■ Australia
Hanson 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 States
New 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.
■ United States
Serial killer confesses
A truck painter pleaded guilty in Seattle on Wednesday to strangling 48 drug addicts and prostitutes to death in a killing spree known as the Green River murders. Gary Leon Ridgway, 54, said in a confession that he murdered the women because he hated prostitutes and knew they would not be missed. As details of his grisly crimes unfolded, relatives of the victims wept in court while the owlish-looking Ridgway showed no emotion. Ridgway, who some law enforcement officials believe may have killed more than 100 women, pleaded guilty in return for the prosecutors' agreement to spare his life.
■ United States
Jeb Bush fights suit
Florida Governor Jeb Bush asked a judge on Wednesday to dismiss a suit seeking to stop him from intervening in the case of a brain-damaged woman whose husband wants her feeding tube removed. The request came two weeks after the legislature passed a measure empowering the governor to order a feeding tube reinserted in the woman, Terri Schiavo. Several courts had granted Schiavo's husband, Michael, permission to remove the tube years after she suffered extensive brain damage when her heart stopped beating temporarily in 1990.
■ United States
Top Democrat in race row
Howard Dean, a former Vermont governor and one of the front runners in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, was struggling on Wednesday to limit the damage of a race row, the first significant hitch in his campaign. Dean, who stunned the party by his fund-raising prowess, came under sustained attack from Democratic rivals in the nomination race for remarking on the campaign trail that he wanted "to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pick-ups." At a televised debate aimed at the youth vote, Dean refused to apologize for the comment but insisted that it did not represent an endorsement of the flag.
■ France
Striptease lessons for free
A celebrated but hitherto undeniably staid Paris department store is to offer free striptease lessons to women shoppers unsure of how to achieve the best effect with purchases from its lingerie department. "It's completely serious," a spokeswoman for the Galeries Lafayette store said on Wednesday. "When a woman buys underwear, it's to show it off, and you have to know how to do that. We want to teach women how to get undressed in front of their men. It isn't easy to take a pair of trousers off without looking ridiculous, I can tell you," she said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema