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World News Quick Take

■ CHINA

Storms decimate forests

Around one-tenth of China's forests were damaged by recent winter storms, the worst in at least five decades, and in the hardest-hit regions nearly 90 percent of forests were ruined, Xinhua news agency said yesterday. The State Forestry Administration said total losses reached 17.3 million hectares of forest in 18 provinces in southern China, Xinhua said. The agency did not give any value for the losses, but in an earlier report the administration said that by the end of last month the storms had caused about US$2.5 billion in damage.



■ MALAYSIA

Cash for rats

Authorities in Kuala Lumpur have ushered in the Year of the Rat by offering a bounty on rats to help fight the city's age-old rodent problem, a newspaper said yesterday. "There's no incentive like money," Yew Teong Look, a member of parliament for a Kuala Lumpur precinct, was quoted by the New Straits Times as saying. Dead or alive, the rats are worth 2 ringgit (US$0.62) each, he said. "All residents have to do is place the vermin at drop-off points where City Hall officers will collect them for disposal," he said.



■ AUSTRALIA

Man guilty of killing wife

A Welsh-born man who hid his wife's body for 23 years in a steel drum in the couple's suburban backyard was convicted yesterday of her murder. Frederick Boyle, 58, claimed he hid the body of Edwina Boyle out of panic after finding her dead in bed at their home on the outskirts of the southern city of Melbourne. But a Victoria state Supreme Court jury found him guilty yesterday of the murder on Oct. 6, 1983. He pleaded not guilty at the outset of his trial. Boyle told the court he found his 30-year-old wife dead in bed with two bullets in her head and one of his neckties around her throat. He said he thought he would be a suspect because he was having an affair, so he hid the body.



■ INDONESIA

Roof riders to be sprayed

Commuters riding on the roofs of trains will be sprayed with colored liquid so that security officers can identify and arrest them, a report said yesterday. Electric trains linking the Indonesian capital and its neighboring towns are packed with passengers during rush hours, with many sitting on the roofs due to a lack of space inside or to avoid paying. "We will confiscate their IDs and give them a ticket," the Jakarta Post quoted regional rail spokesman Akhmad Sujadi as saying. Although illegal, roof riding is rampant because of a lack of efficient and affordable means of transport for commuters in the greater Jakarta area. At least 53 roof riders have been killed in the past two years, the Post said.



■ INDIA

Avalanches kill 20

Twenty people were killed by avalanches and 15 were missing in Indian Kashmir as the heaviest snowfall in recent years brought the Himalayan region to a standstill, officials said yesterday. More than 300 people have been rescued from avalanche-hit areas, while many villages remained inaccessible, police said. Six members of a family, including two children, were killed when an avalanche swept away their home late on Friday in the Banihal area, 110km south of Srinagar, police said. In the neighboring area of Kapran an avalanche killed another family of six. The Indian army said it would airlift 1,500 people yesterday who have been stranded for more than a week on a snowbound mountain highway that connects the Kashmir Valley with the rest of India.



■ UNITED KINGDOM

Gerry Adams' driver a spy

MI5, the domestic security service, took one of Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams' personal drivers into protective custody on Friday after he was unmasked as a British agent. MI5 advised Roy McShane to leave his west Belfast home after it emerged that an internal Irish Republican Army (IRA) investigation found he had been working for the British for more than a decade. McShane was part of a pool of drivers for senior Republican leaders from the time of the IRA's first ceasefire in 1994.



■ UNITED STATES

'Icebox' city defends title

International Falls is officially the "Icebox of the Nation." The Minnesota city on the Canadian border had been fighting the ski town of Fraser, Colorado, for the legal right to the trademark. International Falls claimed victory this week when the US Patent and Trademark Office sent the city attorney a certificate granting the city Reg. No. 3,375,139. "I ran over to the attorney's office and kissed the certificate," Mayor Shawn Mason said on Friday. She said the city has used the icebox title to market itself to industry as the premier site for cold-weather testing.



■ GREECE

Lost phone causes trouble

A young actress who forgot her cellphone in an Athens cab was blackmailed for 1,500 euros (US$2,200) when the driver threatened to post sex footage stored inside the phone on the Internet, the police said on Friday. The 30-year-old driver was arrested on Thursday after the unnamed actress gave him the demanded sum in marked currency. The driver, who had initially tried to peddle the sex footage to a reporter, told police he was facing "serious financial difficulties."



■ SWITZERLAND

Two Picassos pinched

Two oil paintings by Pablo Picasso worth nearly 5 million Swiss francs (US$4.5 million) have been stolen from a museum in the eastern town of Pfaeffikon, police sources said on Friday. Police said the circumstances surrounding the theft of Tete de Cheval and Verre et pichet on Wednesday evening were still unclear, but that the thieves managed to leave the building around 7pm. The security alarm was set off as they left the museum. The two paintings belong to the Sprengel museum in Hanover, Germany, which has offered a reward for their safe return.



■ UNITED STATES

Winehouse gets visa

A day after saying "no, no, no" to troubled British pop singer Amy Winehouse, US officials on Friday granted a work visa that would allow her to perform at tonight's Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. But Winehouse, who is in rehab for drug addiction, will instead stick with her plan to sing live via satellite from London. "Unfortunately, due to the logistics involved and timing complications, Amy will not be coming to the US this weekend to perform at the Grammys in Los Angeles," said Tracey Miller, the singer's spokeswoman.



■ UNITED STATES

Bogie's mistress dies

Verita Bouvaire Thompson, the mistress and confidante of Humphrey Bogart, has died at age 89. Thompson died of natural causes in New Orleans on Feb. 1, her boyfriend, Dean Shapiro said. In 1982, Thompson wrote a book called Bogie and Me: A Love Story in which she described a 14-year love affair with Bogart.
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