■ISRAEL
Not swine, but Mexican flu
The outbreak of swine flu should be renamed “Mexican” influenza in deference to Muslim and Jewish sensitivities over pork, a health official said on Monday. Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman said the reference to pigs is offensive to both religions and “we should call this Mexican flu and not swine flu,” he told a news conference at a hospital. Both Judaism and Islam consider pigs unclean and forbid the eating of pork products. Scientists are unsure where the new swine flu virus originally emerged, though it was identified first in the US. They say there is nothing about the virus that makes it “Mexican” and worry such a label would be stigmatizing.
■UNITED STATES
Chihuahua takes flight
Tinker Bell has been reunited with her owners after a 113kph gust of wind picked up the 2.7kg Chihuahua and tossed her out of sight. Dorothy and Lavern Utley credit a pet psychic for guiding them on Monday to a wooded area nearly 1.6km from where eight-month-old Tinker Bell had been last seen. The brown long-haired dog was dirty and hungry but otherwise OK. The Utleys, of Rochester, Michigan, had set up an outdoor display on Saturday at a flea market in Waterford Township, 40km northwest of Detroit. Tinker Bell was standing on their platform trailer when she was swept away. Dorothy Utley told the Detroit News that her cherished pet “just went wild” upon seeing her.
■UNITED STATES
Stripper stands in at reunion
Comedy writer Andrea Wachner hated the idea of going to her 10-year high school reunion so much that she hired a stripper to go instead and what followed, she says, was a comical study in human nature. Her story is detailed in a nearly 40-minute documentary directed by Wachner that, because of issues surrounding its length and getting approval to show it from former classmates, may never be seen — not even by her parents.
■UNITED STATES
Hijacking trio sentenced
Life stopped smelling rosy for a New York gang sentenced on Monday to lengthy prison sentences for hijacking trucks loaded with perfumes and cosmetics. A court in White Plains, New York, sentenced the three men to 55, 37 and 26 years for a series of armed hijackings in the New York region between September 2006 and January 2007, prosecutors said. In one hit the gang stormed a truck carrying more than US$500,000 worth of perfume, pistol-whipped the drivers, then drove the truck to New Jersey for unloading. In another attack, two of the convicted men took part in the hijacking of a tractor-trailer containing more than US$150,000 worth of Elizabeth Arden cosmetics in Pennsylvania, prosecutors said.
RSS