■NEW ZEALAND
‘Tasteless’ pizza ad pulled
A pizza chain has withdrawn an advertisement showing the corpses of actor Heath Ledger, Britain’s Queen Mother and Mount Everest conqueror Sir Edmund Hillary dancing on a grave. The animated Halloween promotion advertisement on the Hell Pizza Web site shows the three decomposing celebrities emerging from graves and dancing to Michael Jackson’s song Thriller. Ledger and Hillary died this year and the Queen Mother passed away in 2002. Hillary’s son Peter said the ad was in “extremely poor taste.” “I think it’s a bit disturbing ... a little grotesque,” he told the Dominion Post.
■CHINA
‘Dark’ networks to blame
Eggs tainted with an industrial chemical were an isolated case, the Agriculture Minister was quoted saying the day after officials were ordered to crack the “dark” networks selling contaminated animal feed. The country is battling to restore faith in its food and the regulators who are supposed to check it after milk powder laced with melamine killed four babies and made tens of thousands more so sick they needed hospital treatment. The government rushed to tighten checks on milk and put melamine — used legally in making plastics and illegally to cheat nutrition tests — to a list of controlled ingredients.
■HONG KONG
Car plate draws US$46,000
The wealthy Special Administrative Region may be teetering on the brink of a global recession, but a prestige car number plate can still fetch more than US$46,000, auctioneers said yesterday. The car registration number 1234 fetched HK$360,000 (US$46,445) at Sunday’s government auction where a total of 280 unusual plates raised just short of US$345,000. However, of the 280 plates put up for auction, some 30 failed to reach their reserve price in a sign that the economic downturn is beginning to bite in one of the world’s richest cities. Shares have been among the worst hit in the recent downturn, with the Hang Seng Index shedding more than 25 percent of its value in the past six weeks alone.
■SOUTH KOREA
Public toilets get nod
Two South Korean cities have flushed away competition and won a best public toilets contest in Asia, the WHO said yesterday. The WHO said Seongbuk, which is part of Seoul, and the city of Jinju bested other cities in Asia in providing well-maintained public sanitary facilities. The mayors of Seongbuk and Jinju will receive their awards at the World Toilet Summit & Expo 2008 to be held in Macau starting yesterday. The WHO, which cosponsored the contest with the Alliance for Healthy Cities, cited Seongbuk for investing a significant amount of money in rehabilitating and upgrading government-operated toilets in the area.
■HONG KONG
Patten slams Bush
The last British colonial governor Chris Patten said in a radio interview yesterday that he thought US President George W. Bush was the worst US president he had seen. “I think that President Bush has been the worst American president in my lifetime,” Patten, who was in the former British colony this week to promote his latest book on global politics and economy, told broadcaster RTHK. “I don’t happen to think that President Bush is as foolish as lots of Europeans and others suggest. I think he’s actually perfectly intelligent,” he said ahead of today’s US presidential election. “But I don’t think he’s got a first-class temperament, to put it mildly. And I think he’s deeply uncurious intellectually.”
RSS