■FINLAND
Trash cans to give thanks
In an attempt to curb littering, Helsinki will distribute trash cans that say “thank you” in celebrity voices when they are fed trash, city project managers said on Tuesday. “We are always thinking about different ways to stop littering. And this idea is great and fun,” Helsinki project manager Elina Nummi said. Four ordinary-looking talking trash cans will be placed around the city center from tomorrow until the end of September, she said. A detector in the bin will activate a loudspeaker as soon as rubbish is put in, and the conscientious bin user will hear the voice of a city leader or celebrity thanking them for their effort. The detector will also monitor the number of times a thank you message is played, and thus how many times the bin is used. “It is great that you care about the city. Cool, isn’t it?” says Mayor Jussi Pajunen in one message. The project was drawn up by a company called Public Side as part of a broader campaign aimed at animating the capital. “The idea is to make a thing that is considered lifeless alive,” company project manager Janne Wrigstedt said. Talking trash cans have previously been used with great success in other European cities, including Berlin and in Britain, he said.
■ISRAEL Stillborn ‘returns to life’
A stillborn baby who was pronounced dead by doctors “came back to life” on Monday after spending hours in a hospital refrigerator. The baby, weighing only 600g at birth, spent at least five hours inside one of the hospital’s refrigerated storage units, before her parents, who had taken her to be buried, began noticing some movement. “We unwrapped her and felt she was moving. We didn’t believe it at first. Then she began holding my mother’s hand, and then we saw her open her mouth,” said 26-year-old Faiza Magdoub, the baby’s mother. The baby was pronounced dead several hours earlier, after doctors at Western Galilee hospital were forced to abort her mother’s pregnancy because of internal bleeding. Magdoub was 23 weeks into her pregnancy.
■germany
Couple survives plane crash
A couple had a lucky escape after their light aircraft hit a 380,000 volt power line and then hung upside down from a wheel for nearly three hours. “They had a very, very lucky accident,” said police officer Edmund Martin at the scene in Durach. Emergency services freed the pair suspended 20m from the ground late on Sunday with a hydraulic lift after a helicopter rescue was ruled out as too dangerous. The couple suffered only minor injuries.
■SPAIN
Airliner swerves off runway
At least 45 people were killed when a Spanair plane crashed on takeoff at Madrid airport yesterday, the government said. The Spanair jet made an emergency landing just after taking off from the Madrid-Barajas airport, according to an emergency services spokesman quoted by national radio. The flight was heading to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. Billowing smoke poured from the wreckage of Flight 5200 off the bottom of the airport’s runway four after the crash. An airport spokesman said the jet had a capacity of 166 passengers. Spanair, a subsidiary of Scandinavian carrier SAS, is Spain’s second biggest airline after Iberia. Five passengers on a Spanair flight from Spain’s Basque region to Barcelona were injured in an emergency evacuation on January 9, 2006. It was founded in 1986 and says it has carried more than 104 million passengers from about 100 European destinations to Spain since then.
■UNITED STATES
Wanted: signature forger
You have to pity the authors of bestselling books. Not only do they have to labor over the original works, sometimes aided by a mere ghostwriter or two, but then they have to spend hours of interminable boredom signing autographed copies for special promotions. One smart publisher seems to have devised a way of easing the pain for the millionaire bestseller writer: they have posted an advert on the listing site, Craigslist, inviting a team of part-time workers to fake the signatures and get paid in cash for the privilege. The advert says it is looking for 14 people who can do a blitz of false autograph signing on behalf of two unnamed co-authors of a newly released, and equally anonymous, book. “You will need to be able to copy the look and style of both author’s signatures,” it says. In return, the successful applicants will be paid US$25 for 200 books signed.
■UNITED STATES
Dave Matthews’ cohort dies
LeRoi Moore, saxophone player for the Dave Matthews Band, died on Tuesday of injuries suffered in an accident on an all-terrain vehicle in June. He was 46. Moore died at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles, the band said on its Web site. He was initially hospitalized in late June after the accident on his farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia. He had recently returned to his Los Angeles home to begin physical rehabilitation when complications forced him back into the hospital July 17. It was not immediately clear what the complications were. A message left with Hollywood Presbyterian was not immediately returned.
■UNITED STATES
Applegate well after surgery
Actress Christina Applegate is cancer-free after a double mastectomy, she said on Tuesday in an interview on Good Morning America. “I’m clear. Absolutely 100 percent clear and clean,” said the 36- year-old star of the comedy Samantha Who? “It did not spread — they got everything out, so I’m definitely not going to die from breast cancer.” Applegate said. She opted to have both her breasts removed three weeks ago in an operation known as a prophylactic double mastectomy, and avoid chemotherapy even though cancerous lumps were only found in one breast. “My decision, after looking at all the treatment plans that were possibilities for me, the only one that seemed the most logical and the one that was going to work for me was to have a bilateral mastectomy,” Applegate said. “I didn’t want to go back to the doctors every four months for testing and squishing and everything. I just wanted to kind of get rid of this whole thing. This was the choice that I made and it was a tough one.”
■MEXICO
Church warning draws ire
Miniskirts are making some Mexicans ruddy with indignation. The outrage is directed at the Roman Catholic Church for warning women that the skimpy clothing can provoke sexual violence. Reverend Sergio Roman sounded the alarm against miniskirts in an online publication to prepare Catholics for a church family-values forum next year in Mexico City. “When we show our body without prudence, without modesty, we are prostituting ourselves,” wrote Roman, a Mexico City priest. Mexican newspaper columnists lampooned the article, and women’s rights advocates have assailed it. Women dressed in miniskirts and low-cut shirts have rallied at the doors of Mexico City’s Cathedral during Sunday Mass, carrying signs that read: “Clothed and naked, I am the same.”
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not