World News Quick Take

■ JAPAN

Porn movies too graphic

Police arrested five porn movie producers and a member of an industry self-censorship group on charges their films were too graphic. Sexual images are widely available in the country, but only as long as they do not expose genitalia. To circumvent the law, adult film and magazine makers have created industry groups that impose self-censorship, mostly by blurring out images of genitalia. But Katsumi Ono, 51, a member of the Nihon Ethics of Video Association, was arrested on Saturday for alleged laxity in screening seven porn films. Police said he helped filmmakers, including Yoshitaka Haga, 80, chairman of a porn manufacturer, distribute movies in which genitalia was not fully pixelated.



■ JAPAN

Troops under curfew

US in Japan said late on Monday they would ease a sweeping curfew on troops imposed nearly two weeks ago in a bid to calm public anger after an alleged rape by a US Marine. The US military said it was ending round-the-clock restrictions on the more than 20,000 troops on Okinawa but would keep in place a curfew from 10pm to 5am. The military completely ended restrictions on the movement of civilian base personnel and relatives of troops, who had come under the unusually tough curfew imposed on Feb. 20.



■ THAILAND

Stop flirting, you monks

Officials Buddhist monks yesterday to avoid using social networking Web sites to woo women after an advocacy group found some monks were doing just that. The request came as police in the northeast detained a monk accused of using a Web site to lure a woman to his temple and raping her. "I call on Hi5 users to tell the monks to leave the site if they are found using it," junior minister Jakrapob Penkair told reporters after a Buddhist monitoring group said some monks were flirting on the Web site popular with Thai users.



■ INDIA

State fights abortions

The state is offering to pay poor families about US$3,000 to bring up their girl children and discourage the widespread practice of aborting the female fetus, which has led to a skewed gender balance in parts of the country. Many families prefer boys, as future breadwinners, to girls, on whom dowries have to be spent to find husbands. A study published in the British medical journal The Lancet showed that about 10 million female fetuses may have been aborted in the country over the last 20 years -- after illegal sex determination tests. The government hopes a cash incentive will change that.

■ ITALY

Tenor di Stefano dies at 86

Giuseppe Di Stefano, one of the top tenors of the 20th century and a celebrated singing partner of soprano Maria Callas, died at his home near Milan. He was 86. Di Stefano's wife, Monika Curth, said the tenor died on Monday morning from injuries sustained when he was attacked while staying at his family's villa in Kenya in November 2004. Curth said unidentified assailants struck Di Stefano on the head in Diani, Kenya, leaving the tenor incapacitated. From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, Di Stefano sang at the world's top opera houses, including Milan's La Scala and New York's Metropolitan Opera.



■ NORWAY

Eat a whale to save planet?

Eat whale and save the planet, a pro-whaling lobby said on Monday of a study showing that killing the giant mammals is less damaging to the climate than farming livestock. Environmental group Greenpeace dismissed the survey, saying almost every kind of food was more climate friendly than meat. The survey, focused on whale boats' fuel use, showed that a kilogram of whale meat represented just 1.9kg of greenhouse gases against 15.8kg for beef, 6.4kg for pork and 4.6 kg for chicken.



■ EGYPT

Crackdown on opposition

Authorities 64 members of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood across the country on Monday, a security source said, as part of a crackdown ahead of key local elections. The members were detained in raids on homes in the Nile Delta provinces of Sharqiya, Gharbiya and Daqahliya, and in the southern towns of Qena and Sohag. "They were detained for belonging to an illegal organization. Documents were confiscated from some of the homes," the source said. The authorities are stepping up their clampdown on members of the Muslim Brotherhood, with hundreds of such arrests.



■ ITALY

Radioactive steel seized

Police on Monday they had seized 30 tonnes of Chinese-made steel that had been contaminated by a radioactive substance. The environmental protection police squad said the steel was destined for the industrial production of chimneys and pulleys, and long-term exposure could have been dangerous for workers handling it. Police said in a statement that the shipment had come from China's TISCO company and had arrived in the northern port town of La Spezia in May last year. The steel had been accidentally mixed during production with cobalt-60, a radioactive isotope of cobalt, they said. Officers seized it last week after radiation turned up in tests on metal scraps at firms across Italy that had used part of the shipment.



■ GERMANY

Plane's wing grazes runway

A Lufthansa jet was caught by gusting wind as it tried to land during a weekend storm, causing the tip of the aircraft's wing to graze the runway before the pilot got the plane back off the ground, the airline said on Monday. The incident happened on Saturday afternoon as the Airbus A320, with 131 passengers on board, approached Hamburg airport on a flight from Munich. Airline spokesman Wolfgang Weber said the the pilot was able to stabilize the aircraft and take off again in what he called an "absolutely professional maneuver." The plane landed safely shortly afterward on its second attempt.

■ UNITED STATES

White House e-mail probed

For US President George W. Bush, who expresses disdain for e-mail, the White House system of electronic record-keeping is a good match. Even if Bush used e-mail, it might get lost in the problem-plagued White House computer system. In Congress and in federal court, a congressional committee and two private groups are pushing for information on how the White House has handled its e-mail for the past six years and whether officials there complied with records-retention laws. The picture emerging from testimony and court filings is one of disregard for fundamental principles that well-run private companies adhere to routinely. By one estimate, over 1,000 days of e-mail are missing from various White House offices.



■ UNITED STATES

Venezuelan pleads guilty

A Venezuelan man has pleaded guilty in Miami to conspiracy related to the smuggling of US$800,000 in cash supposedly destined last year for the campaign of Argentina's president. A federal court document states Carlos Kauffman entered his single guilty plea on Friday. The man with ties to Venezuela's state oil company also had been facing a charge of illegally acting as an agent of a foreign government. The document did not say the status of that charge. A federal prosecutor declined to comment. Defense attorneys did not return phone calls and e-mails. Three other men also were charged in the alleged scheme to cover up the money's source. Argentine President Cristina Fernandez and Venezuela deny allegations the money was destined for her campaign.



■ CUBA

Castro to write life memoir

Former Cuban president Fidel Castro, 81, said on Monday he intends to write a memoir of his life "if time permits," an article published in state media said. Castro, who stepped aside last month to allow his brother, Raul Castro, to be formally elected president, had provisionally handed over power 19 months ago because of gastrointestinal surgery and has not been seen in public since. "While I write these lines on a Sunday afternoon, the idea returns to me, that if time permits me, I should write my memoir," said Castro in the official Granma daily.



■ UNITED STATES

Pop culture to be auctioned

It is billed as the best pop culture collection ever assembled -- ranging from the gun used to kill the assassin of President John F. Kennedy to the Wicked Witch of the West's hat from The Wizard of Oz. Collected over the past 25 years by South Florida property developer Anthony Pugliese, the collection, which also includes a whip and the holy grail from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, will be put up for auction next month in Las Vegas. Arlan Ettinger, president of New York-based auction house Guernsey's, said the collection of 850 lots could fetch more than US$5 million when it goes under the hammer at The Palms Resort and Casino on March 15 and March 16.



■ UNITED STATES

Black begins jail term

Disgraced baron Conrad Black on Monday began his six-and-a-half year prison term imposed for a multimillion-dollar fraud and obstruction of justice, prison officials said. "He reported today to a low security prison in Coleman, Florida," said Mike Truman, spokeman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Black, who has appealed the sentence by a federal court in Chicago, was ordered to wait out the rest of the appeal in jail.