■ JAPAN
Cash found in mailbox
An unemployed man had an unexpected windfall in his mailbox when he found 1 million yen (US$10,000) in cash from an anonymous benefactor, police said yesterday. The 61-year-old man discovered the wad of cash last week along with a slip of paper with the message: "Please make use of this in your everyday life," written with a black ballpoint pen. But instead of following the advice, the jobless man in the ancient capital of Nara turned over the gift to police. The sender has until June 27 to claim the money or the unemployed man will get it.
■ PHILIPPINES
Faulty trucks fail to stop fire
An historic church on the island of Cebu may have been saved if fire trucks had worked and firemen did not have to push them to the blaze, police said yesterday. The 178-year-old Immaculada Conception Church in Oslob town was destroyed just before dawn on Wednesday for still unknown reasons, said local police investigator Winston Pinaranda. A relative of the parish priest, who was staying at the church, raised the alarm but the town's two fire trucks were not working. The Oslob firemen resorted to pushing the rescue vehicles the short distance to the burning church, but by the time the trucks arrived, it was too late, Pinaranda said.
■ NEW ZEALAND
SUV knocks man off toilet
A man got the fright of his life when a runaway SUV crashed into his house and knocked him off the toilet, a newspaper reported on Friday. The vehicle had been parked with its emergency brake only half on, and rolled down a 10m bank into the house on Thursday in Christchurch, the Press newspaper reported. Police said a building contractor working next door had parked the vehicle minutes earlier. "He came back to his vehicle and found it next door, basically," police Sergeant Kim Reid said. The paper said that when the home owner was asked how the builder might be feeling, he said: "What about me? I got knocked off the toilet. I got a hell of a fright."
■ INDONESIA
Hackers protest porn ban
Hackers took over an Indonesian government Web site for several hours to protest against a new law banning online pornography, the information ministry said yesterday. The protesters posted a message on Thursday on the ministry of information Web site challenging it to "prove that the law was not drafted to cover the government's stupidity." Parliament passed a law on Tuesday against producing or accessing Web sites with pornographic or violent content. The new law, which has still to be approved by the president, provides for a maximum penalty of six years in jail or a fine of up to 1 billion rupiah (US$110,000) for disseminating pornographic material online.
■ CHINA
Tortoise allegedly smokes
A tortoise that smokes and appears to be addicted to nicotine has been discovered in Jilin Province, state media said on Thursday. Xinhua news agency said the animal was the pet of a man identified only as Yun. The agency cited Yun as saying he put a cigarette into the animal's mouth as a joke and the animal started smoking. "It seems to have become addicted," Yun was quoted as saying. Xinhua said Yun proved his claim by putting a cigarette in the tortoise's mouth in front a reporter and neighbors. The tortoise finished it in less than four minutes, Xinhua said.
■ UNITED KINGODOM
Two convicted in goth death
A British jury has convicted two teens of murdering a woman because she dressed like a goth. Sixteen-year-old Ryan Herbert and 15-year-old Brendan Harris beat 20-year-old Sophie Lancaster to death as she tried to protect her boyfriend. Both were kicked and stamped into unconsciousness by a gang in a park last August. Lancaster died two weeks later. Her 21-year-old art-student boyfriend Robert Maltby survived the assault. A jury at Preston Crown Court has been told the pair were singled out because of how they dressed.
■ NETHERLANDS
MP posts anti-Islam film
Dutch far-right MP Geert Wilders on Thursday made good on his pledge to post a controversial film critical of Islam on the Internet, featuring violent imagery of terrorist attacks in New York and Madrid intertwined with Koranic texts. Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, who had earlier called on Wilders to reconsider posting his film, said on Thursday that he regretted it had aired. The 17-minute film titled Fitna appeared on the LiveLeak video sharing Web site and had been viewed by over 2 million people by 11pm central European time.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
`Pygmy Queen' loses out
Self-help manual If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs won this year's oddest book title competition, the Bookseller trade magazine said yesterday. The book took an impressive one-third of the 8,500 votes cast online in the Bookseller 30th annual competition. Runner up I was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen, the story of a fictitious World War II pilot forced to bail out over the jungle, polled a distant 20 percent. The winner beat stiff competition from other shortlisted titles including the somewhat niche Cheese Problems Solved and How to Write a How to Write Book and the rather provocative Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues.
