■ AUSTRALIA
YouTube priest put on leave
A Roman Catholic priest who unleashed a torrent of expletives and racist abuse against skateboarders outside his Melbourne cathedral, only to have the outburst filmed and placed on YouTube, has been put on leave. The Reverend Monsignor Geoff Baron, the dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, was videotaped swearing at and abusing a group of teenagers using the cathedral grounds as a skate park. "Move, you fucking fool," Baron tells one skater in the video, slapping one of the group across the head and prompting a torrent of abuse in reply. Pointing to a skater lying on the ground, Baron is heard telling the youth "Little foreigner there, look at the sleepy eyes, black hair."
■ CHINA
Dog farmer sentenced
A dog farmer in Shanghai has been jailed for 14 years for breaking into a local dog breeder's home, tying her up and stealing 24 puppies, state media said yesterday. Ge Wei (葛偉), 32, owner of a farm outside Shanghai, was also deprived of his political rights for four years and fined 20,000 yuan (US$2,600) at a Shanghai court on Wednesday. The court was told that Ge set up his dog farm in a Shanghai suburb in 2005. "On Jan. 21 this year, Ge read an online posting regarding the sale of puppies. After having contacted the owner of the pups, identified as Ms Wang, Ge went to her home to inspect them, concluding that each dog could fetch more than 10,000 yuan each on the market," Xinhua said.
■ CHINA
Slave labor case decided
Courts in Shanxi Province have sentenced 31 people, including a police officer, to prison terms of up to five years stemming from the use of slave labor in brick kilns, state media reported yesterday. The scandal erupted in June after news media reported that children as young as eight were abducted or recruited from bus and train stations with false promises of well paying jobs and sold to kilns for about 500 yuan (US$65). Victims were forced to work almost around the clock, beaten, and deprived of pay, nourishment and basic medical care.
■ EAST TIMOR
Aussie troops may remain
Australia said yesterday it could keep its troops in the country until the end of next year if the new Timorese government, which has yet to be formed, still wants to keep them. Foreign Minister Alexander Downer also brushed aside concerns after officials announced on Wednesday that it was delaying the composition of a new government. Speaking at Asia's annual security summit, Downer said Australia could keep its 1,000 troops in the tiny nation until the end of next year.
■ NEW ZEALAND
Lamb born with seven legs
A six-day-old lamb at a veterinary clinic on the South Island bleats like any other newborn sheep, but is rather different in other ways. The lamb has seven legs, local media reported yesterday. Two of the extra legs hang useless behind the lamb's forelegs. The animal has three hind legs, one of them with two hoofs. It walks using its two forelegs and three hind legs, the Ashburton Guardian newspaper said. The lamb was born last Friday on the farm of Dave and Di Callaghan. Dave Callaghan said he was surprised to find the seven-legged creature, born with a twin, walking round in the paddock with its mother and normal twin sibling. "I have never seen anything like that," he said.
■ ITALY
Getty to return statue
The Getty museum of Los Angeles, California, has agreed to return a prized statue, The Aphrodite, to Italy following years of dispute over allegedly looted antiquities, the culture ministry announced on Wednesday. Under a bilateral agreement, the Getty will "transfer to Italy 40 objects, including The Aphrodite, formally called the Cult Statue of a Goddess, in 2010, the ministry said in a joint communique with the US museum. The rare fifth-century BC statue made of marble and limestone was at the center of the dispute. The authorities claimed it had been illegally exported.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Man wins lottery twice
A lottery winner doubled his share of the jackpot after he mistakenly bought two lucky tickets for the same draw, organizer Camelot said on Wednesday. Derek Ladner, 57, from Cornwall, and his wife Dawn, 60, won with their usual numbers in the mid-week draw, sharing the ?2.4 million (US$5 million) jackpot with four other tickets. A week later, he found a second identical ticket in his wallet and realized he had absent-mindedly entered twice. Their double-share of the jackpot is worth just under ?1 million.
