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■ INDONESIA
UK chef's brother on trial
British celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay's younger brother went on trial in Bali yesterday on charges of heroin possession. Ronald Ramsay, 38, was arrested in February after entering a supermarket in Kuta. Police said they seized 100mg of heroin from him. At the court's detention room, an apparently distressed Ramsay covered his face with a newspaper and spat when journalists tried to take his picture.

■ THAILAND
Insurgents torch 13 schools
A Muslim man was shot dead while insurgents set fire to 13 schools in the south, police said yesterday. The 44-year-old man was gunned down late on Wednesday in a drive-by shooting in Yala, one of three Muslim-majority provinces bordering Malaysia, police said. In nearby Narathiwat, a soldier guarding a vocational college was injured early yesterday when a bomb exploded in front of the school. Insurgents also torched 13 schools in nearly simultaneous arson attacks in Yala and Pattani provinces late on Wednesday, police said.

■ CHINA
Web `addict' kills mother
A 16-year-old Chinese "Internet addict" stabbed his mother to death and then seriously injured his father after he was refused money to go to a cybercafe, state media reported yesterday. The boy, identified only by his surname, Wang, asked his mother for the money on Tuesday afternoon in their apartment in Guangzhou, the Beijing News reported. After she refused, he grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed her to death, it said. He had actually been planning to kill his parents for more than a month, feeling they were stifling his dreams of someday becoming a politician or economist, the paper quoted the boy as telling police.

■ FRANCE
Rothschild dies aged 98
Guy de Rothschild, patriarch of the banking family and an influential behind-the-scenes figure in the Gaullist politics of the 1960s and 1970s, died on Tuesday at the age of 98, his family announced on Wednesday. Born in 1909, Rothschild inherited the family banking business in 1949 after serving with General Charles de Gaulle's Free French in World War II. In later years Gaullist leaders including former president Jacques Chirac and Edouard Balladur often turned to Rothschild for advice. In 1981 Socialist president Francois Mitterrand nationalized the bank, prompting Rothschild to say: "A Jew under Petain, now a pariah under Mitterrand." The bank was restored to the family in 1987.

■ ITALY
Nazi's new job causes furor
A military court has allowed a former Nazi officer convicted for his role in a 1944 massacre to leave house arrest to work -- a ruling that sparked outrage among the families of those murdered, politicians and Jewish groups. Since last month, 93-year-old Erich Priebke has been allowed to leave the Rome apartment where he is serving a life sentence to work as a translator at his lawyer's office. Priebke has been in prison or house arrest since he was extradited to Italy in 1994 from Argentina. He was convicted of war crimes three years later for his role in the massacre of 335 civilians at the Ardeatine Caves on the outskirts of Rome. Priebke has admitted shooting two people and helping round up the victims, but has always insisted he was just following orders.

■ ITALY
Spanish Steps driver nabbed
A man was arrested before dawn on Wednesday as he drove his Toyota Celica down the Spanish Steps, one of Rome's most popular tourist spots where visitors are usually banned from drinking and singing, let alone driving. Photographs showed police surrounding the sports car as it neared the bottom of the sweeping 18th century staircase, almost reaching the Piazza di Spagna. Police said the driver was a 24-year-old man of Colombian origin who had turned left at the Trinita dei Monti church at the top of the staircase, apparently mistaking the steps for a road. He was found to be twice above the legal limit for alcohol.

■ GERMANY
Squirrel attacks three
An unusually aggressive squirrel attacked three people in the town of Passau before its last victim finished it off with a crutch, police said on Wednesday. The rodent jumped through a living-room window on Tuesday and bit its first victim. With the squirrel hanging on by its teeth, the woman ran out into the street, where she managed to shake the animal off. The squirrel then bit a builder before fleeing into a nearby garden, where it bit a 72-year-old man who eventually killed it with his crutch, police said. The dead animal was to be tested for rabies.

■ SPAIN
Hotel looking for wreckers
A Spanish hotel chain is running a competition for stressed executives to let off steam in a fashion usually reserved for rock stars -- by smashing up hotel rooms. NH Hoteles will allow 30 people chosen by a team of psychologists to help demolish the interior of the 11-year-old NH Alcala hotel in Madrid as part of its refurbishment, it said. The 30, armed with mallet and hard hat, can destroy any part of the 146-room building on July 3, NH said.

■ UNITED STATES
Bush pans watch coverage
US President George W. Bush wants the story of his vanishing watch to disappear. Video coverage of Bush's wild stop in Albania over the weekend showed that Bush's watch seemed to have disappeared from his wrist as he greeted the locals. That led Albanian and US media and Web sites to raise questions about whether the watch had been swiped. The White House said the watch was not stolen, and that Bush instead had put it in his pocket. Just to prove the point, Bush showed he was wearing a watch in the Oval Office on Wednesday. Photographers captured the moment. "I have never seen such a ludicrous story," Bush said of the coverage. "Unbelievable."

■ CANADA
Lotto winner wants chess
Forget luxury cars, an apartment in New York or a big yacht. What the winner of a huge Canadian lottery jackpot really hankers for is a chess set. Graham Gelineau, a 55-year-old Toronto man who lives alone in a rooming house and relies on disability payments, found himself in a new world after picking up a check for C$37 million (US$35 million) on Monday. Asked what he would buy with his fortune, Gelineau said: "A new chess set." He also said he might rent an apartment. "I'm flabbergasted. I'm quite happy, to put it mildly," he told reporters. The jackpot is the largest single prize won by an individual in Ontario.

■ UNITED STATES
Deputy killed during funeral
A pine tree falling in a thunderstorm crushed a patrol car carrying two sheriff's deputies, killing one and injuring the other, during a funeral procession for another deputy, authorities said. St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Deputy Marylin Mayo, who was riding with Corporal Linden Ramier, was listed in critical condition at Tulane Medical Center in New Orleans, authorities said. The deputies' car was part of a kilometers-long procession for Deputy Hilery Mayo Jr., who was killed on Saturday when his car struck a tree as responded to an emergency call. Marylin Mayo is not related to Hilery Mayo.

■ UNITED STATES
Saggy pants ruled obscene
Overly saggy pants are obscene, the Delcambre, Louisiana, town council declared in an ordinance passed unanimously this week. The indecent exposure ordinance carries penalties of up to six months in jail and a US$500 fine for being caught in pants that show underwear or, as Mayor Carol Broussard puts it, "private parts." Broussard said he would sign the ordinance. Several residents said the ordinance targets blacks, but Broussard denied the ordinance is racially motivated. "White people wear sagging pants, too," he said.

■ UNITED STATES
Sex on the sleeping mind
Men may spend infinitely more of their waking time thinking about sex than women, but both genders dream about the subject in equal measure once the lights are out, a Canadian study released yesterday showed. But while women tend to fantasize about famous people or lovers past and present, men tend to visualize themselves making love to multiple partners in public or unknown settings, said the author of the study, Antonio Zadra, of the University of Montreal. The study was based on interviews with 109 women and 64 men who logged their dreams over a period of two to four weeks. The volunteers racked up some 3,500 dreams, but just 8 percent were erotic dreams. Zadra reported the results of his analysis at Sleep 2007 in Minneapolis on Wednesday.


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