Thesun 2009-01-07 Page09 Pirates Take French Ship Nine Hostages

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| WEDNESDAY JANUARY 7 2009

news without borders Study sheds light on virus that causes SARS their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Coronaviruses cause diseases in animals and in people from the common cold to severe gastrointestinal illness. They also cause SARS which scientists believe, like influenza, initially came from an animal. The 2002 outbreak of SARS is estimated to have cost as much as US$100 billion (RM350 billion). Quarantine and travel restrictions helped contain it. Bosch and colleagues used a new type of electron microscopy to take images of the virus in a frozen state. “Because we take so many pictures from different angles, we could combine the images to recreate the virus in 3D,” Bosch said. – Reuters

briefs Computer glitch causes chaos at Taiwan airport TAIPEI: A computer breakdown at the Taipei international airport continued yesterday, causing chaos with customs officers hand-recording departing passengers’ data and passengers forming long queues, according to radio reports. The computer glitch began at

Pirates take French ship, nine hostages A French Navy handout picture taken off the Somali coast shows a group of Somali pirates captured on Sunday.

about 6.45am on Monday at the Taoyuan International Airport near Taipei. As queues of departing passengers become longer, the airport opened all its 42 counters to speed up customs clearance and prevent flight delays. The real worry is that some criminals might take advantage of the loophole to flee Taiwan, the Broadcasting Corp of China said. The computer glitch came one day after the baggage-handling system at the airport’s Number 2 Terminal malfunctioned, causing more than 100 pieces of luggage to miss flights. – dpa

PARIS: Pirates off the Nigerian coast have seized a French ship and taken its nine crew members hostage, the ship owners said on Monday in Paris.

The ship, which conducted transport of materials and personnel for oil companies, was taken on Sunday night, shipping company Bourbon said.

EPAPIX

LONDON: Dutch researchers have built a three-dimensional model of a type of virus that causes SARS in a step that could one day help in the battle against the deadly disease. The model, created using hepatitis coronavirus from mice, will help scientists understand severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which appeared in China in 2002 and killed some 800 people globally before being brought under control. “I think we can translate what we found for this virus to the SARS virus,” Berend Jan Bosch, a virologist at Utrecht University who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview on Monday. “If you are going to study the SARS virus you will basically find the same features.” The researchers reported

Burglar nabbed after showing loot to owner TAIPEI: A Taiwan watch thief has been arrested after sending the stolen watches to their owner to estimate their value. Tsai Chin-hsin, 37, broke into a house on Dec 28 in Hsinchu, west Taiwan, and made off with nine watches and some jewellery, the China Times reported yesterday. Believing the watches might be expensive, he asked an associate, identified by his surname Chuang, to take the timepieces to a shop in Hsinchu to be appraised.

The nine watches were all expensive pieces, including a limited-edition Epos, a Swiss mechanical watch valued at T$70,000 (RM7,200). The jewellery was valued at a total of T$200,000 (RM21,600). There are dozens of watch shops in Hsinchu, but the shop Chuang visited on Sunday was run by the man whose home Tsai had burglarised, the paper said. When the watch shop owner saw the nine watches, he recognised them and called police, who questioned Chuang and eventually arrested Tsai. – dpa

The crew includes five Nigerians, and men from Ghana, Cameroon and Indonesia. They were reportedly in good condition. Nigeria is Africa’s most important oil producer, with reserves estimated at 36 billion barrels. Earlier on Sunday, a French warship captured 19 Somali pirates when it came to the rescue of two cargo ships threatened in the Gulf of Aden. The French naval vessel Jean de Vienne was on patrol off the Somali coast as part of a European Union anti-piracy force when it came to the rescue of a Croatian cargo vessel and Panamanian ship crossing the Gulf. The 19 pirates, armed and equipped to board the vessels, were captured and handed to Somali authorities. Meanwhile, a Chinese naval convoy arrived yesterday in the Gulf of Aden on a landmark mission to protect the country’s shipping from Somali pirates and escorted its first four vessels, state media reported. The four ships escorted were Chinese merchant vessels, including one from Hongkong, Xinhua news agency said in a dispatch filed from aboard the destroyer Wuhan. The naval task force, deploying two destroyers and a supply ship, marks China’s first potential combat mission beyond its territorial waters in centuries. – Agencies