she told the Northern Territory News. “He said give me the pizza back or the money,” Lisa Paardekooper said. “He stuck his hand through the gate and grabbed Cain.” She said the driver let the boy go when she raised her fist.
■AUSTRALIA
Setback for teenage sailor
A teenager’s bid to become the youngest solo round-the-world sailor suffered a setback when she crashed just hours into a preliminary voyage yesterday. Jessica Watson, 16, was on a 10-day test journey when she hit a 63,000-tonne freighter in a busy shipping lane off the coast of Queensland state, snapping her pink yacht’s mast and damaging its rigging and hull. But Watson vowed the incident would not stop her attempt to become the youngest person to sail non-stop around the world, solo and unassisted, scheduled to start this month. Transport officials are investigating the incident, which came at 2:30am on Tuesday despite Watson making radio contact with the ship’s crew.
■AUSTRALIA
Ray Barrett passes on
Veteran actor Ray Barrett, who became a familiar figure on British television in the 1960s and most recently appeared in the big-budget movie Australia, has died at the age of 82. Barrett died in a hospital on the Gold Coast in the state of Queensland after falling at his home and suffering a brain hemorrhage, his agent said. Barrett studied music, elocution and acting before moving to England, where the craggy-faced actor became a star in the 1960s, appearing in a long list of shows. He was the voice of some characters in the popular children’s puppet series Thunderbirds and Stingray, starred in the show The Troubleshooters and appeared in Dr Who. He moved back to Australia in the mid-1970s, appearing in various TV shows over the years. His last major role was as the character Ramsden in Baz Luhrmann’s epic Australia released last year.
■SRI LANKA
UNICEF official loses visa
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon criticized Sri Lanka on Tuesday for revoking the work visa of a spokesman for UNICEF whom Colombo accuses of spreading rebel propaganda. “The secretary-general strongly regrets the decision of the Sri Lankan government to expel Mr. James Elder,” UN spokesman Farhan Haq told reporters. He said Ban would raise the issue with President Mahinda Rajapaksa “at the earliest opportunity.” Foreign Secretary Palitha Kohona said on Monday that Elder’s visa had been revoked because he had spread Tamil Tiger propaganda. UNICEF denied the allegation.
■RUSSIA
Teens may face drug tests
President Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday proposed setting up mandatory screening of teenagers to fight drug addiction, which he called a threat to national security. “Experts estimate the actual number of drug users to be between 2 and 2.5 million people. That’s nearly 2 percent of Russian citizens,” local news agencies reported Medvedev as saying during a national security council meeting in Kremlin.
■THE HAGUE
Krajisnik transferred to UK
Former Bosnian Serb politician Momcilo Krajisnik was moved to Britain to serve a 20-year jail term for the persecution of Bosnian Muslims and Croats, a statement from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague said on Tuesday. Krajisnik, a former key ally of Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic, was sentenced to 27 years’ imprisonment by the ICTY in September 2006 for crimes against humanity. The 64-year-old had pleaded not guilty. An appeals chamber in March cut seven years off the sentence as it reversed some of his convictions.
■SPAIN
Phone booths to power cars
Phone booths, which have become increasingly redundant with the proliferation of mobile phones, are set to play a key role in the nation’s electric car revolution under government plans to make them part of a network of electric charging stations for vehicles. About 30 telephone boxes have been earmarked to form part of a test network of 546 state-subsidized recharging points in Madrid, Barcelona and Seville. The government will spend US$14.5 million to phase in the use of electric cars over the next two years, with US$2.1 million going into recharging points.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Ban alcohol ads: doctors
The British Medical Association on Tuesday called for a ban on alcohol advertisements, saying it was necessary to challenge the nation’s dangerous drinking culture. The association argued in a report that a rapid increase in alcohol consumption among young Britons in recent years was being underpinned by “clever alcohol advertising” and that a prohibition on alcohol-related publicity was needed to help turn the situation around. It said in a report last year that alcohol-related death rate nearly doubled between 1991 and 2005 — from 6.9 to 12.9 per 100,000 people.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Tolkien dispute settled
The estate of writer J.R.R Tolkien has reached a settlement with the studio behind the Lord of the Rings movies after alleging it had not received “even one penny” of royalties from the trilogy of money-spinning films, officials said on Tuesday. An attorney for the Tolkien Trust, which together with HarperCollins Publishers had filed a lawsuit against New Line Cinema in February last year, said the settlement was finalized ahead of a scheduled Oct. 19 trial.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Darwin has new center
London’s Natural History Museum on Tuesday unveiled an eight-story extension in the shape of a cocoon to house the collections of Charles Darwin. The new ultramodern white addition to the imposing Victorian museum includes the Darwin Centre, a state-of-the-art research and exhibition facility named after the father of the theory of evolution. The US$129 million building houses 17 million insect specimens and 3 million plant specimens as well as a Climate Change Wall of screens showing the impact of global warming.
■UNITED STATES
‘Robber’ returns for date
Ohio police say a suspect in a robbery was arrested when he returned to the home about two hours later to ask the victim out on a date. Police say Stephfon Bennett, 20, was among three men who robbed a couple late on Sunday. Columbus police Sergeant Sean Laird says the woman recognized Bennett as one of the robbers when he returned to ask her out. Police say Bennett was arrested in front of the home.
■CANADA
Envoy claims betrayal
A former UN special envoy to Niger who was kidnapped and later freed says he believes someone in the government of Niger or possibly with the UN betrayed him to al-Qaeda. Former Canadian diplomat Robert Fowler told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp in an interview to be broadcast on Tuesday and yesterday evenings that someone “shopped” him to his captors. Fowler spent four months in captivity after being taken at gunpoint last December. The now retired diplomat blames a possible leak of his whereabouts. Only the government and the UN knew his itinerary. “I know somebody shopped me,” Fowler said.
■UNITED STATES
Blood donor nears record
A New York man is donating his 320th pint (0.5 liter) of blood this week, making him one of two people in the US who has given 40 gallons (151.4 liters). Al Fischer, 75, of Massapequa planned to reach the milestone on Tuesday, 58 years after he started giving blood. According to a New York Blood Center official, only Maurice Wood, 83, has donated more. Wood is a retired railroad inspector from St Louis. Fischer, a print shop operator, donates blood about six times a year. He says he and Wood are engaged in a friendly rivalry and last spoke to each other a few months ago.
■IRAQ
Tribunal seeks audit arrest
A top court has issued an arrest warrant for a senior anti-corruption official. Abdul-Basit Turki, the head of Iraq’s Board of Supreme Audit, one of a handful of government agencies dedicated to fighting widespread corruption, stands accused of “wasting national funds in the past government,” Iraqi High Tribunal chief judge Aref al-Shaheen said late on Monday. However, in a news conference on Tuesday, Turki said he was himself investigating officials at the court over accounting irregularities and he questioned the timing of the warrant. Last year, only Somalia and Myanmar were seen as more corrupt than Iraq, Transparency International figures showed.
■ARGENTINA
Murder charges reinstated
An appeals court on Tuesday overturned the dismissal of murder charges against former president Fernando de la Rua in the deaths of five protesters during violent street demonstrations in 2001.
■ARGENTINA
Largest crater field claimed
Argentina can lay claim to the world’s largest crater field, a volcanic area in Patagonia known as the “Devil’s Slope,” according to a study released on Tuesday. Covering 400km2, the Bajada del Diablo field is peppered with at least 100 depressions left by the collisions of meteorites or comets 130,000 to 780,000 years ago, the study found. “Each crater measures between 100m and 500m in diameter and is between 30m and 50m deep, which makes it the biggest such field in the world in terms of the size of the craters,” said Rogelio Acevedo of the Southern Center for Scientific Investigations.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
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