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World News Quick Take

■ China
Women move up a cup
Bra producers have been forced to offer bigger cup-sizes in China because improved nutrition is busting all previous chest measurement records. "It's so different from the past when most young women would wear A or B-cup bras," Triumph brand saleswoman Zhang Jing told the Shanghai Daily from the Landmark Plaza of China's commercial hub Shanghai. "You ... never expect those thin women to have such nice figures if they are not plastic."

■ China
Parent killer sells kids
A woman has been arrested for murdering eight people in China's central Henan Province and selling their children, state media reported on Monday. Jia Dezhi, 55, confessed to the killings after six bodies were found buried in the courtyard of her home in Anyang City, the Southwest Express newspaper reported. "I killed the adults for the money, it made the selling of their children less bothersome," the paper quoted her as saying. Jia said she could earn up to 15,000 yuan (US$1,870) from the sale of a child.

■ Hong Kong
Lawmakers say lines tapped
Three pro-democracy lawmakers say that their phones have been tapped, a newspaper reported yesterday. The legislators said they didn't know who was listening to their phone conversations, reported the Apple Daily. The lawmakers -- Albert Cheng (鄭經翰), Martin Lee (李柱銘) and Leung Kwok-hung (梁國雄) -- said that they have installed a counter-surveillance device called "Bug Smasher" on their phones and the equipment has indicated that their lines have been tapped, the paper said in the front-page story.

■ Singapore
Child smuggler jailed
A father was jailed for 13 months for using his son's passport in a racket that smuggled China-born children into the US, news reports said yesterday. Ang Sin Kiat, 40, passed the China-born boy off as his son and accompanied him to Honolulu, Hawaii, according to the Straits Times. The court was told that Ang received S$6,500 dollars (US$4,062) from the syndicate, which brought children from China to Singapore, and smuggled them out to join their parents in the US by passing them off as Singaporeans.

■ China
Crazed knifeman halted
A man in the southwest wounded 10 people with a knife, four of them seriously, before rushing into a kindergarten where a local official stopped him before he could continue his spree, a state-run newspaper reported yesterday. Chen Guancai was in a restaurant in Neijiang, a city in Sichuan Province, when he took the knife out and stabbed his wife in the neck, the Beijing Morning Post said, citing eyewitnesses. Another customer who tried to stop Chen was cut in the arm, the newspaper said. Chen then went out into the street, where he attacked more people before running into a nearby kindergarten and using the knife to break down a wooden door before a local official stopped him, the Post said.

■ Turkmenistan
Official apologizes on air
The former general prosecutor publicly confessed to taking bribes yesterday, begging president-for-life Saparmurat Niyazov for forgiveness in a tearful plea broadcast on state television. Kurmanbibi Atadzhanova, general prosecutor from 1985 until April, is accused of taking bribes and stealing state property including 25 cars, 36 villas, 2,000 cattle and 30,000 buckets. "Great Leader, I admit everything, but I beg you to forgive me, don't jail me," she said in a sobbing confession on television. "I have three daughters." An indifferent-looking Niyazov appeared on television in the same program and told Atadzhanova: "You have to return everything you've stolen. The president can't forgive everyone."

■ China
New money laws pondered
The National People's Congress (NPC) introduced draft legislation yesterday to combat "rampant" money laundering that has risen on the back of a worsening major crime culture, state media reported. The draft law, submitted to the Standing Committee of the NPC is expected to be passed after several rounds of hearings, Xinhua news agency said. The legislation will extend the scope of tracing suspicious money flows from the banking sector to insurance, securities and other commercial sectors, including real estate and auctioning.

■ Cambodia
Child molester sentenced
A former Christian school teacher from Australia has been jailed for 10 years for sexually abusing six young boys, court officials said yesterday. Damien Walker was arrested and charged with debauchery in December after the non-governmental organization Action Pour les Enfants tipped off police that he had fondled his victims' genitals. Walker, 26, was also accused of taking obscene photos of the boys, all street kids aged 11 to 14, as well as snaps of himself and his victims in sexually explicit poses, police and NGO workers claimed. "The presiding judge decided to sentence the man to 10 years in prison and ordered him to pay the victims US$500 each," he said.

■ Armenia
Thousands mark killings
Hundreds of thousands of Armenians on Monday streamed to a hilltop memorial in the capital, Yerevan, to mark the 91st anniversary of mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Armenia accuses Turkey of the massacre of up to 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1919, when Armenia was under the Ottoman Empire. Turkey rejects the claim and says Armenians were killed in civil unrest during the collapse of the empire. Crowds of Armenians as well as expatriates living abroad laid flowers and wreaths at the vast Genocide Victims Memorial.

