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World News Quick Take

■ Thailand
Tourist aid trip launched
A travel company plans to start running three-day coach tours to the most devastated areas of Thailand's Andaman Sea coast this week to inject cash into villages wrecked by last month's tsunami. The trips, organized by Bangkok-based World Class On Tour, will start at a town just north of the devastated resort of Khao Lak where tourists will offer rice and canned food to survivors. The tourists will drive past a temple used as a makeshift morgue for thousands of bodies and stop near Khao Lak for a small memorial service and Buddhist "merit making" ceremony for the spirits of those swept to their death by giant waves on Dec. 26.

■ Vietnam
Bird flu spreads in Vietnam
One man died of suspected bird flu in Vietnam over the weekend and three people were hospitalized as news reports showed the virus has spread across the entire country. In neighboring Thailand, health workers have been put on alert and ordered to conduct stringent surveillance measures but it is Vietnam that has emerged as the epicenter for the deadly H5N1 virus. A 48-year-old man died, and his younger brother and a 62-year-old man were hospitalized on Saturday with acute pneumonia, which doctors in Hanoi suspected could be caused by bird flu.

■ New Zealand
Kiwis give a lot of aid
New Zealanders have donated over NZ$13 million (about US$9.1 million), or more than three New Zealand dollars for every man, woman and child to victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami. Rae Julian, who heads the umbrella group for aid organizations, the Council for International Development, told Radio New Zealand it was an unprecedented response to appeals for relief funds. The New Zealand government, which has committed about US$7 million so far, is expected to announce an expanded aid package soon.

■ Myanmar
Loyalists face charges
Myanmar's military government has initiated criminal cases against several military intelligence officers who were detained after the ouster last year of former Prime Minister General Khin Nyunt, officials said. Criminal charges concerning illegal economic activities, including illicit possession of foreign exchange, were filed against several officers earlier this month, officials familiar with the police investigation said. The officials, said the officers, all of whom face multiple charges, would be tried at dates yet to be set.. Khin Nyunt was also chief of the military intelligence service, which served as his power base. Leaders of the country's ruling junta later accused him of insubordination and being responsible for a major corruption scandal involving his subordinates.

■ Japan
Baby's head found
A severed head of an infant was found Monday in a parking lot of a company office in central Japan, police said. An employee at the shipping equipment manufacturer found the head at around 8:30 am, said a spokesman at the Oyama precinct of Tochigi prefecture, 75km north of Tokyo. "The head was not cut with a knife. It appears that the head was pulled from the body," he said, adding that the police believed the baby was only two to three days old. No other details were available immediately.

■ Croatia
President cosies up to West
Croatia's incumbent President Stipe Mesic promised to align the ex-Yugoslav country more closely with the West after overwhelmingly winning a second term in a runoff election. Mesic, 70, won 66 percent of the vote on Sunday, the state-run Electoral Commission said after nearly all the votes were counted. His conser-vative rival, the Cabinet minister in charge of families and war veterans, Jadranka Kosor, garnered 34 percent. Mesic called on all Croatian parties to help build "a modern and just Croatia, a country of all of its citizens."

■ United Kingdom
Bin Laden game removed
A cheap children's game has been withdrawn from sale because it features players pretending to be Osama bin Laden steering a passenger jet into New York's twin towers. The tasteless liquid crystal game -- aimed at children aged five and over -- has been removed from the shelves of a discount store in Warrington, England, after protests from religious leaders. Laden Versus USA also has packaging which features a photograph of the World Trade Center on fire along with a picture of the al-Qaeda leader and a grim-acing US President George W. Bush. The game, impor-ted from Asia, had been on sale at a Pound Store in Warrington.

■ United Kingdom
Women's hearts are strong
Women live longer than men because their hearts are stronger, new findings by British researchers suggest. A research team at the Liverpool John Moores University found that men's hearts lose up to 25 percent of their pumping power between the age of 18 and 70, whereas female hearts remain nearly as strong over the same period of time. The researchers explained that in male hearts, a third of the millions of contractile cells, which enable the heart to beat, die and are not replaced. "This dramatic gender difference might just explain why women live longer than men," professor Goldspink, who led the team of researchers, told the Daily Telegraph.

■ Italy
Sage could stop alcoholism
Dried up sage root extracts could help combat alcoholism by reducing patients' craving for drinking, researchers in Italy have found. Scientists at the Italian National Research Council in Cagliari, Sardinia, say they have obtained encouraging results from tests on rats. In a recent study, rats that had been previous-ly trained to self-administer alcohol were forced into a seven-day period of abstin-ence and then treated with the plant extract before being offered a drink again. The treatment both delayed and reduced voluntary consumption of alcohol in so-called "alco-holic" rats, suggesting the sage extract appears to reduce craving for drinking.

■ Romania
Woman, 66, gives birth
Doctors said a 66-year-old Romanian woman became the world's oldest woman recorded to give birth when she delivered a daughter by cesarean section. Doctors at the Giulesti Maternity Hospital in Bucharest said Adriana Iliescu, who was artificially inseminated, delivered her daughter -- Eliza Maria -- early on Sunday. The child was born more than six weeks short of a full 40-week pregnancy term. The girl weighed just 1.45kg, less than half the weight of an average newborn, and was in the intensive care unit but breathing on her own.

■ United States Worker nails his brain
A dentist found the source of the toothache Patrick Lawler was complaining about on the roof of his mouth: a 10cm nail the construction worker had unknowingly embedded in his skull six days earlier. A nail gun backfired on Lawler, 23, on Jan. 6 while working in Breckenridge, a ski resort town in the central Colorado mountains. The tool sent a nail into a piece of wood nearby, but Lawler didn't realize that a second nail had shot through his mouth, said his sister, Lisa Metcalse. After reporting pain, he was taken to a suburban Denver hospital, where he underwent a four-hour surgery. The nail had plunged 4cm into his brain, barely missing his right eye, Metcalse said.

■ United States
`Gay bomb' nixed
The US military rejected a 1994 proposal to develop an "aphrodisiac" to spur homosexual activity among enemy troops but is hard at work on other less-than-lethal weapons, defense officials said on Sunday. The idea of fostering homosexuality among the enemy figured in a declassified six-year, US$7.5 million request from a laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio for funding of non-lethal chemical weapon research. The proposal, disclosed in response to a Freedom of Information request, called for developing chemicals affecting human behavior "so that discipline and morale in enemy units is adversely affected."

■ United States
A bible for plastic surgery?
In an age when breast implants are supplanting new cars as high school graduation gifts for thousands of American teenage girls, it was perhaps inevitable. The growing ranks of Americans unwilling to plod through life with puffy eyelids, an outsized nose or sagging derriere now have a bible of their own: it's called New Beauty, and it's a magazine that is touted as a pocket guide to "cosmetic enhancement." The launch this month of the first glossy magazine devoted entirely to plastic surgery is a perhaps milestone in America's growing fascination with surgical body sculpting. The magazine says it will advise readers how to choose a doctor, and what different procedures involve.

■ United States
Chinese stowaways found
Thirty-two Chinese stowaways were found inside two cargo containers in Los Angeles after a 10-day journey from Hong Kong, a radio report said yesterday. The 28 men and four teenagers had food, sleeping bags and battery-powered fans stashed away inside the containers, which were supposed to be carrying a cargo of clothes. The men, believed to be Chinese who paid thousands of US dollars each to be smuggled to the US, were caught when a crane operator in Los Angeles spotted them climbing off the vessel. They were arrested and taken from the Panamanian-flagged vessel to a federal detention center pending an immigration hearing, Hong Kong radio station RTHK reported. All were reported to be in good health.

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