■ AustraliaHanson wins appeal
The controversial founder of Australia's anti-immigrant One Nation party, Pauline Hanson, won an appeal yesterday against her conviction for electoral fraud, 11 weeks after she was jailed for three years, local media said. Three judges on the Queensland Court of Appeal unanimously upheld Hanson's appeal and quashed her conviction, said Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio. But the judges did not immediately give reasons for overturning the conviction.
■ Japan
Undercover cop successful
A 21-year-old policeman dressed as a high-school girl in uniform, including a miniskirt, has trapped a flasher in Japan, police said yesterday. The unidentified policeman in Ube City, 800km southwest of Tokyo, had been operating in not exactly plain clothes since late October after more than 20 girls were molested or encountered a flasher this year. The young policeman chosen for the task "looked good in the borrowed school uniform without a wig or make-up," the spokesman said. He was wearing a floral-pattern cravat bow, navy-blue jacket and miniskirt when a middle-aged man exposed his genitals to him in a residential area late Tuesday. "I was stunned as I believed he was a girl," the flasher, identified as Isamu Nakashima, 50, was quoted as saying after being arrested on obscenity charges.
■ Singapore
Women like it in the dark
Singaporean woman are a modest lot when it comes to sex, preferring darkness, a survey showed yesterday. Seven in 10 said they prefer to have sex in the dark. Her World Body said out of 500 women polled, 62 percent were single, 26 percent married with children and 12 percent married with no children. One in 10 have never had an orgasm while four in 10 take 15 minutes to climax, the survey revealed. Another four in 10 take half an hour and the rest an hour.
■ Australia
Hi-tech net catches poachers
Australian fisheries investigators have wrapped up an illegal poaching operation after inserting microchips into fish then tracking them to the culprits' freezer, officials said yesterday. Police officers inserted microchips under the skin of the golden perch and murray cod caught in an illegal net then returned them and waited for the poachers to turn up. A search of their home uncovered fillets in the freezer, complete with microchips still emitting signals to the fisheries officers' tracking devices. "The officers involved in the operation have shown how effective the use of modern technology can be in the war against people who steal fish," Victoria state Fisheries Minister Bob Cameron said.
■ Thailand
Clove cigarettes selling well
Sweet-smelling clove cigarettes from Indonesia have become a craze among Thai high-school students, frustrating official campaigns to discourage smoking, it was reported yesterday. A Bangkok school teacher was quoted by The Nation newspaper as saying the smuggled smokes were being sold secretly by vendors at the city's Memorial Bridge night market under the Gudang Garam brand. Each package contains cigarettes in up to six flavors and sells for 70 baht (US$1.75) per pack, about double the price of locally-made brands. The vendors avoid arrest by selling only to teenagers they know and trust, according to the teacher, who asked not to be named.
■ United StatesNew Sept. 11 clues
US officials now believe al-Qaeda was trying to bring additional hijackers into the US a few weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks. It is unclear whether these operatives were to join the 19 hijackers who carried out the attack, or if they were meant to mount a second wave of attacks and al-Qaeda was seeking to rush them into place before the expected border security crackdown, according to three senior law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity on Wednesday. The information was disclosed in a footnote in documents filed last week by the Justice Department in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, in the case of accused Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui.
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