World News Quick Take

■ China
Mayor steps up demolition
Beijing's mayor has called for a speeding up of the demolition of impoverished neighborhoods in China's capital as part of preparations for the 2008 Olympics, the state-run Beijing Daily reported yesterday. On a tour of one area in the process of being razed on Friday, Mayor Wang Qishan (王岐山) told officials and construction workers that demolishing the dilapidated neighborhoods is essential and that it must be accelerated, the newspaper said. Beijing is undergoing a thorough makeover for the 2008 Games, spending an estimated US$40 billion to put up sporting venues, lay down new roads and subway lines, build residential communities in the suburbs and beautify the often gray, polluted capital.

■ China
Blind activist missing
A blind rural activist whose campaign against coercive family planning policies stirred international concern has been missing since last month, his wife, who is under house arrest, said by telephone yesterday. Chen Guangcheng (陳光誠), a self-taught legal expert in his mid-30s, drew international attention last year to accusations that officials in Linyi City in the Shandong Province had been enforcing late-term abortions and other coercive family planning measures. "It has been 40 days" since Chen was apparently taken into police custody, Yuan Weijing (袁偉靜) said. There had been no news of his whereabouts and no official notification, she said. Authorities have jammed signals to and from her cellphone but could not block calls yesterday due to a power failure.

■ United Kingdom
Kids getting fat fast
More than a quarter of children in English secondary schools are clinically obese, almost double the proportion a decade ago, an official survey released yesterday showed. Colin Waine, chairman of the UK's National Obesity Forum, said that the figures showed a "public health timebomb" in the making: Children who were obese in their early teens were twice as likely to die by the age of 50, he said. The figures, based on 2,000 children, come from the National Health Survey for 2004, and have alarmed doctors as well as casting doubt on the government's ability to achieve its target to halt the rise in childhood obesity.

■ Italy
`Baby bonuses' recalled
It all started with a pre-election letter by Italy's prime minister to more than 600,000 newborns. "Best wishes for your arrival, do you know that the budget has put aside 1,000 euros for you? Big Kiss. Silvio Berlusconi," read the letter telling the parents of babies born last year how to receive a 1,000 euro (US$1,230) "baby bonus" from the state. Trouble is, the letter was sent in January to all families with a new-born, including immigrants, even though the cash bonus was meant only for Italian babies. The Economy Ministry is now asking all those who claimed the money but were not entitled to it -- at least 3,000 immigrant families, according to one estimate -- to pay it back.

■ United Kingdom
Tories blast Blair hair bill
It emerged on Friday that the British Labour party had footed a ?7,700 (US$13,700) bill for Cherie Blair's hairstylist during last year's UK general election. The Tories were quick to remind journalists that the comparable charge for Sandra Howard, wife of former leader Michael, had been a snip at just ?65 for a one-off visit to a salon. Labour MP Peter Kilfoyle complained that Blair's hair care had cost more than twice the cash spent campaigning in his constituency in Liverpool in the northwest of England, but most of his colleagues seemed to share the feelings of the party's spokeswoman: "So what?"

■ South Africa
Rare diamond discovered
A small three-week-old mining company found a rare 235-carat diamond in a South African mine that had been shut down after its previous owners went bankrupt. The company, Nare Diamonds, discovered the diamond on Thursday in the Schmidtsdrift mine, near Kimberley, South Africa's diamond center. The stone is larger than a golf ball. "The large-sized gemstone is octahedron in shape and of very good quality, according to a third party assessor," said Lonrho Africa, an investor in Nare, in a statement to the London stock exchange.

■ Vatican
Church has sticky problem
St. Peter's Basilica in Rome is having to deal with the unsightly problems of chewing gum and graffiti. According to Cardinal Francesco Marchisano, the prelate in charge of the upkeep of Christianity's biggest church, large cleaning bills are being run up because young tourists are sticking gum on marble statues that are centuries old. Other acts of vandalism include scrawling graffiti inside the 500-year-old church with felt-tip pens. "People have no idea how much time and energy is wasted removing chewing gum," Marchisano said.

■ United States
Cruel mother jailed
A woman was sentenced to at least five years in prison after pleading guilty to tying her son to a doorknob so tightly that he developed gangrene and lost a leg. Tanekeia Justice, 30, was sentenced on Thursday to five to seven years on a charge of felonious child abuse involving serious and permanent injury. The four-year-old malnourished boy was tied to a doorknob in 2004 to prevent him from attempting to feed himself at night, prosecutor Mitchell Garrell said. When the boy tried to free himself, the restraining cord wound more tightly around his leg and cut off the blood supply, Garrell said.

■ United States
Woman fails to see joke
Sexually explicit jokes and off-color language by writers of the hit TV comedy series Friends did not create a hostile work environment, the California Supreme Court ruled on Thursday. The ruling by the state's high court upheld a lower court decision throwing out the sexual harassment claim brought by former writer's assistant Amaani Lyle against writers and producers of the NBC sitcom. Because Friends was an "adult-oriented comedy show featuring sexual themes," Lyle should have expected coarse language from writers producing jokes and scripts for the show, the Supreme Court held in its ruling.

■ United States
Schools can ban T-shirts
Public schools can bar clothing with slogans that are hurtful, a US appeals court ruled on Thursday in the case of a student who wore a T-shirt saying "Homosexuality is shameful." The 2-1 decision by a three-judge panel of the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals backed a San Diego-area high school's argument that it was entitled to tell a student to remove a T-shirt bearing the slogan. The officials were concerned it could raise tension at the school, where there had been conflict between gay and straight students. The student sued, claiming the school's dress code violated his free speech, religious freedom and due process rights.

■ United States
Man uses nail gun on self
An Oregon man who went to a hospital complaining of a headache was found to have 12 nails embedded in his skull from a suicide attempt with a nail gun, doctors say. Surgeons removed the nails with needle-nosed pliers and a drill, and the man survived with no serious lasting effects, according to a report in the current issue of the Journal of Neurosurgery. The unidentified 33-year-old man was suicidal and high on methamphetamine last year when he fired the nails -- up to 5cm in length -- into his head. No one before is known to have survived after intentionally firing so many foreign objects into their head, according to the report.

■ United States
Restraining order for Sheen
A judge ordered actor Charlie Sheen on Friday to keep at least 90m away from his estranged wife, model/actress Denise Richards, and their two young daughters after Richards said in court papers he had been abusive and had threatened to kill her. Sheen denied the charge. The restraining order is the latest chapter in the stormy marriage between Sheen and Richards, 35, who filed for divorce from him last December, after less than three years of marriage. Richards said Sheen, the son of actor Martin Sheen, abused prescription drugs, gambled compulsively, frequented prostitutes and liked to look at pornography on the Internet. Sheen, in court papers, denied Richards' claims.