■ AUSTRALIA
Sailor's sentence suspended
A US sailor convicted of soliciting a child for sex over the Internet was released yesterday and ordered to be deported. David Wayne Budd, 29, received an 18-month suspended sentence and was placed on a three-year good behavior bond. Budd pleaded guilty last month to using the Internet to groom a child for sex after holding an online conversation with a police detective posing as a 14-year-old girl. He had faced up to 12 years in prison, but the judge said he had suffered enough punishment, including the loss of his job, his wife and pension and health benefits amounting to some US$1 million.
■ AUSTRALIA
Rainfall could drop by 30%
Parts of the country could be 5oC hotter and rainfall could drop by 30 percent by 2070 if global greenhouse gas emissions are not radically reduced, government data said yesterday. Penny Whetton, a climate scientist with the government's main research body, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, said the country is already locked into a 1oC increase in average temperatures by 2030 due to past emissions. Under the most extreme scenario, the northern city of Darwin could face as many as 230 days above 35oC each year, compared with just 11 now.
■ JAPAN
Teacher caught with student
A 42-year-old schoolteacher has admitted and been arrested for having sex with her 16-year-old former student, police said on Monday, in what a television network called a "forbidden romance" that made her leave her family. Noriko Shimomura, a mother of three and music teacher at a publicly funded junior high school in southern Saga City, was arrested last week with a boy the age of her eldest child. She disappeared from school on Sept. 20 and her husband filed a missing-person report. She and the boy were caught at a police checkpoint on Thursday.
■ JAPAN
Emission goals to be revised
The government will revise its targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions after missing targets to cut 6 percent of emissions overall by 2012, the chief Cabinet spokesman said yesterday. Nobutaka Machimura said the government will set a new target by the end of the fiscal year. Under the global Kyoto Protocol agreement in 1997, Japan promised to reduce its emissions to 6 percent below 1990 emission levels by 2012. Instead, emissions rose 7.8 percent in 2005, which means the country needs to achieve a reduction of about 14 percent just to meet the 2012 goal.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Elton John exhibit closes
A British gallery that turned over a photograph belonging to Elton John to police amid concerns that it amounted to child pornography has now closed an exhibition featuring the star's photographic collection, it said on Monday. The BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, England, said it closed "Thanksgiving," an installation of 149 pictures by US photographer Nan Goldin, at John's request. "After the removal of one image from the series it was no longer possible for BALTIC to exhibit the collection of works as the artist intended," the gallery said in a statement. "Therefore BALTIC is sympathetic to Sir Elton John's request and supportive of the decision."
■ NETHERLANDS
Cannabis cafes to close
Rotterdam is to close 18 coffee shops that sell cannabis near schools to protect local youths, the city authorities said on Monday. "The sale of soft drugs will have to end by June 1, 2009, in a total of 18 coffee shops within 200 to 250 meters of schools," the city council said in a statement. The port city currently has a total of 62 such coffee shops. The statement said there had been a worrying rise in the use of soft drugs by groups of vulnerable young people.
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