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World News Quick Take

■ Australia
Opposition leader resigns
The embattled leader of the opposition Labor Party resigned yesterday, a victim of his failure to dent Prime Minister John Howard's supremacy in opinion polls. ``It's been a pretty sleepless night but when I got up this morning I decided to call a ballot for the leadership of the parliamentary Labor Party next Tuesday and I won't be a candidate,'' Simon Crean said in a nationally televised statement in Canberra. Shortly after, Crean's predecessor Kim Beazley -- who lost two straight elections to Howard's conservative coalition in 1998 and 2001 -- said he will again seek to lead the party to a national election, expected mid to late next year.

■ China
Sex in cars puzzles police
Booming vehicle ownership in southern China has left police puzzled over how to deal with the new problem of couples having sex in cars, a news report said yesterday. Until recently this notion was virtually unheard of in China as traditionally most people used bicycles and motorbikes. But the explo-sion in car ownership has seen increasing numbers of couples using their cars as a convenient location to have sex. In Guangzhou, amorous couples have been caught having sex in their cars in local scenic spots at night, according to the South China Morning Post. Law-yers have advised police that the best policy in most cases is to leave the couples to it, the paper said.

■ Cambodia
Nightclub bothers embassy
A new nightclub next to
the Chinese Embassy is keeping the staff awake and affecting their job perfor-mance, a newspaper reported yesterday. The Spark Entertainment Center, a hit with Cambodia's rich and influential, opened last week across from the embassy compound in Phnom Penh. Most embassy staff live in the compound. The club starts at midnight and is open all night, an unidentified embassy official told The Cambodia Daily. "Staff members can't fall asleep. This affects our government. Our people can't work well," he said.

■ HONG KONG
Tse's appeal dismissed
Canto-pop star Nicholas Tse (謝霆鋒) failed yesterday to overturn a conviction for conspiring to pervert the course of justice by allowing his driver to act as a stand-in after a car crash last year. High Court Judge Claire-Marie Beeson dismissed an appeal that the singer had not played an active part in the conspiracy, and was therefore innocent, a court official said. Beeson said Tse had full knowledge of what was occurring at the time but had done nothing to stop it. Tse and policeman Lau Chi-wai, 28, were found guilty in October last year of allowing Tse's former chauffeur to present himself as the driver of Tse's black Ferrari.

■ New Zealand
Santa's knee out of bounds
The small South Island town of Mosgiel has banned children from sitting on Santa's knee because organizers fear liability if anything goes wrong, organizers said yesterday. Instead, the children would be asked to sit next to Santa on specially decorated "elf chairs," as they discuss their Christmas wish list. Gail Thompson, secretary of the Mosgiel Business Associa-tion, which is organizing the event, said the precaution was "ridiculous" but necessary. "None of us really want the risk of someone saying in 15 years' time `When we sat on Santa's knee at market day ... ,' so they are sitting on elves' chairs."

■ South Africa
Political parties sued
A South African pressure group is suing the country's four main political parties, demanding they reveal where their donations come from to flush out possible bribery and corruption. "Secret donations by the rich and powerful can drown out the voice of the poor. He who pays the piper plays the tune," political analyst Richard Calland of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa) said in Cape Town on Thursday. The ruling African National Congress, the Democratic Alliance, the Inkatha Freedom Party and the New National Party have argued that they are private organizations and not required to divulge funding sources.

■ Italy
Suicide recruiters arrested
Italy has arrested four immigrants on suspicion of recruiting Islamic militants to carry out suicide attacks in Iraq, judicial sources said on Thursday. The four north Africans were all arrested in the financial capital Milan and are expected to be charged with "subversive association aimed at international terrorism." Italian authorities have issued five arrest warrants, the sources said, and police are still searching for the missing person. One of the warrants was for a man identified as Abderrazak M. -- an Algerian in his 30s arrested by German police this summer in connection with bomb attacks in Spain.

