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World News Quick Take

■ China
Shanghai has 20m people
China's biggest city has gotten even bigger. Shang-hai's population has surged to more than 20 million people, soaring by 3 million over the past year amid a flood of job seekers from other parts of China, an official newspaper said yesterday. Mayor Han Zheng, speaking at a conference of Asian leaders, said creating new jobs for the swelling population was the top priority for China's business capital, the Shanghai Daily said. Shanghai's population of registered residents stood at 13.3 million at the end of last year, with more than 3 million more temporary residents, the paper said.

■ Australia
Aboriginal art in Tasmania
Aboriginal rock art believed to date back at least 11,000 years has been discovered in Tasmania, local indigenous leaders said yesterday. Tasmanian Aboriginal Land Council manager Brian Mansell said about 35 paintings and hand stencils were discovered in a cave in the island's southwest by a group undertaking work for the local forestry authority
in November last year. The find had been kept secret
for fear unwanted visitors would try to access the site. The council estimates the paintings at about 11,000 years old, while other local experts date it at around 15,000 years.

■ singapore
Sewage a tourist must-see
A factory that turns sewage into drinking water is being promoted as Singapore's latest tourist attraction, local media reported yesterday. The government launched an aggressive campaign last year to prepare Singa-poreans for waste water that is processed so that it is clean enough to drink, a product dubbed "Newater." Singapore's Public Utilities Board has printed glossy brochures about the Newater plant, which will be distributed at hotels, tour agencies and other tourist attractions, the Straits Times daily said. Tourists are not shown the actual process of sewage being transformed into Newater, but they do get to take home a freshly produced bottle.

■ Australia
Ham was on sheep's menu
Tests have confirmed that animal rights activists protesting Australia's live export industry fed ham to sheep waiting for export to Kuwait, government officials said yesterday. The move left 1,800 sheep unsuitable for export to Islamic buyers in Kuwait because pork, and anything it comes into contact with, is considered unclean by Muslims, Victoria state's chief veterinary officer said. However, the remaining 73,000 sheep in the flock did not come into contact with the ham and have been cleared for export, officials said. Dock workers began loading them onto a livestock ship yesterday and they were expected to set off for Kuwait today. Animal Liberation campaigner Ralph Hahnheuser will appear in court next month on charges of trespassing and contami-nating goods to cause economic loss.

■ Hong Kong
Counterfeiting ring smashed
Police said yesterday they had smashed a counter-feiting factory turning out up to 1,000 fake coins a day. The factory was producing bogus HK$10 coins (US$1.5), which were then sold to shops for between HK$4 and HK$7 each, police said. Twenty thousand fake coins were seized and 13 people arrested in the raid following a six-month police operation to smash the syndicate. The machines used to turn out the counterfeit coins are believed to have been brought from China.
■ Honduras
Drugs on sale in parliament
A staff member of the Central American Parliament, a body that promotes regional integration, was arrested on Thursday for selling cocaine in the parliament's offices in Honduras, police said. "We arrested Jorge Alberto Caceres in the parliament offices where he carried out the distribution and sale of cocaine," prosecutor Doris Aguilar said. It was not clear what position Caceres held. The parliament, which has few powers, has its headquarters in Guatemala and offices in Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador.

■ United Kingdom
Kidney offer taken offline
Auction Web site eBay removed a listing Thursday from a British man who was attempting to sell one of his kidneys to finance medical treatment for his sick daughter. Peter Randall had put a reserve price of ?50,000 (US$85,000) for the kidney on an advertisement on eBay which described him as a "49-year-old non-smoking male who drinks only socially and who is in good health," and said that the organ could be posted to a buyer in Britain, the Middle East, Asia, Europe or North America. Randall told The Sun newspaper that he was trying to raise money for special therapy for his six-year-old daughter Alice, who suffers from cerebral palsy.

■ United Kingdom
Richards mad at Jagger
Keith Richards is not amused. The legendary Rolling Stones' guitarist has flown into a rock and roll rage against Mick Jagger over the singer's decision to accept a knighthood, the ultimate nod from the British establishment. "I don't want to step out onstage with someone wearing a coronet and sporting the old ermine," Richards told British music magazine Uncut in an expletive-rich interview. "I told Mick it's a paltry honor ... It's not what the Stones is about, is it?" The Stones, still rocking after 40 years, made their names with crunching rock classics including Satisfaction, Street Fighting Man and Brown Sugar. A 1967 Stones' album was entitled Their Satanic Majesties Request.