■ SERBIA
Bull taken to prison farm
A bull was incarcerated in a prison farm this week along with his recently convicted owner so he could look after the 1.5 tonne-animal, which would otherwise have risked going to the slaughterhouse. Four-year old Micko was taken to the farm at Novi Sad District Prison to join his owner Hamdija Djuric, who was jailed on July 21 for stabbing a man, Beta news agency reported. Micko had been left untended following Djuric's arrest. "Since there are no animal quarantine facilities in Novi Sad, it was important to find a solution to accommodate the bull," said Branka Pasko of the animal protection society Arka.
■ GERMANY
States enact smoking bans
Three states introduced smoking bans on Wednesday, after an attempt to pass national regulations collapsed in the face of disagreement between states and opposition from the tobacco lobby. Lower Saxony and Baden-Wuerttemberg in the west and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in the east were the first to ban smoking in public places, while the other 13 regions have pledged to introduce bans by next year. The three banned smoking in schools, hospitals and state institutions, but Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania will wait until next January before joining the other two states in outlawing smoking in bars and restaurants.
■ TURKEY
Eight killed in clashes
Three soldiers and five separatist Kurdistan Workers Party guerrillas were killed in clashes in the east on Wednesday, army sources said. Five soldiers were also injured in the clashes in the eastern province of Tunceli, said the sources, who did not wish to be named. Dozens of soldiers have been killed this year in an escalation of violence in the east and southeast, which has prompted calls from the army for a cross-border incursion into northern Iraq to deal with rebels based there. The AK Party government, re-elected last month, has resisted the powerful army's calls.
■ UNITED STATES
Focus on Pakistan: Obama
Democratic Senator Barack Obama said on Wednesday that the US should shift its military focus away from the Iraq war to a broader fight against Islamic extremism, pledging to dispatch US forces to eradicate terrorist camps in Pakistan if that nation failed to take such action. The Democratic presidential nominee said he would order strikes on al-Qaeda targets and withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid if Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf did not blunt a resurging Taliban presence in the country's tribal areas. This, he said, is the "right battlefield" to make the US safer.
■ UNITED STATES
The real Harry Potter
Sometimes it is a hassle being Harry Potter, especially if you are a 78-year-old retiree. Each time a new Harry Potter book or movie comes out, Florida resident Harry Potter gets phone calls from children and interview and autograph requests. "The kids want to know if I'm Harry Potter," he said with a chuckle. "I tell them I've been Harry Potter for darn near 80 years." Potter said he has not read any of the books or seen the movies, but he gets his fun out of Pottermania. "When Harry talks to the kids, they'll ask about the owl and he'll say, `Oh, he came by and brought the mail,'" his wife Jan said. "Then, when they're done, the mothers come on and say thank you for talking to the kids. He gets a big kick out of it."
■ COLOMBIA
Phone scam on the rise
The nation, long one of the world's kidnapping capitals, has seen a rash of cases in which mobile phone customers receive messages telling them to turn off their handsets for two hours because their telephones have been cloned, police say. The criminals then contact family members of the phone user to say that he or she has been taken hostage. Families who have no way of contacting their relative are directed where to drop off ransom money before the two hours are up. "If you get a call telling you to turn off your handset, contact the authorities," local TV channel Caracol told viewers during a Tuesday news program.
■ UNITED STATES
Mom dressed dead toddlers
Two children found dead under an apartment sink were bathed and dressed by their mother before being wrapped in trash bags, arrest warrants released on Wednesday showed. The warrants provide new details of the events that police in Hanahan, South Carolina, say led to the arrest of a troubled single mother suspected of leaving her children in a hot car for hours while she was at work. Sametta Heyward, 27, was charged on Tuesday with homicide by child abuse after the bodies of one-year-old Triniti Campbell and four-year-old Shawn Campbell Jr. were found. The warrants said Heyward called her ex-boyfriend and told him she had "killed her babies."
■ GUATEMALA
Anti-crime body approved
Congress on Wednesday voted to create a commission made up of a team of international crime experts to investigate organized crime and police corruption. The US, Sweden, Norway and Spain have offered to help finance the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, which is expected to start work in November. "The commission's goal of helping Guatemalan authorities to investigate criminal groups and take them to trial ... will help to strengthen the rule of law," the US embassy in Guatemala said in a statement on Wednesday.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema