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World News Quick Take

■INDIA

PM in hospital debacle

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh awarded compensation to the widow of a man who died after being prevented from receiving emergency treatment because the premier was touring a hospital. Singh’s office said on Wednesday that a check for 200,000 rupees (US$4,250) had been handed to S. Verma’s family, who said he was held up for two hours outside the hospital by the prime minister’s security staff. Singh also wrote a letter to the family expressing his regret that Verma “could not get access [to the hospital] in time because of the restrictions in place for my visit there.” The family said security teams outside the hospital in the northern city of Chandigarh had ignored their pleas that Verma, a 32-year-old with a history of kidney problems, was in a critical condition.



■INDIA

Nanny rented out baby

A nanny in Bangalore was fired after she regularly drugged a seven-month-old baby in her care and rented him out for US$2 a day to be used by street beggars, a newspaper reported yesterday. The child’s mother found her baby missing when she returned home early from work at a multinational firm, the Times of India newspaper said. The nanny confessed to renting out the baby for the previous three weeks, it said.



■HONG KONG

Honest cab driver rewarded

A cab driver who found diamonds worth HK$1 million (US$130,000) in his taxi and handed them to the police has been rewarded for his honesty, a news report said yesterday. The diamonds were left under the back seat of the taxi of Yau Chi-keung (丘志強) by an Indonesian businessman in April last year, the South China Morning Post said. Yau, 57, reported the bag to the police not knowing what was inside it. Yau was rewarded for his honesty with a Quality Taxi Driver Award by the transport commissioner on Thursday. He also received a cash reward from the owner of the diamonds which he gave to charity.



■NEW ZEALAND

Doll found in baby’s grave

Police found a doll when they exhumed a casket from a cemetery while investigating the reported death of a baby, a newspaper reported yesterday. A 33-year-old woman later confessed to staging a funeral to avoid admitting to her partner, who wanted a baby, that she had not been pregnant, the Manukau Courier reported. Detective Darrell Harpur said the woman, who was not named, initially believed she was pregnant, but then discovered she was not. “For some reason she couldn’t tell him, so she embarked on this subterfuge,” Harpur said. The detective said police exhumed a casket from the Mangere Lawn Cemetery, South Auckland, after authorities became suspicious when they received a request for birth and death certificates for a baby with no doctor’s certificate.



■SOUTH KOREA

Driven woman passes test

A woman who tried to pass the written exam for a driver’s license with near-daily attempts since April 2005 has finally succeeded on her 950th time. The aspiring driver spent more than 5 million won (US$4,200) in application fees, but had failed to score the minimum 60 out of 100 points. Cha Sa-soon, 68, finally passed the exam with a score of 60 on Wednesday, said Choi Young-chul, a police official at the drivers’ license agency in Jeonju, 210km south of Seoul. Now she must pass a driving test before getting her license, Choi said.



■FRANCE

Guard escapes with millions

Police in Lyon were searching yesterday for the driver of an armored van who apparently made off with 11 million euros (US$16.4 million) belonging to the Bank of France, media reported. The 39-year-old driver apparently simply drove off Thursday while the van’s two other guards left him alone when they stopped at a branch office of the security company they worked for. The van, stripped of the 38 bags of bills it was carrying, was found several hours later in a Lyon suburb. France Info radio reported that police believe the heist had been meticulously planned. The suspect had drawn all the money out of his bank account and the refrigerator in his home was empty.



■UNITED KINGDOM

Ex-PM almost gets boot

An angry man threw a boot at former Australian prime minister John Howard during a debate at Cambridge University, the student who caught the shoe said on Thursday. Andrew Chapman of the Cambridge Union Society, which organized the debate, said he stepped in to stop the boot thrown by an Australian man. Howard “took it amazingly well — he just brushed off the incident,” the 20-year-old politics student and keen cricketer said. In the debate last Friday, Howard was heckled by a man shouting “go home, racist” to the former premier. When Howard got up to speak, the man shouted: “You make me ashamed to be Australian. Go home, racist.” A short while later, Chapman said, “he reached down to his foot, and I knew what was going to happen. I stood up, and got in between Mr Howard and this gentlemen. He threw this boot and I caught it.” The man, whose identity remains unknown, was escorted out of the building. He later returned to retrieve his boot, but “we politely turned down this request,” Chapman said. Asked about his lightning reflexes honed on the cricket pitch, he added: “There wasn’t a large amount going through my head at the time, other than that we had invited John Howard, he was our guest, and we have to protect him.”



