■Europe
HIV/AIDS epidemic looms
An HIV/AIDS epidemic threatens to hit southeastern Europe, the World Bank warned in a report focussing on Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania on Thursday. A rapid increase in HIV-infection was driven by rising poverty, unemployment and social change, worsening health and educational services and increased drug use and prostitution, the report said. Romania has reported 12,559 HIV infections by the middle of last year. Bulgaria has recorded just 366 HIV cases since 1987, and Croatia's official figure was 341 in late 2001.
■ United States
Wrong house demolished
Jenny Lopez's home in Phoenix is a pile of rubble after a demolition crew mistakenly tore down the wrong house. The house that was supposed to be demolished Wednesday was across the street from Lopez's, where she had lived for 30 years. It was vacant, boarded up and fenced in. One of Lopez's old neighbors spotted the heavy construction equipment in her yard and alerted family members. But when they arrived, the house had already been torn down. Demolition man David Gomez declined to comment about the incident but told a television station that he would probably lose his job.
■ Peru
Brain surgery with pliers
Lacking the proper instruments, a Peruvian doctor at a state hospital in the Andean highlands used a drill and pliers to perform brain surgery on a man who had been injured in a fight, the doctor said on Thursday. "We have no [neurosurgical] instruments at the hospital. He was dying, so I had no choice but to run to a hardware store to buy a drill and use the pliers that I fix my car with, of course after sterilizing them," Cesar Venero said in a telephone interview. The patient, Centeno Quispe, 47, had arrived at the hospital in Andahuaylas, 400km southeast of Lima, after being hit in the head with a metal object in a street fight, Venero said.
■ Germany
Brothel for jobless woman
A Berlin job center unwittingly offered an unemployed woman work in a brothel. "The advert just said they were looking for someone to work in a massage parlour, we weren't to know it was a brothel," said a spokesman for the government-run agency in Berlin's central Mitte district on Thursday. Rage, rather than embarrassment was the response of the 25-year-old woman to the offer, who has been looking for work without success since April in Germany's cash-strapped capital. "It really is a bit much if the job center assumes that the best thing is for you to try your luck in a whorehouse," she told Tageszeitung newspaper.
■ The Netherlands
Python slithers out of toilet
A pet python missing over the last two months made its reappearance by scaring a Dutch woman when it slithered out of her toilet bowl. The constrictor snake, which kills its prey by coiling around it and squeezing, had been on the loose for more than two months after breaking out of its terrarium in a town near the port city of Rotterdam, Dutch news agency ANP said on Thursday. As police and vets came to catch the two-metre long fugitive python, it slid under a bathtub that they had to demolish to capture it. The snake was returned to its owner.
Agencies
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