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World News Quick Take

■JAPAN

Monkey snarls station

A rogue monkey holed up at a Tokyo train station for more than two hours yesterday before giving dozens of net-wielding police officers the slip among crowds of excited children and passersby. “It’s a monkey — it’s not like it did anything bad,” a police spokesman said, adding that the animal was still on the loose. The monkey was spotted hopping around by the automatic ticket gates at a train line in Shibuya Station in central Tokyo at about 9:40am. It then ran downstairs to the entrance to another line, climbed up and down a pillar and ran around the ticketing machines before taking refuge on top of a train information board for two hours, a spokeswoman for railway operator Tokyu Corp said. TV footage showed the 60cm tall brown monkey sitting calmly on top of the board, blinking and looking down at the crowd.

■CHINA

Leak sickens dozens

Dozens of people were taken to hospital after a toxic gas leak at a chemical plant near Nanjing, Chinese news portal Sina (news.sina.com.cn) said yesterday. The accident happened at the Dongfang Chemical Company in Liuhe. “Dozens of people, harmed by the poisonous gas to varying extents, were receiving treatment in the crowded hospital,” the report said. No deaths have been reported.

■CHINA

Quake rocks Yunnan

About 1,200 people were evacuated yesterday after an earthquake measuring 5 on the Richter scale damaged homes in Yunnan Province, the State Seismological Bureau said. The bureau said the quake hit at 5:35am with an epicenter in Yingjiang County and a depth of about 10km. Many homes collapsed in towns and villages close to the epicenter and about 1,200 people were evacuated, Xinhua news agency quoted local authorities as saying. There were no immediate reports of casualties, it said.

■JAPAN

Quake rattles Tokyo

A moderate earthquake with a magnitude of 4.5 rattled Tokyo yesterday, causing buildings to shake in the heart of the metropolis, officials said. The epicenter was 50km underground in Ibaraki Prefecture northeast of the capital, the Japan Meteorological Agency said. Ibaraki police said they had no immediate reports of damage.

■BANGLADESH

Pregnancy scandal at jail

Jail officials were embarrassed that a male prisoner has managed to impregnate a female inmate after the pair bribed guards to let them have sex in a court building. Deputy prisons chief Shamsul Haider Siddiqui said the man, who has two wives, bribed police and jail clerks during a court appearance six months ago to arrange the conjugal visit in a room in the lower court. The 28-year-woman, who appeared on an abduction charge, is also married to someone else, Siddiqui said. “She is now six months’ pregnant and we don’t know what to do about it. It’s a real embarrassment. We’ve never encountered such a problem before,” he said. He said the couple met during a series of court appearances that coincided. Siddiqui said the man hopes to make the woman his third wife.

■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.”