■UNITED STATES
Long eyebrows get trimmed
A 72-year-old man from Bloomfield, Indiana, with eyebrows so long he brushed them each morning raised US$1,600 for charity from people who paid to take turns trimming his out-of-control brows. Some of the hairs shorn from Si Burgher’s eyebrows measured more than 8cm long. Burgher agreed to have his brows tamed last week by the Bloomfield Rotary Club to raise money for a polio eradication campaign. His wife, Amy, got the first whack at the overgrown hairs. “I don’t care if they ever grow back,” he told the Herald-Times. “My wife says I look 20 years younger.” Amy Burgher said she liked his new look: “Beneath the eyebrows is a really handsome man.”
■UNITED STATES
Bank honors McCain
Barack Obama has the presidency and John McCain has a framed photograph next to one of John Kerry at a rural northwest Kansas bank. First State Bank’s “They Also Ran” gallery, a tribute to losing presidential candidates, added the Republican candidate’s image on Tuesday to a row of black-and-white drawings and photographs that starts with Thomas Jefferson, who lost to John Adams in 1796. Curator Lee Ann Shearer — who is also the bookkeeper at the Norton bank — said about 30 people showed up to watch. The gallery was started in 1965 by William Walter Rouse, bank president at the time, after he read Irving Stone’s book They Also Ran, about presidential campaign losers.
■MEXICO
Three heads found
Three heads were found in an ice box south of Ciudad Juarez, prosecutors said. The local prosecutor’s office said the victims were unidentified men and were found in a town about 50km from Ciudad Juarez. A headless body was discovered in a canal a few kilometers away, but the prosecutors’ statement said on Tuesday that the body might belong to one of six police officers kidnapped over the weekend. The heads of four of the officers had previously been found. More than 5,300 gang killings were reported last year countrywide.
■PERU
Rains affect Nazca lines
Heavy rains in recent days have affected the famed Nazca Lines, the 2,000-year-old giant outlines that are one of the country’s top tourist attractions, officials said on Tuesday. The precipitation left a layer of white clay on parts of two of the geoglyphs, “giving another color to the figures,” said archeologist Mario Olaechea of the National Institute of Culture. The Nazca Lines are considered one of the world’s great mysteries and depict people, animals and simple lines.
■MEXICO
Kissing capital named
When you come to Guanajuato, pucker up. Mayor Eduardo Romero is declaring the city “the kissing capital” of the world to disprove claims he banned smooching in public. A flap arose over an anti-obscenity law that many people believed would fine anyone caught kissing in public. The government denied it banned kissing, but suspended the law to review its wording. Romero unveiled ads on Tuesday featuring a couple kissing on one of Guanajuato’s streets. They read: “Guanajuato, the kissing capital.” A legend gives the city claim to the title: It tells of a young woman whose father prohibited her from seeing her lover because he was too poor. But the couple lived across from each other on a street so narrow they could lean out their windows to kiss in secret. The street is known as “Kissing Alley.”
■ITALY
Police seize cocaine
Customs police have arrested five people in separate drug busts, including two Brazilians who tried smuggling in cocaine hidden between packaged meat slices. Police at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci airport said on Tuesday they seized 15kg of the drug last week. Police Lieutenant Giuseppe di Stasio said officers became suspicious when they found packages of red meat in the luggage of the Brazilian man and woman. Inspection showed small packets of cocaine had been hidden between the meat slices. In a separate operation, police arrested three Argentines who tried to bring in cocaine in a hidden compartment of their suitcase.
■YEMEN
German hostage released
A German contractor taken hostage has been released, a tribal source close to the kidnappers told reporters on Tuesday. “The kidnappers handed the German hostage over to tribal mediators an hour ago,” along with two other Yemenis who had also been kidnapped, the source told reporters. “They are now on their way to the city Ataq, capital of the eastern province of Shebwa,” where the German was taken hostage, the source said. Armed tribesmen kidnapped the German contractor working for gas firm Yemen LNG on Sunday. The tribesmen were demanding the release of one of their kinsmen from a prison in Yemen. They have “received promises” from a top security official to fulfill their demands, the tribal source told reporters.
