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World News Quick Take

■ Hong Kong
Funeral parlor finds niche
A funeral parlor reckons it has found a niche in the business -- by using only female undertakers. Kung Sau Funeral Services has hired two sisters as undertakers to conduct the city's first all-female burial preparations, the South China Morning Post reported. "Many women don't want men to clean their bodies and dress them after their death," company boss Lok Kar-keung was quoted as saying.

■ China
Film recalls invasion
China marked the 75th anniversary of Japan's invasion yesterday by providing half-price tickets to a movie about the trial of Japanese war criminals, state media reported. Cinemas across the country and around 100 universities were offering the half-price ticket deal for Tokyo Trial, a Chinese movie about court proceedings against 28 Japanese war criminals, Xinhua news agency said. "The movie evokes patriotism and a pursuit of peace, rather than stirring hatred between China and Japan," Xinhua quoted Mao Shi'an, a Shanghai movie critic, as saying.

■ China
Fire kills nine workers
A cigarette stub ignited cloth at an underwear factory in northeast China, sparking a fire that killed nine female employees, the official Xinhua news agency said. The blaze broke out before dawn on Saturday on the first floor of the Shuanglu factory on the outskirts of Shenyang, a major industrial city, Xinhua said in a report on Sunday. An improperly extinguished cigarette end had been left behind by an employee and nearby cloth caught fire, it said. Four of the 13 workers sleeping in the second-floor dormitory escaped, Xinhua said.

■ Cambodia
Ex-police chief sentenced
A fugitive former police chief was sentenced in absentia to 18 years in prison yesterday for masterminding the murder of a judge more than three years ago. Heng Pov, the former police chief for the capital Phnom Penh, was convicted of conspiring to commit the murder of municipal court Judge Sok Setha Mony in April 2003. Heng Pov fled Cambodia in late July, just days before an arrest warrant was issued for him. His current whereabouts are unclear. "The 18-year sentence for Heng Pov will go into force the day he is arrested," the Municipal Court Judge Kim Ravy said, adding that the ex-police chief had "planned the murder and ordered his henchmen to ambush the victim."

■ Japan
Realignment pains
Nearly half of affected local governments across Japan remain opposed to a plan to shift US troops in Japan, blocking hopes for a forces realignment. A tally by Japan's Defense Facilities Administration Agency found that 21 of the 55 affected local governments are still opposed to the realignment plan agreed on by the two countries in April. Kitao Iwahara, director general of the agency, has said that the plan -- which would move 8,000 US Marines out of the country -- cannot be implemented unless it is accepted by all the 55 local governments.

■ Nepal
Peace talks to resume
Nepal's government and communist rebels are set to restart stalled peace talks in the coming week in efforts to end a decade-long insurgency in the Himalayan nation, officials said yesterday. At a preliminary meeting on Sunday in Katmandu, Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala met Maoist rebel leader Prachanda and the two agreed to resume the negotiations. The leaders reportedly were able to clear up differences that threatened to prevent the talks from going ahead. A meeting has been proposed to discuss a number of key issues of contention -- including the disposition of the rebels' large weapons cache, the drafting of a new national constitution and how the Maoists might join an interim government.

■ Afghanistan
Bomber targets children
A suicide bomber riding a bicycle blew himself up in a crowd of children clamouring to get pens and books from Canadian troops yesterday, killing four NATO soliders and a number of civilians, police and NATO said. Around two dozen children were also hurt by the blast that struck a Canadian patrol in volatile Kandahar province, a day after NATO said it had successfully completed a major anti-Taliban operation nearby. The extremist Taliban movement said it carried out the suicide attack. The nationality of the NATO soldiers killed had not yet been released.

■ South Korea
Gender stereotypes out
South Korea is set to cleanse gender stereotypes from its school textbooks, where women have long been depicted as housekeepers and men as breadwinners. The Education Ministry said it wanted to promote the idea of a flexible family life and reverse a trend where women marry and bear children later in life or choose not to have them at all. Starting next year, suggestions that it is a woman's job to iron and cook will no longer appear in primary and high school textbooks. The new books will instead promote working mothers and fathers who help at home.

■ United Kingdom
Blair to unveil policy review
British Prime Minister Tony Blair will announce a nine-month policy review that will determine the Labour Party's direction for the next decade, it was widely reported yesterday. Aides for Blair and finance minister Gordon Brown, the odds-on favorite to succeed the prime minister when he steps down, told the Times that Blair will brief his Cabinet this week on his plans, adding that Brown agreed to the review last week. Earlier this month, Labour was plunged into chaos when a letter signed by 17 Labour MPs was submitted to Blair demanding he resign.

■ South Africa
Man kept mom in fridge
Police were yesterday investigating a case where a man had kept his mother's body in a fridge for five years after she died of a stroke. "We are collecting necessary information to [get] an indication of how to proceed in the matter," inspector Katlego Mogale from the Pretoria police force told the SAPA news agency. Mogale said they were trying to determine whether he had permission from the municipality to keep her body. She said under normal circumstances he would have been charged with concealing a death but added that he had got a death certificate. "This is not a common thing," she said, adding that this was the second such case in Pretoria in a decade.

■ Ivory Coast
Toxic waste clean-up starts
A clean-up operation has begun to remove hundreds of tonnes of toxic waste from Abidjan as the government worked to recover from a dumping scandal that has led to at least six deaths and cost two ministers their jobs. A team of 25 toxic waste experts in protective suits on Sunday began pumping the hazardous black sludge from the city's main garbage dump, one of up to 14 sites across Abidjan that the UN says have been contaminated. The chemical refuse is byproduct from a fuel shipment apparently dumped illegally late last month by a contractor working for a Dutch-based commodities company.

■ Moldova
Transdnestr backs Russia
Transdnestr, a tiny separatist region of ex-Soviet Moldova, has voted overwhelmingly in favor of a proposal to become part of Russia, according to official results yesterday from a referendum held over the weekend. The central electoral commission said that 97.1 percent of voters on Sunday backed the idea, with a turnout of 78.6 percent. The referendum has no legal value, because the government of Transdnestr is not internationally recognized. However, the poll was a new blow to Moldova's hopes of resolving the 15-year-old conflict in Transdnestr.

■ South Africa
Surfers claim record
Dozens of surfers on Sunday laid claim to setting the world record for the most riders on a single wave during a fundraiser for a shark-spotting project. A surf school in Muizenberg near Cape Town, famous for its waves but also for its great whites, organized the attempt to highlight awareness of sharks and safety measures to prevent attacks. Seventy-three surfers managed to stay up for more than five seconds on a single wave, organizer Dene Botha said, although the unofficial count had yet to be confirmed. "We have broken the world record. We don't know exactly by how many, but we have a record," Botha said. The previous world record, of 44, was set in Ireland.


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