■ New Zealand
Ties with Israel suspended
New Zealand has suspended its diplomatic ties with Israel following the jailing of two suspected Israeli spies in Auckland yesterday. Prime Minister Helen Clark said approval for a new Israeli ambassador would be delayed, a request for Israeli President Moshe Katsav to visit was being declined and the visa free entry status of Israeli officials had been suspended. National radio earlier reported that the alleged spies, Eli Cara, 50, and Urie Kelman, 30, had each been jailed for six months for taking part in a conspiracy to illegally obtain a New Zealand passport. The judge had reduced the proposed year-long sentence by six months on condition that they each pay US$32,500 to a charity that assists cerebral palsy sufferers.
■ China
Polluted cities named
China has named its most polluted cities, with the dusty capital Beijing coming 28th out of 113, and has told them to clean up their act. The northern coal-mining province of Shanxi stood out, with three cities taking the top three slots on the list -- Linfen, Yangquan and Datong, state media said yesterday. "These cities must step up efforts to improve air quality," Wang Jirong (汪紀戎), deputy director of the State Environmental Protection Administration, was quoted as saying by the China Daily. The goal for Beijing is to have 80 percent of "fairly good or excellent air-quality days" a year by 2008, up from the current 60 percent.
■ Hong Kong
Suicide over video games
A nine-year-old boy in eastern China who stole three US dollars from a neighbor to feed his addiction for video games has hung himself in shame, a news report said yesterday. The schoolboy begged his mother to lock him up to stop him from stealing after she scolded him for stealing the money, the Hong Kong edition of the China Daily reported. He had already stolen money from his parents in Ningbo, Zhejiang province, several times to feed his addiction. When the boy's mother returned to his bedroom half an hour after scolding him, she found her son had hung himself, the newspaper said.
■ Hong Kong
Vegetable racket busted
Police said yesterday they had smashed a multi-million dollar vegetable-stall racket when they arrested seven men for allegedly extorting money from rural Hong Kong markets. The men, all believed to be members of an organized crime triad gang, were thought to have been pocketing about 3 million Hong Kong dollars (US$385,000) a month in the scam, a police source said. "This is a problem that has been going on for at least 30 years," said the source. "They had become part of everyday life in the markets." Stall holders and market workers paid protection money to an organization called the Yuen Long Vegetable Union under the guise of labor, weighing and rent.
■ New Zealand
Parolees yearn for cells
Some New Zealand convicts are pleading to return to prison rather than serve out their sentences at home, claiming life on the outside is too tough, officials said yesterday. New Zealand's Corrections Department confirmed 13 inmates on home detention had asked to be locked up in prison after finding they couldn't cope with their family situations. Home detention is an alternative to prison granted to convicted criminals regarded as not posing a danger to their families or communities.
■ Saudi Arabia
Company gives in to rebels
A Saudi company employing an Egyptian driver held hostage by insurgents in Iraq said it would stop work in the country to win the captive's freedom. Faisal al-Naheet, owner of the unidentified Saudi company, told al Jazeera television on Wednesday that his company "will stop our work in Iraq in order to save the life of the hostage who works for us as a driver." It was unclear if al-Naheet meant the company was about to leave Iraq or was awaiting developments in the hostage's case before withdrawing. Earlier Wednesday, al Jazeera reported that the Iraqi Legitimate Resistance group that kidnapped the Egyptian, 42-year-old Alsayeid Mohammed Alsayeid Algarabawi, demanded the Saudi company leave Iraq within 72 hours. The group issued no specific threat. Al-Naheet said the kidnappers also were demanding a US$1 million ransom, but he said the company would not pay.
■ Italy
Child porn raids carried out
Italian police carried out about 500 raids around the country on Wednesday as part of investigations into child pornography. Police picked up over 500 pieces of computer hardware and 11,000 disks and videos in the raids, police official Carlo La Vigna said. Some 462 people are under investigation for distribution and publication of child porn as part of the raid; no one was arrested. La Vigna, whose police unit in the northern city of Asti led the operation, said the investigations began in 2002.
■ Germany
Jokes slow blondes down
Blondes perform intelligence tests more slowly after reading jokes playing on their supposed stupidity, psychologists said in a newly published German study. Some 80 women of various hair colors were tested on their mental capacity to work quickly and precisely in a series of psychometric tests. Before sitting the tests, half the participants had to read "dumb blonde" jokes. "After exposure to negative social stereotypes about them, the fair-haired participants performed significantly more slowly in the tests," said Jens Foerster a social psychologist from the International University Bremen.
■ Greece
Olympic flame reveals drugs
The Olympic flame, a symbol of peace meant to bring the world together ahead of the Games, became an instrument of crime busting when a police helicopter accompanying it on the island of Crete spotted cannabis farms. The police helicopter eventually spotted other farms in remote areas outside the towns of Heraklion and Rethymnon with a total of around 7,000 cannabis plants a spokes-woman for the Ministry of Public Order said.
■ United Kingdom
Excrement power pondered
The UK's Science Museum says it is considering a radical way of paying its hefty energy bills -- using visitors' excrement. The central London museum said it was considering taking the waste from its 14 toilet blocks and converting it into electricity. "With free admission it would be a great way for visitors to give something back to the museum and help keep the overheads down," said the museum's head Jon Tucker. The museum said the plan would be to siphon off waste from the toilets, store it and then either burn it as fuel in a mini-power station or turn it into electricity using a microbial fuel cell.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
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