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World News Quick Take

■JAPAN

Police target elderly thieves

Tokyo police will try to rein in a wave of shoplifting by lonely elderly people by involving them in community service, a police spokesman said on Thursday. One out of four elderly shoplifters in the capital blamed their crime on loneliness, Japanese media quoted a police survey as saying. Another 8 percent said it was because they had “no reason to live.” More than half the elderly shoplifters said they had no friends and 40 percent of them lived alone, media said. Elderly shoplifting cases in Tokyo reached all-time highs last year, nearly catching up with the number of cases involving young offenders. People 65 years or older accounted for 23 percent of the 17,800 known shoplifting cases last year, more than doubling in the past five years, media said. An example cited in the Ministry of Justice’s annual report on crime describes a 76-year-old woman who turned to shoplifting several years ago as a way to battle loneliness after her parents died.



■NEW ZEALAND

Horse smashes windshield

A horse flew through a car windshield, knocking the driver in the face after the woman swerved to miss two other horses that had bolted in front of her car. “I thought the body was the air bag that had gone off,” Catherine Lawrence, 74, told the New Zealand Herald after her accident near the city of Nelson on South Island. Much of the car’s roof was peeled away in the collision, which killed the horse. “The horse hit me on the corner right in front of me,” she was quoted as saying. “But he didn’t come straight back — he went across and he just grazed me, knocking his ... hooves into my face on the way through, and his head was on the back and the rest of him was piled up beside me on the passenger’s seat. If anyone else had been in the car, they wouldn’t have had a hope,” Lawrence said. She was able to get out of the car and was treated for bruises to her face and an eye injury.



■CHINA

Kung fu artist becomes nun

A kung fu artist who tows cars and cuts paper with her braided hair has given up her crowning glory to officially become a Buddhist nun. Zhang Tingting completely shaved off the hair that she says has “kung fu power” and extraordinary strength so that she can enter a temple as a nun.



■NORTH KOREA

Burger business booming

Business is booming at the nation’s first fast food restaurant, which specializes in burgers, chips and other fried delights, official media in the communist state reported yesterday. The Samtaesong restaurant in Pyongyang, which also serves waffles and crispy fried chicken, “is crowded with local and foreign customers,” the Korean Central News Agency said. The venture opened in June in cooperation with a Singaporean firm, Choson Sinbo, a Japan-based newspaper for ethnic North Koreans, reported earlier. “It instantly cooks and serves dishes to the customers as they demand,” KCNA reported approvingly. The hardline regime has long restricted or banned what it sees as Western or “US imperialist influences” on its people. But in March Choson Sinbo reported that the North had also opened its first “authentic” Italian restaurant on the orders of leader Kim Jong-il, who is believed to have a taste for some Western cuisine. The eatery, which opened in December in Pyongyang, has reportedly proved to be a major hit. In 2004, the BBC ran an interview with an Italian chef who had taught pizza-making skills to three North Korean army officers so they could cook for the country’s leader.



■BELARUS

President rigged vote

President Alexander Lukashenko has admitted rigging the last presidential election — because his popularity is so vast that the true margin of victory was unbelievable and had to be lowered, he said. Lukashenko said in an interview published on Thursday by the Russian daily Izvestia that he took 93 percent of the vote in the 2006 polls, but he had the number reduced for “psychological” reasons. “I gave the order for it to be not 93 percent, but something around 80, I can’t remember how much,” he said. Official results had Lukashenko winning 83 percent of the vote in the election that was condemned as undemocratic by Western election observers.



■NETHERLANDS

Moon rock a fake

The Dutch national museum said on Thursday that one of its prized possessions, a rock supposedly brought back from the moon by US astronauts, is just a piece of petrified wood. Rijksmuseum spokeswoman Xandra van Gelder, who oversaw the investigation that proved the piece was a fake, said the museum would keep it anyway as a curiosity. The museum acquired the rock after the death of former prime minister Willem Drees in 1988. Drees received it as a private gift on Oct. 9, 1969, from then-US ambassador J. William Middendorf during a visit by the three Apollo 11 astronauts, part of their “Giant Leap” goodwill tour after the first moon landing. Middendorf, who lives in Rhode Island, told Dutch NOS news that he had gotten it from the US State Department, but couldn’t recall the exact details.



■SOUTH AFRICA

Bishop ‘raped’ daughters

A bishop was arrested on Thursday for raping his three daughters aged nine, 17 and 18 at their home in the Vaal Triangle region, police said. “It is alleged that he has been raping his children since 2006 and threatened to kill them if they reported him,” a police spokesman told the news agency SAPA. The bishop’s wife reported the rape of the nine-year-old after the child complained of pains and admitted under questioning that her father had raped her. The older girls then told of their ordeal. Police declined to reveal the name of the bishop’s ATTACK: The Saudi wing of al-Qaeda said it was behind the blast. The bomber was the only casualty, while the prince suffered minor injurieschurch but said he was to appear at a magistrate’s court in Vereeniging yesterday to face three counts of rape.



■GERMANY

Roman horse head unveiled

Archeologists on Thursday unveiled a bronze and gold horse’s head they said was believed to be a remnant of a 2,000-year-old Roman statue. A team digging at a former Roman town near Waldgirmes in central Germany found the life-sized head along with the foot of a rider on Aug. 12. “This bronze sculpture counts among the best pieces to have ever been found from the area of the former Roman empire,” Hesse State Minister for Science Eva Kuehne-Hoermann said at the unveiling in Frankfurt. Experts say the statue dates from around 3 BC or 4 BC when the Roman outpost was set up and probably depicts the Emperor Augustus.



■ITALY

Ban on Blue Grotto lifted

Officials in Capri have lifted a ban on visits to the island’s Blue Grotto. Capri Environment Commissioner Alessandro Esposito said on Thursday that tests of the cave’s sparkling blue waters found they were fine and had “absolutely no pollution.” Samples of the water were analyzed after a fisherman reported a nauseating smell and an unexplained whitish foam in the grotto. Earlier this month, police found that raw cesspool sewage was being dumped into the waters.
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