■ FRANCE
Oldest recording unveiled
It's nobody's idea of great music -- to some, it may sound like a dolphin with tonsilitis -- but the ghostly warbling of a French folk song nearly 148 years ago comprises the oldest recording of the human voice, France's Academy of Sciences says. The 10-second recording was made by a Parisian inventor, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville on April 9, 1860, when Emperor Napoleon III, the last monarch of France, was on the throne. It was made a whole 17 years before Thomas Edison made his historic message "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on a phonograph. Scott de Martinville's gadget scratched sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke from an oil lamp. The recording, comprising a snippet of the song Au clair de la lune can be heard in MP3 format at www.firstsounds.org/sounds/index.php.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Iraqi's rights breached
London will admit breaching the human rights of an Iraqi who died while held by British troops in Basra in the wake of the 2003 war, opening the way for compensation claims, a minister said on Thursday. The Ministry of Defence will also admit breaching the rights of eight other Iraqi men. Baha Mousa, a 26-year-old hotel worker, suffocated when he was forced to the floor with his arms behind his back as the soldiers tried to cuff him, prosecutors said.
■ MEXICO
Troops to tackle drug feud
Some 2,500 troops will deploy this weekend to Ciudad Juarez on the US border, where a gangland feud between drug cartels has killed almost 100 people this month alone, Mexican Interior Minister Juan Camilo said on Thursday. "Joint Operation Chihuahua" will bring in "2,026 army troops, 425 federal police and about 100 agents from the Attorney-General's Office," Camilo said in Ciudad Juarez. He said most of the force would begin deploying this weekend in the troubled border city, where 97 people have been killed execution style this month, including six on Tuesday.
■ UNITED STATES
Men put Aussie on the barbie
Prosecutors have filed felony torture and assault charges against two men suspected of throwing an Australian tourist into a burning fire pit on a California beach. The San Diego County district attorney's office said on Thursday that two alleged transients, 21-year-old Damian Maple and 46-year-old Frank Montoya, face five felony counts and up to life in prison if convicted. Robert Schneider was found in the surfside pit in Ocean Beach with third-degree burns on Feb. 27. Police say the 26-year-old was beaten with a skateboard and then heaved into the fire.
■ UNITED STATES
Cab driver went extra miles
There's no question that New York City taxi driver Douglas Guldeniz went the extra mile -- thousands of them, in fact. He drove a Queens couple 4,025km to the duo's new retirement home in Arizona last April. Now Guldeniz is getting official recognition for what officials believe was the longest taxi ride in city history. He has won the city Taxi and Limousine Commission's Going the Extra Mile award. Guldeniz was among about 60 cabbies honored on Thursday for good deeds ranging from returning lost cellphones to thwarting a suspect's attempt to flee after a rape. Charles Kabbani was named Driver of the Year for helping a passenger who apparently suffered a seizure.
■ UNITED STATES
Bayou Bob's booze illegal
A rancher who calls himself Bayou Bob found a new way to make money: Stick a rattler inside a bottle of vodka and market it as an "ancient Asian elixir." But Bayou Bob Popplewell's bright idea landed him on the wrong side of the law, because he has no liquor license. Popplewell, who has raised rattlesnakes at Bayou Bob's Brazos River Rattlesnake Ranch for more than two decades, surrendered to authorities in Santo, Texas, on Monday, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported. If convicted of selling alcohol without a license, he faces up to a year in jail and US$1,000 in fines.
■ UNITED STATES
Toilet girl's friend arrested
A man whose girlfriend sat on a toilet for so long that the seat adhered to her body has been arrested in a separate case. Authorities say Kory McFarren was arrested on Sunday for alleged lewd and lascivious behavior. He allegedly exposed himself to a neighbor's teenage daughter and her friends. He spent the night in jail before posting bond. No charges had been filed by Thursday. The 36-year-old McFarren could not be reached for comment. He was charged last week with a misdemeanor count of mistreatment of a dependent adult. That was after his girlfriend was found stuck to the toilet in late February.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
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