■ United States
E-mail angers Islamic group
An Islamic rights group on Monday urged Michigan State University to discipline an engineering professor for disparaging Muslims in an e-mail he sent to the school's Muslim Students' Association. Indrek Wichman, a mechanical engineering professor, sent an e-mail to the student group on Feb. 28 -- apparently in response to its protests of Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed as a terrorist. The students had labeled the cartoons as hate speech. Wichman, 50, wrote that he was protesting their protest and he was offended not by the cartoons but rather Muslims who commit suicide bombings, behead civilians, and attack public buildings.

■ Germany
Driving dead mom nets fine
A 53-year-old German woman who was driving her dead mother across country to save on mortuary transportation costs was fined by police for disturbing a dead person's peace. "You're not allowed to transport dead people in your private car," said Ralf Schomisch, police spokesman in Koblenz, where the car was found after a tip-off from a mortuary. "The corpse was on the back seat without a seat belt, which in this case didn't really matter. But it was covered up with clothing. It is a misdemeanor."

■ South Africa
Car thief returns baby
A thief safely returned a seven-week-old baby he discovered in a car he had stolen, in a real-life incident that echoed the plotline of Oscar-winning movie Tsotsi. The man sped off in Olga Botha's car with baby son JP in the backseat on Friday after the mother had stepped out of the vehicle to open the gate to their Johannesburg home. Botha alerted the police who reached the thief by phoning the mother's cell phone that was inside her handbag in the car. "The suspect answered the phone and said he had been waiting for a call so he could say where the baby could be found," police spokesman Paul Ramaloko told the Star daily.

■ France
Thieves targeting metals
Hold-up gangs have been targeting copper and nickel shipments, hijacking trucks and breaking into scrapyards, hoping to profit as prices of metals soar to record highs, officials said. Posing as police officers, a dozen armed men broke into a metal recycling plant in Reims last week, taking the director and his staff hostage, French officials said on Monday. The gang ordered a crane operator to fill two trucks with copper scrap, making off half an hour later with the booty worth some 200,000 euros (US$250,000). Four thieves, also posing as police, commandeered two truckloads of nickel near Le Havre in January and last month.

■ United States
Bush's rating down to 32%
President George W. Bush's public approval rating has fallen to 32 percent, a new low for his presidency, a CNN poll showed on Monday. The survey also showed that 60 percent of Americans disapprove of the way Bush is handling his job. Bush's poll numbers have languished below 40 percent in the last couple of months, hit by growing public opposition to the Iraq war, his support for a now-abandoned plan for a Dubai firm to take over major US port operations and American anger over gas prices now topping US$3 a gallon at the pump. Bush's approval rating as measured by CNN's poll dropped from 36 percent in March.

■ Jordan
Hamas members arrested
The government yesterday announced the arrest of members of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas who it said had received orders from a leader in Syria to carry out attacks in the kingdom. "Security forces foiled attacks against officials and strategic points in Jordan that were planned by elements of Hamas and which were in the final stages of execution," government spokesman Nasser Jawdeh told reporters. They have "arrested elements of Hamas who were carrying out the orders of a Hamas leader based in Syria," he said, without specifying the number of arrests nor when they were carried out.

■ Haiti
Partial results favor Preval
President-elect Rene Preval's party has won almost one-fourth of the parliamentary seats, according to partial results, boosting his legislative influence as he tries to unite this divided and impoverished country. But the results highlighted that, lacking a majority in the senate and lower house, Preval will need to form a coalition to govern effectively. With 98 percent of the votes counted from Friday's senate race, Preval's Lespwa party had won at least 11 of 30 seats, the Provisional Electoral Council announced late on Monday. Lespwa was easily beating the second-place Organization for the People's Struggle party, which had taken four senate seats so far. In the lower house of parliament, Preval's party won at least 20 of 99 seats, the council said.

■ Perubr
Garcia looks set for runoff
Left-of-center former president Alan Garcia looked set on Monday to go through the election runoff as allies of conservative Lourdes Flores accepted defeat and election officials said they did not expect the few remaining votes to make a difference. Garcia, 56, whose 1985-1990 government left the country in economic ruin, would face ex-army nationalist Ollanta Humala, who has said he would impose greater state control over the economy and has 30.7 percent of the vote, in a May or June runoff. With 98.2 percent of ballots counted, Garcia had 24.3 percent of the votes, versus Flores' 23.7 percent.

■ Israel
Eye in the sky launched
A new spy satellite went into service yesterday which will increase the levels of surveillance of Iran's nuclear program, organizers of the launch said. The Eros B satellite was to go into orbit in an evening launch in eastern Russia, carried on the back of a Russian ballistic missile that has been refitted to serve as a launcher. The satellite is being launched by ImageSat, a company that is part-owned by state-owned Israel Aircraft Industries. ImageSat said that the 280kg satellite, which is able to spot objects of no more than 70cm long, would be fired into space from a site in Siberia.

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