■HONG KONG
Sex offender told to exercise
A TV reporter who quit his job after he was arrested for masturbating naked on a bus said he was only trying to “ease his stress,” reports said yesterday. Chiu Yu-kit, a former journalist at Asia Television, admitted in court to the act while he was alone on the top tier of a double-decker bus on July 31, the Standard reported. An off-duty officer made the arrest after he jogged past the bus and saw Chiu standing on a seat naked and facing a window. Chiu, 31, pleaded guilty to one count of indecency in public. Principal magistrate Josiah Lam (林偉權) put Chiu on a one-year good behavior bond and advised him to exercise or talk to others if he wanted to relax. Last month, a “lonely and disturbed” man became stuck and had to be freed by emergency services after attempting to have sex with a park bench.
■JAPAN
Monk burns down temple
A monk trying to rid his temple of a hornet’s nest panicked when the hornets attacked him and dropped a torch, burning his temple to the ground, police said on Thursday. The Buddhist monk had put lighted rags on a stick into the nest in the temple, but dropped it and ran when the hornets flew out and attacked him, a Niigata prefectural police official said. The fire occurred on Wednesday. Atsushi Sato, 41, suffered burns on his ears, face and left hand, but he was not stung.
■CHINA
Elephant completes detox
An elephant rescued from smugglers in China has undergone a detoxification program to cure it of heroin addiction, state media said on Thursday. The seven-year-old male Asian elephant was scheduled to return to Yunnan Province this weekend after finishing its three-year rehabilitation program on the southern island province of Hainan, Xinhua news agency said. The elephant, named Xiguang, became addicted after smugglers used heroin-smeared bananas to lure it across the border from Myanmar into Yunnan, the agency said. Wildlife experts in Hainan gave Xiguang regular injections of methadone at five times the normal human dose, it said. Xiguang and three rescued female elephants were scheduled to arrive today at the Yunnan Wild Animal Park.
■JAPAN
Geeks seek PC blessings
At Tokyo’s Kanda-Myojin Shinto shrine, the faithful can bring their computer and have the priests use ceremonies to ask the gods for help and protection for their computer, a shrine spokesman said yesterday. The shrine is located near the Akihabara quarter, Tokyo’s technology hub and popular destination for geeks and lovers of the latest electronic gadgets.
■NEW ZEALAND
Farmer impales cow
Two farmers face animal cruelty charges after a live cow was impaled on the steel fork of a tractor’s front-end loader, police said yesterday. Sergeant Mike Craig said he stumbled on the incident near the farming town of Ohakune. “It was actually impaled on one of the forks. I couldn’t believe what I saw and did a U-turn and went back,” he said. Craig said it appeared the farm manager had been asked to slaughter the cow, which was sick, and had shot it in the side of the head. However, it did not die and a short time later the farm owner arrived with the tractor, impaling the cow by stabbing it below its spine. The sergeant said that after his intervention, the cow was released “and it walked away into a neighboring paddock in an obviously distressed state.” The animal was eventually killed by the farmer.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Discount sex on offer
Brothels offering full sex for as little as £15 (US$26.50) can be found widely across London and employ women from more than 75 different nationalities, a charity said on Thursday. Researchers from the Poppy Project, which campaigns against the trafficking of women, posed as clients looking for sex and telephoned ads listed in newspapers. They found 921 brothels across London offering full sex for between £15 and £250. They estimated that at least 1,933 women aged between 18 and 55 were working in the establishments, an average of two per brothel. The charity said the full scale of prostitution was likely to be much larger as the survey did not cover ads placed in telephone booths or on Web sites. But it estimated that between £50 million and £130 million a year was being earned by the brothels identified through newspaper ads. Many of the brothels were licensed as saunas or massage parlors, although the majority were private apartments in residential areas.
■GERMANY
Bad weather halts windfarm
Violent weather has delayed construction on the country’s first offshore wind farm, a consortium planning the project said on Thursday. The plan was to place the first three foundations — each weighing 635 tonnes and standing some 45m high — by this week. But the wind they plan eventually to reap is causing construction problems. “We’ve had a really, really shocking summer,” said Jonny Stokes, a spokesman for E.ON AG, one of three firms in the project. Crews are waiting for a four-day block of good weather to install the three foundations for the first of 12 five-megawatt turbines 72km off the shores of Borkum Island in the North Sea.
