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■ China
Very high heels
Customs officers in the southern city of Guangzhou have discovered 28kg of marijuana leaves hidden in 215 pairs of shoes left at the airport last year, Xinhua news agency said on Wednesday. The marijuana was found in five suitcases and a nylon bag that arrived in Guangzhou from Addis Ababa on Aug. 6 last year, but were never declared at customs and only opened two weeks ago. "When they opened the packages on Jan. 11, officials found the shipment contained 215 pairs of platform shoes, whose soles had been hollowed out and stuffed with marijuana leaves," Xinhua said.

■ China
Murder most foul
Hundreds of chickens have been found dead and a court has ruled that the cause of death was the screaming of a four-year-old boy who had been scared by a barking dog, state media reported on Wednesday. "One neighbor told police that he had heard the boy's crying that afternoon and another villager confirmed the boy screaming by the henhouse window," the Nanjing Morning Post reported.

■ China
Factory fined over spill
A factory has been fined a record 1 million yuan (US$128,000) over an infamous toxic spill which cut off water supplies to millions of people and even reached Russia, state media said yesterday. Jilin Petrochemical, a subsidiary of the Petrochina group in the northeastern province of Jilin, was fined the maximum amount allowed by law, the Beijing Morning Post said. About 100 tonnes of carcinogenic benzene poured into the Songhua River after a huge explosion in November 2005, causing an 80km slick and raising benzene levels to 108 times safety levels.

■ Australia
Marsupial lion discovered
The animal was 2.7m long and probably the most fearsome predator on the continent. But the marsupial lion may have been wiped out by the arrival of humans 50,000 years ago, a first analysis of a treasure trove of fossils showed. The discovery has been described by scientists as the "find of the century." "We discovered 69 species of mammals, birds and reptiles," said Gavin Prideaux, a paleontologist at the Western Australia Museum. The animals are thought to have fallen into the underground caves in the Nullarbor plains between 200,000 and 800,000 years ago. Hundreds of fossils were extremely well preserved. The most impressive find was the first complete skeleton of the marsupial lion.

■ Indonesia
Airliner's `black box' found
A US Navy ocean survey ship has located the "black box" flight recorders from an Indonesian airliner which went missing on New Year's Day, the US embassy said yesterday. The USNS Mary Sears detected ultrasonic pinger signals from the ocean floor on the same frequency as the black boxes from the missing plane, the embassy said in a statement. The Adam Air Boeing 737-400 was carrying 102 passengers and crew when it went missing halfway through its flight from Surabaya on the central island of Java to Manado on Sulawesi on Jan. 1. A part of the tailfin, found by a fisherman, is the largest piece of debris from the plane recovered so far.

■ Afghanistan
Poppy pesticide rejected
Heroin-producing poppies will not be sprayed with herbicide this year despite a record crop last year and US pressure for President Hamid Karzai to allow the drug-fighting tactic, a spokesman said yesterday. Karzai's Cabinet decided on Sunday to hold off on using chemicals, said Said Mohammad Azam, spokesman for Afghanistan's Ministry of Counter-Narcotics. The public is deeply opposed to aerial spraying, and Karzai has said herbicides pose too big a risk of contaminating water and killing licit crops nearby.

■ South Korea
Court rejects cancer suit
A court yesterday rejected South Korea's first lawsuits filed by cancer victims and relatives against a tobacco firm, saying there is no evidence the disease was caused by smoking the firm's cigarettes. "Although there is pathological correlation between their smoking and the diseases ... there is no evidence to acknowledge that the lung and larynx cancer of the complainants were caused by smoking the cigarettes sold by the defendant," Yonhap news agency quoted the ruling as saying. The two lawsuits were filed in December 1999 against Korea Tobacco and Ginseng Co, which was then a state-owned firm. A total of 36 people including cancer patients and their relatives brought the suits.

■ Kashmir
India wary of celebrations
India has redeployed its troops in insurgency-wracked Kashmir in a bid to prevent attacks by Islamic militants during India's Republic Day celebrations today, officials said yesterday. "To thwart militant attacks we have deployed extra security personnel around the Republic Day venues," senior Kashmir police officer S.M. Sahai told reporters in Srinagar. "They may try to attack but we are ready to take them on," he said. Militants battling Indian rule routinely increase their attacks on Indian troops ahead of Republic Day, celebrated every year on Jan. 26, and have attacked the venues in the past despite tight security.

■ Germany
Sloth unmoved by science
Scientists in the eastern city of Jena said on Wednesday they have finally given up after three years of failed attempts to entice a sloth into budging as part of an experiment in animal movement. The sloth, named Mats, was consigned to a zoo after consistently refusing to climb up and then back down a pole as part of an experiment conducted by scientists at the University of Jena's Institute of Systematic Zoology and Evolutionary Biology. Mats was not even tempted by cucumbers or plates of homemade spaghetti. Mats' new home is the zoo in the northwestern city of Duisburg.

