■MONGOLIA
Red Cross appeals for aid
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) launched an emergency appeal yesterday for nearly US$1 million to help thousands of herders who have lost their livestock to one of the worst winters in decades. The nation is grappling with a severe winter after a dry summer, a phenomenon known as a dzud that has led to extreme cold and food shortages for the livestock that many depend upon for survival. A total of 4.5 million livestock have died since December. The IFRC said the fund would provide families with emergency food and non-food relief, assistance with restoring and diversifying their livelihoods, and support to cope with depression and stress.
■MYANMAR
Bus company stops caning
A bus company has been told to stop caning drivers and conductors for letting too many passengers on buses, the Myanmar Times reported yesterday. The paper said Bandoola Transport brought in the punishment on two routes in Yangon last month as fining drivers and conductors was not improving discipline, but it was told last week to stop the caning, an order thought to have come from the Commander of Yangon Division. The firm will revert to issuing fines, the paper said.
■MALAYSIA
Migrants escape detention
Sixteen migrants were on the run yesterday after escaping a detention center at the main international airport, immigration officials said. The group, 12 Afghan and four Myanmar nationals, got through the gate of a facility at Kuala Lumpur airport, where officials said they were being held for their own protection from human trafficking syndicates. The migrants are believed to have cut through the wire mesh of the gate. The Afghans were part of a group of 18 rescued last October from a ship off the Malaysian coast as they were suffering from starvation, officials said.
■NEW ZEALAND
Wildlife smugglers jailed
Two foreigners were sentenced to prison yesterday for hunting and possessing protected native lizards. The men were sentenced to six months in jail, but District Court Judge Raoul Neave reduced their terms to 18 weeks because they entered guilty pleas. In his sentencing remarks, Neave said the men’s actions were no different from that of ivory hunters. Swiss Thomas Benjamin Price and Mexican Gustavo Eduardo Toledo-Albarran had arrived in the country last month and traveled to South Island. Price admitted possessing the lizards and Toledo-Albarran admitted illegally hunting them.
■GREECE
Bomb kills 15-year-old
A 15-year-old boy was killed and his mother and sister injured late on Sunday after a bomb exploded outside a building in central Athens, police said. Bomb attacks by militant leftist groups are frequent in the country and usually target police, public buildings or businesses. Sunday’s explosion was the first in years to kill someone. Urban violence increased in the country after the police shooting of a teenager in December 2008. Police later said the dead person was a 15-year-old teenager and that the injured women were his 44-year-old mother and 11-year-old sister. The bomb, which went off outside an association for business management, also damaged cars and adjacent buildings.
■UAE
Indians sentenced to death
A court in Dubai has sentenced 17 Indians to death over the killing of a Pakistani following a dispute involving illegal trade in alcohol, a newspaper reported yesterday. The Shariah court in Sharjah, one of the smaller of seven emirates, sentenced the men to death following DNA tests indicating involvement in the fatal stabbing, the Khaleej Times reported. The sentence is thought to be the largest single number of people sentenced to death at one time in the country, which is dominated by the oil-exporting emirate of Abu Dhabi and its flashy but deeply indebted neighbor Dubai. The newspaper reported three Pakistanis who survived the attack said that 50 people had assaulted them with knives.
■ITALY
Fraudsters sink to a new low
Fraudsters have sunk to a new low with a scam that threatened to break the hearts of thousands of children. Tax police in Latina, south of Rome, have seized 20,000 fake soccer stickers and are investigating eight people, among them a distributor and newsagents, suspected of preying on the passion for filling folders with soccer players’ faces and swapping doubles in the playground. The Italian firm Panini, which makes the original versions of the Italian Serie A stickers, said it had not seen such fine fakery in 50 years. The cards sell at EU$0.60 (US$0.80) for an envelope of six, and albums to stick them in for 2 euros. The newsagents, who allegedly purchased the cards at lower prices than the Panini cards, could face eight years in prison and fines.
■FRANCE
Sarkozy Sr writes memoir
President Nicolas Sarkozy’s father, a self-confessed bon vivant and womanizer, said he was setting the record on his life straight in an autobiography written above all for his children, and meant to counter claims he was a bad father. Pal Sarkozy wrote Tant de Vie (“So Much Life”) after his son advised him against filing lawsuits against his disparagers and instead to “answer later ... about all these unjust accusations,” the 81-year-old said in an interview on Sunday. So the book is above all a family affair, he said.
■GERMANY
Boy finds WWII bomb
A six-year-old boy found an unexploded World War II incendiary bomb while on a walk in a Berlin woods with his grandfather, police said. The boy spotted the roughly 60cm cylinder with a red head casing in a wooded area of Berlin’s Kopenick neighborhood, which his 62-year-old grandfather recognized as being a WWII-era bomb. After being contacted by the grandfather, police bomb specialists arrived, confirmed it to be a WWII incendiary bomb, and removed it. Berlin police plan to award the boy with a stuffed animal for his find, a spokesman said.
■MEXICO
Shootout kills five
Five people were killed in a shootout with soldiers near Monterrey, officials said, shortly after thousands held a protest march in the city against drug-related violence in their region. Nuevo Leon state security chief Luis Carlos Trevino said troops in Monterrey on Sunday were tipped off to the presence of gunmen in a hotel in nearby Santa Catarina. When they got there the troops were met with a hail of gunfire, Trevino said. The shootout occurred shortly after a peaceful demonstration attended by about 8,000 people in downtown Monterrey to protest against the violence in the city.
■UNITED STATES
Man held for bomb hoax
A Carnival cruise ship was held off the Florida coast for several hours on Sunday while authorities searched the vessel and arrested a drunk passenger on bomb hoax charges, the Coast Guard said. No explosives or hazardous materials were found and the ship, the Carnival Sensation, was allowed to dock at Port Canaveral on Sunday morning, Coast Guard petty Officer 1st Class Christopher Evanson said. The ship was carrying 3,470 passengers and crew and was headed back to Florida after a three-day cruise to the Bahamas when a passenger reported hearing another passenger make a bomb threat, the Coast Guard said. The man was quoted as saying: “We are jihad. Come to the top deck and watch the bomb. The bomb is going to blow.” Evanson said the man was “highly intoxicated.”
■UNITED STATES
Ground zero search to start
New York City officials are planning to search through material excavated from around the World Trade Center site for any remains of Sept. 11 victims. The three-month endeavor will start on Friday at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. The material being searched was taken from the area around ground zero in the last two years. The search is expected to cost US$1.4 million.
■ISRAEL
Country’s image a concern
A Passover eve poll says Israelis are increasingly concerned about their country’s international standing amid its most serious crisis with the US in decades. A poll published in the Maariv newspaper showed that only 14 percent of citizens defined the country’s standing as good, 36.8 percent called it reasonable and more than 48 percent called it bad. The survey questioned 500 people and had a margin of error of 4.4 percentage points.
■ITALY
Low voter turnout
Polls reopened yesterday for the second and final day of regional elections with the specter of a sharp drop in turnout haunting embattled Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The Interior Ministry said after the close of voting on Sunday that turnout reached 47.7 percent, nearly nine points off the figure at the same point in the 2005 regional polls. Turnout was down 12.5 percent in Rome’s Lazio region.
■IRELAND
Adams key to IRA: book
A new book on the Northern Ireland conflict published yesterday identifies Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams as a key Irish Republican Army (IRA) figure who directed some of the IRA’s most notorious killings and bombings. Sinn Fein has rejected the allegations in Voices From the Grave, a book based on interviews provided by Northern Ireland militants to Boston College researchers on condition that they not be published until the interviewees were dead.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress