■ India
`Irritating Village' irritates
When India's president visits this month, the residents of Vaitagwadi won't ask for good roads or drinking water, just a change in its name -- "Irritating Village" in the Marathi language -- that has made them the butt of jokes. The villagers say they want their hometown in the western Maharashtra state to be named after President A.P.J.Abdul Kalam, the Indian Express reported yesterday. "I don't know how our village got this name," said resident Dashrath Bendukale. "Everywhere we go, people ridicule us, saying the irritants have arrived. Unless we change the name to something positive, our problems will not go away."
■ Japan
Court rejects shrine suit
The Takamatsu High Court yesterday rejected a lawsuit against Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to a war shrine that have been criticized in Asia for glorifying Japan's past militarism. The suit was brought by 159 people seeking a total ?1.57 million (US$13,800) in compensation. The court rejected the lawsuit, court official Yoshifumi Uematsu said. He could not provide other details immediately. Kyodo News agency said the court did not make a judgment on whether the visits violated the Constitution's ban on religious activities by the state.
■ New Zealand
Woman found with corpses
A woman who survived a car crash which killed two others was discovered last night after being trapped in the wreckage below a New Zealand road with the bodies for four days. A truck driver heard the 46-year-old woman's screams and found her in the upturned and burnt out car under bushes 6m down a bank on a North Island highway between Napier and Taupo, Radio New Zealand reported. The woman was taken to hospital with burns, fractures and hypothermia and an ambulance spokesman said the accident was believed to have happened on Sunday morning. "Its a miracle really that the truck driver parked in that location where he could hear the lady shouting and screaming," he said.
■ China
Dumplings soothe chimp
Zookeepers have stopped giving cigarettes to a captive chimpanzee and are using dumplings and music to distract her from a 16-year nicotine habit, state media said yesterday. Ai Ai, a 26-year-old chimpanzee from the Qinling Safari Park in Shaanxi Province, began scavenging cigarette butts left by visitors in the late 1980s after her first mate, Jian Jian, died, the China Daily newspaper said. Meat dumplings, pop music and walks have been used to distract Ai Ai from her cravings, the paper said. "In the first few days, she squealed for cigarettes every now and then, but as her life became more colorful, she gradually forgot about them altogether," a zoo employee was quoted as saying.
■ China
Cancer killing more women
Breast cancer kills nearly 40 percent more Chinese women than it did a decade ago and the disease is now targeting a younger age group, state media reported yesterday. A survey carried out by the Ministry of Health indicated that the fatality rate of breast cancer rose 38.7 percent for women living in urban areas and 39.1 percent for rural women between 1991 and 2000, the China Daily reported. The report did not give detailed statistics but only stated that 3.53 out of every 100,000 Chinese women died from breast cancer from 1990 to 1992.
■ Germany
Potty Potter fan runs amok
The stress of lining up to buy the German edition of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince proved too much for one man, who ran amok and threatened to kill people unless he got a book, police said on Tuesday. The 24-year-old man stormed into a book shop in the Hanover railway station and absconded with six copies of the German-language edition. With police in pursuit, he raced across a train platform, threatening to kill anyone who got in his way. Officers finally tackled the man. "Suspect said he could not stand the suspense of not knowing who the half-blood prince was," a police spokesman said. "Suspect was informed that he will likely have plenty of time for reading long books in his jail cell."
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