■AUSTRALIA
Unlucky day for aged ewe
The world’s oldest sheep, Lucky, has died after succumbing to a record heat wave that scorched much of the country’s southeast, its owner said yesterday. Despite her best efforts to nurse Lucky through the searing heat, Delrae Westgarth said the ewe died on Monday, aged 23 years, six months and 28 days, at the farm in Victoria state where she was born. “We brought her into the shed where she was reared and put air conditioners on her, which kept her going a bit longer,” Westgarth told public broadcaster ABC. Lucky was recognized by Guinness World Records as the world’s oldest sheep in 2007. The normal top age for a sheep is 10 to 12 years.
■INDONESIA
Ferry passenger rescued
Rescuers plucked a woman from choppy waters on Monday, some 25 hours after she jumped from a crowded ferry that sank in a storm off Sumatra. At least 29 people drowned and 20 others were missing. A total of 255 survivors have been pulled from the sea since Sunday, when the Dumai Express 10 was hit by towering waves and sank about 90 minutes into an inter-island trip from Batam to Dumai in Riau. The rescued woman in her 30s was spotted by fishermen and was in stable condition in a hospital, a navy officer said. Patrols were still searching for 20 people, but bad weather was hampering the mission, the navy said.
■AUSTRALIA
Kangaroos smuggle drugs
Drugs are being smuggled into Aboriginal communities in the far north inside dead kangaroos, the Northern Territory parliament was told yesterday. Former indigenous affairs minister Alison Anderson said cannabis was being sewn inside kangaroo carcasses to get it past police patrols. Outback roads are often littered with kangaroos killed by vehicles and the roadkill is often collected. Anderson said women were also stuffing cannabis into their underwear as police are not permitted to frisk females.
■AUSTRALIA
Jetstar apologizes to athlete
Budget airline Jetstar apologized on Tuesday after making a Paralympic champion check in his wheelchair before a flight. Kurt Fearnley, who had just completed a grueling 96km crawl along a Papua New Guinea jungle track, complained bitterly about the weekend incident. Fearnley, 28, hauled himself around Brisbane airport using his hands and onto his flight in protest when Jetstar asked him to check in his personal wheelchair. He spurned the airline’s wheelchair, specially designed for planes, complaining that he would lose his mobility and have to be pushed around by airport staff.
■FRANCE
Bank robber turns cult hero
A suspected bank robber may not be most girls’ idea of Mr Right, but women are proposing marriage to a jailed van driver accused of stealing millions of euros, his lawyer said on Monday. Toni Musulin, 39, has become a cult sensation after he drove off from Lyon with 11.6 million euros (US$17 million) in his van on Nov. 5, before surrendering to police after 11 days on the run. “Contrary to what you might think, Toni Musulin is far from being the crook that we want to describe him as. He is an interesting man,” defense lawyer Herve Banabanaste told a press conference in Lyon. “He receives marriage proposals and requests for his face to appear on T-shirts. We are in quite an absurd situation, but he is taking it with a lot of humor,” he said, without saying how many proposals he had received. More than 9 million euros were recovered by police in an underground Lyon parking lot two days after his disappearance, but Musulin has refused to provide any information on the missing 2.5 million euros.
■UNITED STATES
Nude model released
A New York judge dismissed public lewdness and other charges on Monday against a model who posed for a nude photo shoot at a museum while visitors looked on. Kathleen “K.C.” Neill was arrested in August during photographer Zach Hyman’s shoot in the arms and armor department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Defense lawyer Thomas Hillgardner said Neill did nothing indecent while posing in an institution full of depictions of nudes. He said she was making art and he noted court rulings saying public nakedness isn’t necessarily lewd. Prosecutors said they weren’t sure they could prove the charges beyond reasonable doubt.
■UNITED STATES
Mosque arsonist sentenced
A court in Tennessee sentenced a man to more than 14 years in prison for burning down a local mosque, the Justice Department said on Monday. Michael Corey Golden, 24, was sentenced to 14 years and three months in prison after pleading guilty to having vandalized and burned down the mosque in February 2008. Golden admitted to using Molotov cocktail explosives to destroy the mosque, which he ignited while a co-defendant painted swastikas and the phrase “White Power” on the walls of the building in the town of Columbia. “The right to worship without fear of this kind of violent interference is among our most fundamental civil rights,” said Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general for civil rights. “We will aggressively prosecute anyone who seeks to intimidate or injure any congregation because of what they believe, how they worship or who they are.”
■NORWAY
Gingerbread town destroyed
The people of Bergen rolled out the cookie dough on Monday as local police tried to sniff out vandals who destroyed the city’s traditional Christmas decoration — a town of gingerbread houses. On Saturday vandals entered a massive tent in central Bergen and crushed most of the 650-cookie-house town, topping off the ruins with paint and fire extinguisher foam. Police in the country’s second-biggest city asked the public to offer information that could lead to the perpetrators. Local media reported that the destruction had shocked the residents of Bergen, a picturesque city on the North Sea coast where children decorate hundreds of gingerbread houses every year before Christmas.
IDENTITY: A sex extortion scandal involving Thai monks has deeply shaken public trust in the clergy, with 11 monks implicated in financial misconduct Reverence for the saffron-robed Buddhist monkhood is deeply woven into Thai society, but a sex extortion scandal has besmirched the clergy and left the devout questioning their faith. Thai police this week arrested a woman accused of bedding at least 11 monks in breach of their vows of celibacy, before blackmailing them with thousands of secretly taken photos of their trysts. The monks are said to have paid nearly US$12 million, funneled out of their monasteries, funded by donations from laypeople hoping to increase their merit and prospects for reincarnation. The scandal provoked outrage over hypocrisy in the monkhood, concern that their status
The United States Federal Communications Commission said on Wednesday it plans to adopt rules to bar companies from connecting undersea submarine communication cables to the US that include Chinese technology or equipment. “We have seen submarine cable infrastructure threatened in recent years by foreign adversaries, like China,” FCC Chair Brendan Carr said in a statement. “We are therefore taking action here to guard our submarine cables against foreign adversary ownership, and access as well as cyber and physical threats.” The United States has for years expressed concerns about China’s role in handling network traffic and the potential for espionage. The U.S. has
A disillusioned Japanese electorate feeling the economic pinch goes to the polls today, as a right-wing party promoting a “Japanese first” agenda gains popularity, with fears over foreigners becoming a major election issue. Birthed on YouTube during the COVID-19 pandemic, spreading conspiracy theories about vaccinations and a cabal of global elites, the Sanseito Party has widened its appeal ahead of today’s upper house vote — railing against immigration and dragging rhetoric that was once confined to Japan’s political fringes into the mainstream. Polls show the party might only secure 10 to 15 of the 125 seats up for grabs, but it is
The US Department of Education on Tuesday said it opened a foreign funding investigation into the University of Michigan (UM) while alleging it found “inaccurate and incomplete disclosures” in a review of the university’s foreign reports, after two Chinese scientists linked to the school were separately charged with smuggling biological materials into the US. As part of the investigation, the department asked the university to share, within 30 days, tax records related to foreign funding, a list of foreign gifts, grants and contracts with any foreign source, and other documents, the department said in a statement and in a letter to
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