■ Canada
Queen's envoy selected
A Haitian-born female journalist from the French-speaking province of Quebec will become Canada's new governor general -- the representative of head of state Queen Elizabeth -- CBC television said on Wednesday. The public broadcaster said Prime Minister Paul Martin would formally unveil CBC television journalist Michaelle Jean, 48, at 11am yesterday. Jean, who will become Canada's first black governor general, will take up her new position on Oct 1.
■ United Kingdom
Reality TV gets too real
The UK's Channel 4 TV station was Wednesday facing renewed calls to take the reality television series Big Brother off the air after a housemate shocked viewers with her drunken behavior. Around 80 complaints were lodged with Ofcom, the UK broadcasting regulators, who also came under criticism for failing to halt the trend for ever more shocking television. During Tuesday night's Big Brother highlights show on Channel 4, broadcast at 10pm, one of the female contestants was shown simulating sex with a blow-up dog, appearing to perform sex acts with a bottle and kissing two male housemates while topless in the house jacuzzi. Kinga Karolczak, 20, a former barmaid and market researcher from London has since apologized and said that she had only been joking.
■ United States
`Brainwashing diet' works
It's a weight loss regime that seems to guarantee success, but researchers may have to work on the name. Proving, it seems, that fighting the flab really is a question of mind over matter, psychologists in the US "brainwashed" a number of volunteers into losing their taste for certain fattening foods by implanting unpleasant childhood memories about them. Even though the memories were false, the psychologists from the University of California managed to successfully turn people off strawberry ice cream, pickles and hard-boiled eggs. In each case they manipulating the volunteers into believing that the foods had made them sick when they were children.
■ Norway
Munch thieves get a surprise
Two masked men stormed into an Oslo hotel early Wednesday and stole what looked like three Edvard Munch artworks, but made off only with worthless photocopies, police said. The Hotel Continental, which has a large art collection, had replaced its original Munch works with copies following the theft of two Munch masterpieces from an Oslo museum last year. "Except for the joy they give the observer, they are worthless," hotel manager Siv Lunde Kolrud said about the stolen copies. Police said the two suspects ran into the hotel, which has a large art collection, at around 8am and lifted copies of three Munch lithographs from the wall of a lounge on the ground floor. They fled in a car, which was found abandoned 2km from the hotel, police said.
■ United Kingdom
Men arrested for axe attack
Two men wanted in connection with the suspected racist axe murder of a black teenager returned to Britain Wednesday from the Netherlands and were immediately arrested, police said. Anthony Walker, an 18-year-old student, was left with the axe embedded in his skull in the assault near his home in Liverpool, northern England, last week. Michael Barton, 17 -- brother of English Premiership footballer Joey Barton -- and Paul Taylor, 20, flew into the city's John Lennon airport from Amsterdam Wednesday evening. The pair returned voluntarily with a lawyer.
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