■ Serbia
Parking attendants attacked
Serbian parking attendants have been attacked and shot at with airguns for enforcing new restrictions that took effect this week in downtown Belgrade, one of the worst parking jungles in Europe. Dragan Jaksic, head of parking control in the city of 1.5 million, said two unidentified people fired an air rifle at two parking controllers, hitting the cap of one.

■ United States
Woman jailed for McAttack
A Texas woman was sentenced to 10 years in jail for running over the manager of a McDonald's with her car because she wanted mayonnaise on her cheeseburger. Waynetta Nolan, 37, showed no emotion as the sentence was read in court following a trial in which the McDonald's manager, Sherry Jenkins, said she gave Nolan the mayonnaise she requested, but she flew into a rage anyway. "I gave her everything she asked for -- mayonnaise, no mustard, onions, everything I could possibly do for this lady. Mayo, mayo, mayo, and it's still not good enough," Jenkins told reporters outside the courtroom. Nolan, who was convicted of aggravated assault for the April 23 incident, became so angry when a McDonald's employee told her she could not get mayonnaise that she threw her cheeseburger into the drive-through the window, witnesses said.

■ United States
Kissinger memo revealed
Newly declassified documents revealed on Thursday that in October 1976, then-US secretary of state Henry Kissinger urged Argentina's military rulers to hurry to complete their "dirty war" against leftists, real and suspected, before the US Congress could cut off aid. "Look, our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed. I have an old-fashioned view that friends ought to be supported. What is not understood in the United States is that you have a civil war. We read about human rights problems but not the context. The quicker you succeed the better," Kissinger told Argentina's foreign minister Admiral Cesar Augusto Guzzetti in a memo of their meeting on Oct. 7, 1976. The US Congress at the time was preparing to approve sanctions against Argentina over reports of human rights abuses committed by military rulers.

■ United States
Reagan deteriorates
Ravaged by Alzheimer's disease, former US president Ronald Reagan is no longer able to speak or feed himself and does not recognize his family, People magazine said on Thursday. It said that the US' 40th president, now 92, spends his days confined to a hospital bed in a small room in his Los Angeles mansion with his wife almost constantly at his bedside. The emotional and physical strain is taking a heavy toll on the increasingly-frail Nancy Reagan, 82, who fiercely protects her ailing husband's dignity to the extent that even their closest friends are barred from seeing him, the magazine said.

■ United States
House arrest for mother
A woman who nursed her infant while driving at 105kph on the Ohio Turnpike was sentenced to three months' house arrest for violating child-restraint laws. Catherine Nicole Donkers, 29, was also fined US$300 on Thursday. The judge delayed the sentence for one month so she could pursue an appeal. Donkers was found guilty in August of three traffic-related charges. She was found not guilty of child endangerment. Donkers said her husband ordered her by cell phone to breast-feed their seven-month-old daughter to save time while she drove on the turnpike on May 8. Police stopped Donkers after a trucker who saw her holding the baby on her lap called police.

■ Boliviabr /> Terror suspects arrested
Bolivia's state news agency said authorities in La Paz detained 16 Muslims on Thursday after a tip-off from French police that some of them were planning to hijack a plane and attack targets in the US. It quoted Interior Minister Alfonso Ferrufino as saying most of those arrested were Bangladeshis and that they were detained at Viru Viru airport near the southern Bolivian city of Santa Cruz. Prosecutor Jaime Solis said nine of
the detainees would be deported, but he did not
say to where.

■ Italy
EU dignitary criticized
Britain's Europe minister Denis MacShane has called on European Commission chief Romano Prodi to either give up his job or his ambition of returning to Italian politics, The Guardian said yesterday.
"It is not acceptable that
the commission should have a president who is not dedicated 100 percent to the questions of Europe, but who is instead seen as a leader of the opposition in exile," MacShane was quoted as telling the newspaper.

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