■ Spain
Dummies to be fattened up
Shop window dummies have been ordered to fatten up after the government and big fashion chains agreed that female dummies should wear size 10 clothes or above. The agreement between retail chains such as Zara and Mango and the country's health ministry came as the fashion trade agreed to a series of measures designed to combat anorexia. Stick-thin mannequins will be withdrawn from store windows over the next few years as those capable of wearing clothes bearing labels marked European size 38 take their place.

■ Saudi Arabia
Drug user's Koran sentence
A court has ordered a drug user to spend six months memorizing the Koran, and he faces a year in prison if he fails to recite the Muslim holy book by heart, a newspaper said on Tuesday. The "alternative sentence" saves the man, from Jeddah, from a six-month jail term, the al-Watan newspaper said. But that sentence will be doubled if his Koranic recitation classes fail to make him a hafez, someone who knows the Koran by heart. There are more than 77,000 words in the Koran. It takes on average two years to study.

■ Congo
Mountain gorilla agreement
Rebels in the restive east have agreed to stop the killing of mountain gorillas and allow government rangers to restart patrols, conservationists said on Wednesday. Earlier this month, rebels allegedly killed and ate two silverback mountain gorillas, according to field reports collected by the London-based Africa Conservation Fund. There are only about 700 mountain gorillas left in the world, 380 of them spread across a volcanic mountain range in Central Africa that crosses the borders of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. Silverbacks are the older adult males of the species.

■ Italy
No Auschwitz killings claim
British historian David Irving, who was jailed for questioning the Holocaust in a book published in Austria, said that the Auschwitz death camp was a tourist attraction, and added that there was no proof that it ever had gas chambers. Irving, whose comments during an interview with Italy's Sky TG24 News were immediately picked up by Italian news agencies, said there was no doubt the Nazis killed millions of Jews, but said the killings did not take place at Auschwitz. "At Auschwitz they did not have gas chambers, or at least there is no proof that I am satisfied with," Irving told the news channel. Irving spoke in English, but his comments were translated by a voiceover. Irving was sentenced in February last year to three years, later commuted, under a law that applies to "whoever denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse" the Nazi genocide.

■ Brazil
Police officers suspended
Three Rio de Janeiro state police officers were suspended on Wednesday after photographs of them posing with tourists playing with their guns and handcuffs surfaced on the Internet. The photos, taken in November near the seaside resort city of Parati, 150km west of Rio, were on the Internet photo sight Flickr, where they were reportedly posted by Peruvian tourists. "The policemen violated the rules and will be punished," state police Commander Ubiratan Angelo told reporters. "There is no problem with taking pictures with tourists but not that kind of photo. The uniform is sacred, as is the policeman's gun, that's not something you play with."

■ Nicaragua
People's councils formed
Lawmakers on Wednesday approved a bill backed by President Daniel Ortega to create "people's councils" that some fear will resemble the defense committees that operated under his 1980s Sandinista government. However, the unicameral Congress weakened some of the original clauses in the reform bill submitted by Ortega before approving the package 84-0. The new councils will be more consultative -- forwarding suggestions and advice on government actions -- rather than operational, as were the Sandinista Defense Committees in the 1980s, which critics said acted as spies and enforcers for the leftist government.

■ Venezuela
Castro writes to Chavez
President Hugo Chavez said on Wednesday that his friend and ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro, retired from public life for the last six months, had sent him a signed letter via visiting Cuban Vice President Carlos Lage. After Lage's arrival at the presidential residence Palacio de Miraflores, Chavez held up the letter to TV cameras saying: "This is for those who say he's dying." Castro, 80, transferred power provisionally to his brother, Defense Minister Raul Castro, on July 31, four days after undergoing intestinal surgery.

■ United States
New world's oldest person
The woman who marked her 114th birthday last fall by crediting God for her longevity has become the world's oldest known person. Emma Faust Tillman, born in 1892 to former slaves, earned the distinction on Wednesday after the death of 115-year-old Emiliano Mercado del Toro at his home in Puerto Rico. Tillman had been the world's third-oldest person until 115-year-old Julie Winnifred Bertrand of Canada died in her sleep last week. With del Toro's death, Tillman became the world's oldest validated "supercentenarian."

■ United States
Shark smuggler nabbed
A San Francisco-area pastor who pleaded guilty to helping smuggle young leopard sharks from California to aquariums in Europe and the US has been sentenced to a year and a day in prison, the Justice Department said on Tuesday. Kevin Thompson, 48, a Unification Church pastor in San Leandro, was one of six men charged with harvesting thousands of sharks smaller than 91cm, which are protected by law. The five others have also pleaded guilty. In the sentencing, which took place on Monday, Thompson was also ordered to pay restitution of US$100,000. According to the indictment, about 465 leopard sharks were sold to pet distributors in the US, the Netherlands and Britain. Leopard sharks can grow up to about 1.83m.

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