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World News Quick Take

■ CHINA

Beijing cleaning up its act

Less spitting, better queuing and cleaner streets show Beijing has become more "civilized," but the city still has to fine-tune its etiquette to attain Olympic standards, Xinhua news agency said on Friday, citing a new study. China wants to leave nothing to chance when the eyes of the world turn its way for the Olympics in August and the Beijing government has waged a long campaign to hone manners. Renmin University created an annual "civic index" to gauge progress, surveying thousands of residents and sending out teams of observers, Xinhua said. Last year's results pointed in the right direction: 2.5 percent of people spat in public, down from 4.9 percent in 2006; instances of queue jumping dropped to 1.5 percent from 6 percent; and littering fell to 2.9 percent from 5.3 percent.



■ JAPAN

Hatchet man attacks family

A Japanese repairman allegedly hacked his mother and wife to death with a hatchet and nearly chopped his son's hands off before killing himself, news reports said yesterday. The incident came to light late on Monday when a passer-by noticed blood flowing out of the closed shutter of Toru Sasaki's shop of used industrial machines attached to the family's house in Tokyo. Sasaki, 52, is believed to have killed his wife, Kazuko, 49, and his mother Tokuko, 85, according to Jiji Press news agency. The younger of the Sasakis' two sons, 15, was found with his hands almost cut off. He told a rescue official, "Dad did this," before falling into a coma at a hospital, the reports said.



■ CHINA

Crackdown targets gamers

China has targeted illegal Web sites, computer markets and Internet cafes as part of a wide-ranging crackdown on juvenile crime, state media reported yesterday. The crackdown, christened "Operation For Tomorrow," seeks to ferret out online games considered overly violent or otherwise unhealthy, as well as Web sites offering unregistered playing platforms or services for gamers that can be downloaded, Xinhua news agency said.



■ SOUTH KOREA

Lawmaker stages sit-in

A South Korean lawmaker yesterday locked himself inside a parliamentary committee room to try to block moves to ratify a free trade deal with the US, officials said. Kang Ki-kab of the leftist Democratic Labour Party (DLP) entered the foreign affairs and trade committee room before dawn and has refused to come out, they said. The DLP, which has nine MPs, strongly opposes the agreement signed last June but still awaiting ratification by the legislatures of both countries. "Representative Kang has since been staging a sit-in protest inside and several of his aides are also with him," a parliament official said.



■ CHINA

Movie request turned down

A Hollywood movie set in World War II-era Japanese-occupied Shanghai reportedly starring John Cusack and Gong Li (鞏俐) has been denied approval to shoot in China, a producer said yesterday. Producer Mike Medavoy said the filmmakers wanted to shoot on location in Shanghai but the Chinese government did not clear them to do so. "The film is about Shanghai at that period. Shanghai is a character in the film, its human side, what was so unique about it. There must have been a misunderstanding and I hope they reconsider their decision," Medavoy said in an e-mail.



■ GERMANY

Body-builders help driver

A group of 10 body-builders from a German gym took a break from their normal training routine to help a driver whose car was stuck in a ditch, police said on Monday. The men were training at the Explosives fitness studio in Bad Zwischenahn when the 38-year-old driver lost control of his vehicle, veered into a meadow and plunged the front of his car into the 6m deep ditch. The men lifted the car out of the ditch in only a few minutes, a police spokesman said, adding that the grateful driver joined the men at the fitness studio bar and treated them to a round of energy drinks.



■ SWEDEN

Dogseller found guilty

Stockholm's appeals court on Monday found a kennel owner who refused to sell a puppy to a lesbian woman guilty of discrimination, slapping her with a 20,000 kronor (US$3,100) fine. Smila Bergstroem had contacted the kennel owner, 51-year-old Anette Sjoeholm, to purchase one of the puppies she had advertised for sale, but when she let it slip that she lived with another woman, Sjoeholm had refused to go through with the sale, according to the TT news agency. The kennel owner reportedly made it clear to Bergstroem that she did not trust homosexuals, telling her she had read that transvestites sexually abused animals.



■ RUSSIA

Spam on the rise

Russia has become a "superpower" of spam e-mail, becoming the second most prolific country after the US in producing junk e-mails, a computer security firm said on Monday. "The country has stormed into second place, accounting for 8.3 percent of the world's spam, or one in 12 junk mails seen in inboxes," according to security firm Sophos in its quarterly update on spam. Between October and December last year, the US accounted for 21 percent of spam, but on a regional basis, Asia ranked first with 32 percent of all spam.



■ SAUDI ARABIA

Police ban red roses

Religious police have banned red roses ahead of Valentine's Day, forcing couples in the conservative Muslim nation to think of new ways to show their love. The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice has ordered florists and gift shop owners in the capital Riyadh to remove any items colored scarlet, which is widely seen as symbolizing love, newspapers said. "They visited us last night," the Saudi Gazette quoted an unidentified florist as saying. It is not unusual for the vice squad to clamp down ahead of Valentine's Day, which it sees as encouraging relations between men and women outside of wedlock.



■ UNITED KINGDOM

Stampede disrupts funeral

A hearse overturned when the horses pulling it to a south London cemetery stampeded last month, dragging the carriage and coffin past appalled relatives and sending floral tributes flying. "It was dreadful," a mourner told the South London Press. "The horses dragged the carriage to the cemetery on its side, tossing the coffin all over the place and destroying all the flowers inside. "Some people got very angry and had to be restrained by other mourners ... It is understandable given the circumstances. I'm horrified that something like this could happen." The carriage appeared to have clipped a mini-roundabout as it entered Lambeth Cemetery, the local council that administers the graveyard said on Friday.



■ FRANCE

Troops to hunt gold diggers

The country will send 1,000 troops to rid French Guiana of illegal gold diggers, the president announced on Monday, saying they were endangering both the environment and the food chain in the South American territory. President Nicolas Sarkozy, on the first day of his two-day visit to the country's largest overseas territory, promised a "fight without mercy." Troops from mainland France and the Antilles will begin the "exceptional operation" next week and will stay as long as necessary, Sarkozy said. For the first time, special intervention troops from the elite GIGN unit of the gendarmerie will take part in the operation, he said.



■ UNITED STATES

School filled with chickens

Monday mornings are hard enough. Imagine finding 50 chickens running loose in your school. Workers arriving about 5:30am to open Northeast High School in Philadelphia found dozens of hens and roosters wandering around the hallways. The birds were apparently brought to the school sometime over the weekend, said school district spokesman Fernando Gallard. "We don't know where the chickens came from or who they belong to," Gallard said. The floors were covered with droppings and chicken feed. Most of the school's 3,600 students were sent home for the day because the school required extensive cleanup, he said.



■ UNITED STATES

Boy scout on trial for murder

A 16-year-old boy scout accused of killing his parents and two brothers in their home was indicted on Monday in Towson, Maryland, on four counts of first-degree murder. Nicholas Browning is also charged with using a handgun in a crime of violence. His attorney, Joshua Treem, did not respond to an e-mail request seeking comment. The Brownings were slain in Cockeysville early Feb. 2. According to police, Nicholas Browning then spent the night and most of the next day with friends before he returned and reported finding his father's body. He was charged after confessing to police and telling investigators where he had stashed the weapon, a handgun belonging to his father, authorities have said.



■ UNITED STATES

Immigration driving numbers

Immigration will drive the nation's population sharply upward between now and 2050 and will push whites into a minority, projections by the Pew Research Center showed on Monday. "If current trends continue, the population of the United States will rise to 438 million in 2050, from 296 million in 2005," an increase of nearly 50 percent, the study by the Washington-based think-tank said. More than 80 percent of the increase will come from immigrants arriving in the country and their US-born children, who will make up nearly one in five Americans by 2050 compared with one in eight in 2005, it said.



■ UNITED STATES

Contest looks at presidents

Men have begun a beard-growing competition that's partly a presidential look-alike contest as Delaware, Ohio, celebrates its 200th birthday. The current, clean-shaven resident of the White House is not the inspiration. Instead, it's the nation's 19th president, Rutherford B. Hayes, born in Delaware in 1822 and typically pictured with long, wiry whiskers. The competitors all started on Sunday with clean slates. They were photographed with shaved chins and obtained permits to register in the contest, to be judged July 5.
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