■ Bangladesh
Ladies say, marry or be fired
Bachelor professors at a women's college in Bang-ladesh have been given six months to get married after a teacher left administrators red-faced by running off with a student, a newspaper said yesterday. The Pirganj Women College, 250km north of Dhaka in the Rangpur district, has told the teachers they must all be married within half a year or they will lose their jobs, the mass-circulation Ittefaq daily reported. School adminis-trators took the drastic step after professor Sajedur Rahman Rana fled on Sept. 22 with a female student, sparking protests from parents, the report said.
■ Australia
Slim Dusty mourned
Mourners including Australian Prime Minister John Howard sang about a pub which runs out of beer as they bade farewell to country and western singer Slim Dusty at a state funeral yesterday. Howard and hundreds of mourners in and around St. Andrew's Church in downtown Sydney sang a verse of Dusty's 1957 song The Pub with No Beer, an iconic lament about a remote outback hotel which has been drunk dry of Australians' favorite drink. Dusty died last week aged 76 after a battle with cancer. He wrote his first song at the age of 10 and went on to record more than 100 albums.
■ Australia
Stranded sheep free to Iraq
Australia is in negotiations to buy back over 50,000 sheep stranded at sea for about a month and give them to Iraq to calm mounting protests over the nation's live export trade, a newspaper reported yesterday. The Age said the deal would cost the industry up to A$10 million (US$6.8 million) and may trigger a new levy on live exports but it would end the uncertainty over the shipload of sheep adrift in the Gulf after being rejected by Saudi Arabia on grounds of disease. However, the Australian government refused to say if it was planning to buy the sheep on board the Dutch-owned Cormo Express from their Saudi importer, or if it was in talks with Iraq where there are about 150,000 foreign military personnel.
■ East Timor
Persecutors face prosecution
East Timor prosecutors have indicted 18 people for crimes against humanity, including two Indonesian military officers, in connection with violence surrounding its 1999 vote for independence. The tiny country's serious crimes unit said yesterday the 18 were indicted for crimes ranging from murder to torture and persecution. As well as the two Indonesian officers, those indicted include four East Timorese who were Indonesian soldiers at the time of the vote to break away from Indonesia, the unit said in a statement. According to the UN about 1,000 people were killed before and after the UN-supervised vote in August 1999.
■ New Zealand
Politician driven to extremes
A politician and farmer appeared in court yesterday charged with disorderly behavior after driving a farm tractor up the steps of the Parliament building in Wellington during an anti-government protest by farmers. Shane Ardern, arrived at court driving the same tractor, leaving it at a parking meter outside the court house this time. The farmers were protesting a government plan to introduce a new tax to finance research into global warming. Methane expelled by the country's sheep and cattle accounts for half of all greenhouse gases in New Zealand. Ardern pleaded not guilty to the charge.
■ Israel
Extremist settler held
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