■ Bosnia
NATO to reduce force
NATO will announce next week sharp force reductions in Bosnia, paving the way for the EU to take over security in the Balkan state by the end of next year, according to London's Financial Times. NATO defense ministers will announce the decision to scale back the force from 12,000 to 7,000 during their two-day meeting in Brussels starting on Monday, according to the report. The cutbacks should be complete by the middle of next year, the Financial Times said. The US has 1,500 soldiers in Bosnia, with the rest drawn from European countries. Bosnia was divided into two entities -- the Serb-run Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation -- after the brutal inter-ethnic war which cost more than 200,000 lives in the 1990s.

■ Germany
Man stuck with husband
A Thai man who masqueraded as a woman to wed a German man has failed to get the marriage annulled, and now seems saddled with his husband. A German court dismissed the Thai's request for an annulment because same-sex marriages are not recognized in Germany, and therefore cannot be reversed. "I don't know why they got married, whether it was love or the desire for a residence permit," said Ulrich Skwirblies, a spokesman for the court in the western town of Celle. The 42-year-old Thai married the man in Denmark under a false name in 1994 and was later granted German residency.

■ Europe
EU pets to get passports
Cats, dogs and ferrets going on holiday with their owners in the EU are to be given tattoos, microchips and EU passports, the European Commission has said. From next July, pets moving between any EU state must carry an electronic microchip for easy identification, or a tattoo, and be vaccinated against rabies. The EU pet passport -- with a blue cover and yellow stars of the European emblem -- will carry proof of vaccination and an optional photo.

■ United Kingdom
Terror suspects arrested
The British authorities arrested two terrorist suspects in separate raids on Thursday and said one of them was believed to be connected to "the network of al-Qaeda groups." Sky Television said a 24-year-old British man of Asian heritage who was seized in Gloucester had links to Richard Reid, the British "shoe bomber" who was sentenced to life imprisonment in January in the US for trying to blow up an American Airlines flight. Three streets around the suspect's home were sealed off, and over 100 people were evacuated from the area because the police feared that the man might have hidden explosives in the neighborhood. Separately, a 39-year-old man was arrested in Manchester, in northwestern England, the police said.

■ United States
Heart attack gene isolated
The first gene linked directly to heart attacks has been isolated from an extended Iowa family that has been plagued for generations with rampant coronary artery disease. The gene, called MEF2A, plays a role in protecting the artery walls from building up plaque that can impede blood flow and lead to heart attacks, said Dr Eric Topol of the Cleveland Clinic, head of a team that discovered the gene. "Everyone who has this gene mutation is destined to have the disease. If you don't have this gene in this family, you appear to be free from developing this disease," Topol said.

■ Russia
University head resigns
The head of a Moscow university resigned on Thursday, saying he felt guilty about the deaths of 37 foreign students in a dormitory fire. Flames swept through a packed dormitory block of the state-run Patrice Lumumba People's Friendship University on Monday, forcing people to leap from top floors. More than 170 students were taken to hospital. Investigators blamed the blaze on an electrical fault. They said the university had inadequate emergency evacuation procedures.

■ France
Bomber's conviction upheld
An appeals court on Thursday upheld the conviction and life sentence of an Islamic militant for bombings in 1995 that terrorized Paris subway commuters. Boualem Bensaid, a 35-year-old Algerian, had appealed his conviction last year for attempted murder and destruction by explosives. The 1995 attacks targeted mainly trains and subways, killing eight people and injuring more than 200. The court on Thursday deliberated for five hours before announcing its decision. Bensaid has no possibility of parole for 22 years.

■ Kenya
Charges dropped in bombing
A court yesterday dropped murder charges against five suspects accused of involvement in last year's bombing of an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa that killed at least 16 people. A year to the day since the attack, prosecutors said three of the suspects would be re-arrested and charged on a lower count of conspiracy to commit a felony, while the other two men would be released due to insufficient evidence. In total nine suspects had been charged with murder. The remaining four pleaded not guilty. The al-Qaeda guerrilla network of Osama bin Laden claimed responsibility for the attack on the hotel, which occurred within minutes of a failed attempt to shoot down an Israeli airliner leaving Mombasa airport.

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