■FRANCE
Paris brushes off ‘snub’
Paris on Tuesday brushed off a decision by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) to skip France when he makes a fence-mending tour of European capitals next week, denying it was a snub to the government. “I do not sense an attempt to go everywhere in Europe but France,” foreign ministry spokesman Eric Chevallier told reporters after Beijing announced plans for the week-long visit, starting next Tuesday. “I do not believe that the Chinese prime minister’s schedule includes all the countries in the EU, or even all the countries considered to have the most economic and demographic weight in the Europe,” he said. Relations between France and China hit a low point when Beijing postponed summit with the EU last month due to be hosted in France. Beijing was protesting at a decision by President Nicolas Sarkozy, then holder of the rotating EU presidency, to meet Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama. Wen’s visit to Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Britain, and the EU headquarters in Brussels was presented by Beijing as a move to mend ties with Europe hurt by tensions over Tibet, but France has been left off the list.
■RUSSIA
Medvedev visits Ingushetia
President Dmitry Medvedev visited the southern region of Ingushetia on Tuesday and pledged to spend billions of roubles on the province where violence has threatened to dent the Kremlin’s control. In an apparently unrelated incident, news agencies reported on Tuesday that gunmen had shot and wounded a senior official from one of Ingushetia’s regions in his car on the outskirts of the town of Nazran. “Despite the fact that we don’t have the simplest financial situation at the moment, we have allocated 29 billion roubles (US$881.5 million), and this is big money,” Medvedev said during a meeting with Ingushetia’s President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov. He did not specify when the money would be allocated or exactly how it would be spent.
■HONG KONG
Murder rate doubles
Twice as many people were murdered in the Special Administrative Region last year than the previous year as the region saw a spate of cases involving the killing of prostitutes, police said yesterday. There were 36 murders in the relatively low-crime territory of 6.9 million in the last year, twice as many as in 2007. More than half of the cases involved family and relationship disputes, police said. In five of the murders the victims were prostitutes, a trend that has led welfare groups to call on the government to give sex workers greater protection against attack.
■SRI LANKA
Blast kills two in east
A blast authorities blamed on Tamil Tiger rebels killed two people and wounded 11 yesterday in the eastern part of the country, police said. The explosion in the town of Batticaloa came as the military has cornered the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the northeast of the Indian Ocean island nation and is fighting toward a decisive battle to end the 25-year-war. “An explosion in Batticaloa town has killed one police officer, a civilian and injured 11 others including four schoolchildren,” police spokesman Ranjith Gunasekara said. He blamed the LTTE for the blast. The LTTE could not be reached for comment.
■VIETNAM
Case could embarrass PM
The prosecution of two senior government officials for embezzling more than US$50,000 from a state-funded IT project could tarnish the reputation of former prime minister Phan Van Khai, a prominent lawyer said yesterday. The government announced on Monday it would try Vu Dinh Thuan, 67, former deputy head of the Government Secretariat, and his former assistant Luong Cao Son, 52, for alleged embezzlement committed between 2001 and 2007. The two are charged with submitting inflated expenses and pocketing the difference while administering Project 112, a failed program to set up a national electronic network for government offices.
■INDIA
PM undergoes heart tests
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh underwent medical tests on Tuesday and yesterday for heart-related problems at a top state-run hospital in New Delhi, the Press Trust of India (PTI) reported. The tests included an angiogram that revealed some arterial blockages in his heart and doctors were debating the next course of action, PTI said. The 76-year-old premier had visited the All India Institute of Medical Sciences on Tuesday for an “overall medical checkup,” the report said.
■INDONESIA
Airline official jailed
The Supreme Court sentenced a former senior official from Garuda Indonesia airlines to one year in jail for aiding in the murder of a prominent human rights campaigner who was poisoned on a flight to Amsterdam four years ago, state-run media said yesterday. The Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s acquittal of Rohainil Aini, the former secretary to the chief pilot of national carrier Garuda Indonesia, linked to the murder of Munir Said Thalib. The court sentenced Rohainil to one year in prison, saying that she had been proven guilty of falsifying an assignment letter enabling an off-duty Garuda pilot, Pollycarpus Budi Priyanto, to travel on Munir’s flight.
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