■FRANCE

Famous peak shrinking

Western Europe’s tallest peak, the snow-capped Alpine giant Mont Blanc, has shrunk by 45cm in two years, experts said on Thursday following an official survey. The new height of Mont Blanc, which lies on the three-way border between France, Italy and Switzerland, is now 4,810.45m, just over half that of Nepal’s Everest but still the tallest Alpine peak. The volume of snow and ice coating the summit has also dropped by about a tenth, topographer Bernard Dupont told reporters, adding that this could not be linked directly to the effects of climate change. The expedition also found that the highest point on the mountain had shifted 26m closer to Italy but remained in France.



■LEBANON

Anne Frank diary censored

Anne Frank’s diary has been censored out of a school textbook following a campaign by the militant group Hezbollah, which claimed the classic work promotes Zionism. The controversy erupted after Hezbollah learned that excerpts of The Diary of Anne Frank were included in a textbook used by a private English-language school in Beirut. Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television channel ran a report slamming the book for focusing on the persecution of Jews. “What is even more dangerous is the dramatic, theatrical way in which the diary is emotionally recounted,” the report said. A member of the school board said that the school dropped the textbook from its curriculum after the controversy erupted.



■UNITED STATES

Car crashes into elephant

A couple driving along a rural road at night crashed into an elephant that had escaped from a nearby circus. The couple weren’t injured, but the 2.4m tall, 2,040kg elephant was being examined on Thursday for a broken tusk and a leg wound. A local veterinarian said it appeared to have escaped major injury. Bill Carpenter, 68, said he swerved his sport utility vehicle at the last second and ended up sideswiping the 29-year-old female elephant late on Wednesday on a rural highway in Enid, Oklahoma. “Didn’t have time to hit the brakes. The elephant blended in with the road,” driver Carpenter said on Thursday. “At the very last second I said ‘elephant!’ So help me Hanna, had I hit that elephant, not swerved, it would have knocked it off its legs, and it would have landed right on top of us.” After sideswiping the elephant, his wife, Deena, flagged some people down and used their cell phone to call police. “The dispatcher didn’t believe her: ‘You hit a what?’” Carpenter said.



■UNITED STATES

Police charge snake owner

A man who caught a 4.2m python in a Florida drain pipe was charged with perpetrating a hoax after wildlife officers discovered he owned the snake and put it in the pipe in order to stage the capture. Justin Matthews, a professional animal trapper, later said that he had “staged the event to call attention to a growing problem of irresponsible pet ownership,” the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said on Thursday. Matthews was charged with misusing the 911 emergency system and maintaining captive wildlife in an unsafe manner.



■UNITED STATES

Stolen VW van recovered

A Volkswagen van stolen 35 years ago in Washington state has been found in a shipping container bound for the Netherlands. Customs agents found the 1965 van on Oct. 19 when they opened a shipping container at the Los Angeles/Long Beach seaport, the Spokesman-Review newspaper reported. They ran the vehicle identification number and discovered it was listed as stolen. Law officers said the van, which is in great shape, was stolen from an upholstery shop in Spokane on July 12, 1974 — while Spokane was hosting the 1974 World’s Fair. Authorities have not been able to find the original owner, whom they would not identify. The operators of a vehicle restoration business in Arizona were the latest to have possession of the van, which they refurbished and planned to sell abroad, said Michael Maleta, an investigator with the California Highway Patrol.



■CANADA

Coroners identify foot No. 7

A coroner has identified the seventh severed foot that washed up on the bank of a British Columbia river last month as belonging to Vancouver man who committed suicide. Police said on Thursday the foot belonged to a man reported missing in January last year. The man’s identity is being withheld at the family’s request. The foot, found on Oct. 27, is the seventh severed foot to wash ashore in British Columbia since August 2007.



■CANADA

Royalty visit castle

Prince Charles and Camilla have arrived at a Canadian castle that was home to a distant relative of Camilla, who is the Duchess of Cornwall. The duchess’ great-great-great grandfather Allan Napier MacNab lived in the Dundurn Castle in Hamilton, Ontario. Macnab was pre-Confederation prime minister from 1854 to 1856. MacNab’s family came to Canada from Scotland and he was born in Ontario in 1798.


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