■GREECE
Anarchists give away food
Anarchists stormed a supermarket on Thursday and handed out food for free in the latest of a wave of raids provoked by soaring consumer prices. About 20 unarmed people, mostly wearing black hoods, carried out the midday robbery in Thesaaloniki, police said. They took only packets of pasta, rice and cartons of milk, which they drop in the middle of the street for people to collect, a police official said. “They have never stolen money or hurt anyone. They ask people to remain calm but use ambush tactics, jumping over cash desks … When they attack without hoods, people are surprised to see that they are mostly women.”
■UNITED KINGDOM
Hendrix’s burnt guitar sold
An electric guitar that Jimi Hendrix set on fire while playing on stage sold last night at a London auction for £322,000 (US$569,260) with fees. The Fender Stratocaster, ignited with lighter fluid by Hendrix at London’s Finsbury Astoria theater on March 31, 1967, was the first instrument the guitarist burned during a performance, said the specialist rock and pop memorabilia auctioneers, the Fame Bureau. The guitar was bought in the saleroom by Daniel Boucher, a US collector and dealer based in Boston.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Pop star tells almost all
Pop star Cliff Richard says his relationship with a former Roman Catholic priest has been a blessing, according to autobiography excerpts carried in the Daily Express on Thursday. Richard shares his home with John McElynn. The 67-year-old singer comments on the relationship in his new autobiography titled My Life, My Way but insists that his sexuality is no one’s business.
■UNITED STATES
Stamp callers get sex line
People calling a federal telephone number to order duck stamps are instead greeted by a phone-sex line thanks to a printing error the government says would be too expensive to correct. The carrier card for the duck stamp transposes two numbers, so instead of listing 1-800-782-6724, it lists 1-800-872-6724. The first number spells out 1-800-STAMP24, the second 1-800-TRAMP24. People calling that second number are welcomed by “Intimate Connections” and enticed by a husky female voice to “talk only to the girls that turn you on,” for US$1.99 a minute. Duck stamps, which cost US$15 apiece, are required to hunt migratory waterfowl. The government uses nearly all the revenue to buy waterfowl habitat for the National Wildlife Refuge System. Duck stamp sales brought in nearly US$22 million in the 2006-2007 period. This year’s stamps, which feature a pair of northern pintail ducks, went on sale on July 1 and are good through June 30 of next year. The error will not be corrected until next year’s duck stamps are printed. A spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service, which administers the program, said it would cost US$300,000 to reprint the 3.5 million duck stamps.
■MEXICO
Two Cubans arrested
Two Cubans are being held by Mexican police for their alleged involvement in the beheadings of a dozen men in the Yucatan Peninsula. A Public Safety Department statement says the man and woman were arrested on a beach in Cancun. Police also raided a house, seizing an AK-47, a grenade and ammunition. They acted after questioning three Mexicans detained in the case last week. Public Safety officials declined to provide further details on Thursday, citing the ongoing investigation. The 12 decapitated bodies were found on Aug. 28 outside Merida, the capital of Yucatan state.
■UNITED STATES
Man gets leg back
After being shot five times, a western Nebraska man had to go to court to get his prosthetic leg back from prosecutors. The Box Butte County Attorney’s office gave Val McCabe’s leg back on Wednesday after a judge ordered it returned. McCabe’s prosthetic left leg had been held since Friday’s shooting because prosecutors wanted to run tests on it and a bullet lodged inside. The 58-year-old McCabe, who lost his leg below the knee in a railroad accident roughly 30 years ago, filed his lawsuit on Tuesday. McCabe lawyer argued it wasn’t practical for him to replace the specially built, US$28,000 prosthesis. Police removed the bullet from the leg before returning it. No arrests had been made by Wednesday.
■CHILE
Storm victims rescued
Emergency crews used helicopters on Thursday to rescue some of the nearly 100,000 people hit by the worst rains in three decades in the southern part of the country, where at least four people have died, officials said. A storm has dumped torrential rain on the Araucania region 700km south of Santiago since Saturday, damaging at least 10,000 homes as waters flooded rivers and canals, blocked roadways and inundated 200,000 hectares of farmland. The towns of Carahue, Nueva Imperial, Puerto Saavedra and Teniente Schmidt were all inundated after nearby rivers overflowed. The region was designated a “catastrophe zone” by Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, who toured some of the worst-hit areas on Wednesday.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
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