■ JAPAN
Former priest arrested
Japanese police on Thursday arrested a former priest for allegedly embezzling more than US$1 million from his Buddhist sect to invest in oil and other commodities futures, officials said. Yoshifumi Kuwao, 52, was arrested on suspicion of embezzling ?47 million (US$1.3 million) from the Jodo Shu sect, according to a police spokesman. The centuries-old Buddhist sect went to authorities last year with their case against Kuwao, saying he embezzled ?45 million from February 1997 to September 2004.
■ JAPAN
Cellphone university classes
Japanese already use cellphones to shop, read novels, exchange e-mail, search for restaurants and take video clips. Now, they're taking a university course. Cyber University began offering a class on the mysteries of the pyramids on cellphones on Wednesday. The cellphone classes show Power Point images. Cyber University, which opened in April with government approval to give bachelor's degrees, has 1,850 students.
■ Thailand
Candidates pass out Viagra
Parliamentary candidates in the upcoming election are trying to buy the votes of elderly men by passing out free Viagra, a local government official said on Friday. Thais go to the polls on Dec. 23 for the first time since a bloodless coup last year. Residents in Prathumthani, north of Bangkok, reported some of the candidates were passing out the anti-impotence drug in exchange for promised votes, said a local government official. "The villagers told me they have been given one or two pills of Viagra by candidates," the official said.
■ NEW ZEALAND
Hacker kingpin arrested
Police questioned the suspected teenage kingpin of an international cyber crime network accused of infiltrating 1.3 million computers and skimming millions of dollars from victims' bank accounts, officials said yesterday. Working with the FBI and police in the Netherlands, New Zealand police raided the home of the 18-year-old in Hamilton and took him into custody along with several computers, said Martin Kleintjes, head of the police electronic crime center. The case is part of an international crackdown on hackers who allegedly assume control of thousands of computers and amass them into centrally controlled clusters known as botnets.
■ UKRAINE
Circus crocodile recpatured
Officials recaptured a crocodile on Wednesday which had escaped from a traveling circus six months previously and repeatedly eluded search teams. The reptile was found basking in a pool at a thermal power station in the east of the country, where the water was warmer than the nearby sea. "We caught the crocodile alive today," Oleksander Soldatov, a spokesman for the Emergencies Ministry said by telephone. "We are now contacting the owner so that he can come and fetch it." The crocodile escaped from the circus in late May and was spotted several times lurking around industrial sites near the city of Mariupol, on the coast of the Sea of Azov.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Relatives dispute will
Relatives of an elderly woman who left ?10 million (US$21 million) to a couple that ran a Chinese restaurant she frequented challenged the will in a court case that opened on Thursday. Kim Sing Man and his wife, Bee Lian Man, the owners of a Chinese restaurant in Witham, a town northeast of London, inherited the money in the will, which was drawn up for widow Golda Bechal in August 1994. She died in January 2004, aged 89. Bechal's five nephews and nieces are asking the High Court to declare the will invalid because they claim it was written when their aunt was suffering from dementia. They also are asking the judge to give the inheritance to them.
■ Ireland
Police hunt beer bandit
Police announced a manhunt on Thursday for a beer bandit who drove into the Guinness brewery and left with 450 full kegs. The national police force, the Garda Siochana, said a lone man drove into the brewery -- a Dublin landmark and top tourist attraction -- on Wednesday and hitched his truck to a fully loaded trailer awaiting delivery to city pubs. Diageo PLC, the drinks company that owns Guinness, said the brewery had never suffered such a large-scale theft before in its 248-year history. Police said the raider took 180 kegs of Guinness stout, 180 kegs of US lager Budweiser and 90 kegs of Danish beer Carlsberg.
■ United Kingdom
Toilet locator launched
A new service promises Londoners they'll never have to spend much time looking for the loo. Westminster City Council, which covers London's bustling Oxford Street, the West End and the Houses of Parliament, on Thursday launched "SatLav" -- a toilet-finding service for mobile phone users. Harried theatergoers, distressed shoppers and hard-pressed bar patrons in London's West End can now text the word "toilet" -- and receive a text back giving the address of the nearest public facility. The system, which covers 40 public toilets, triangulates a user's position by measuring the strength of the phone signal. The texts cost ?0.25 (US$0.52), while most of Westminster's toilets are free.
■ Sweden
Moose attraction planned
With little to attract tourists, a region in the north is pinning hope on a truly gargantuan wooden moose. When completed, the 45m tall, 47m long moose will have a restaurant in its belly, as well as a concert hall, conference rooms and a shop, project coordinator and local tourism promoter Thorbjorn Holmlund said on Thursday.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of
IN PURSUIT: Israel’s defense minister said the revenge attacks by Israeli settlers would make it difficult for security forces to find those responsible for the 14-year-old’s death Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday condemned the “heinous murder” of an Israeli teenager in the occupied West Bank as attacks on Palestinian villages intensified following news of his death. After Benjamin Achimeir, 14, was reported missing near Ramallah on Friday, hundreds of Jewish settlers backed by Israeli forces raided nearby Palestinian villages, torching vehicles and homes, leaving at least one villager dead and dozens wounded. The attacks escalated in several villages on Saturday after Achimeir’s body was found near the Malachi Hashalom outpost. Agence France-Presse correspondents saw smoke rising from burned houses and fields. Mayor Amin Abu Alyah, of the