HONG KONG
Suitors drawn by ‘bounty’
A tycoon who offered a US$65 million “marriage bounty” to any man who can win the heart of his lesbian daughter has been inundated with applications from around the globe, a report said yesterday. Cecil Chao (趙世曾) told the South China Morning Post newspaper that around 100 would-be suitors of his 33-year-old daughter, Gigi (趙式芝), had poured into his office since he went public with his offer on Wednesday. One of the applicants, a Frenchman, wrote: “I’m really serious and [despite the fact] I am a man I think I can make this woman happy. I’m as soft as a woman.” Another appeared to offer a menage a trois: “I will win his daughter’s heart and marry her, and my Maid Marian, a gorgeous Brazilian model, will help accomplish that with me.” Gigi has dismissed her father’s behavior and all the attention she is receiving as “seriously distracting.” Chao announced the financial reward of HK$500 million after Gigi reportedly married her same-sex partner of seven years in France earlier this year.
JAPAN
Chinese crew rescued
A dozen Chinese crew members were rescued by the coast guard when their Panama-registered boat caught fire in a bay, an official said yesterday. Television footage showed thick smoke pouring from the Hao Han, a 1,999 tonne cargo vessel, as the ship listed badly in waters off Osaka. The coast guard, which has recently been heavily involved in a standoff with Beijing over disputed islands in the East China Sea, pulled the crew to safety and was tackling the blaze. “There were no injuries among the crew,” a coast guard spokesman said. The cargo vessel left Kagoshima on Friday last week and docked at two other Japanese ports before sailing for China loaded with 1,000 tonnes of scrap metal, he said. Live footage aired by public broadcaster NHK showed a fierce fire on the boat as a coast guard vessel sprayed it with water.
NORTH KOREA
German film wins festival
A German film about an English teacher’s struggle to introduce soccer at a strict school in late 19th-century Germany has won the grand prize at the Pyongyang International Film Festival.
North Korea’s official news agency reports that The Big Dream also won the festival’s award for best actor, while a joint North Korean-European film, Comrade Kim Goes Flying, won for best direction. The biennial film festival closed on Thursday after an eight-day run that offered North Koreans and foreigners the chance to see movies from North Korea as well as France, Britain, Iran, India and Russia. The film festival is the only time North Koreans and foreigners can watch films together at Pyongyang theaters.
GERMANY
Statue found to be meteorite
An ancient Buddhist statue that a Nazi expedition brought back from Tibet shortly before World War II was carved from a meteorite that crashed on Earth thousands of years ago. Elmar Buchner of the University of Stuttgart said on Thursday the statue was brought to Germany by the Schaefer expedition that set out for Tibet in 1938 in part to trace the origins of the Aryan race. The existence of the 10.6kg statue, known as “iron man,” was only revealed in 2007 when it came up for auction, Buchner said. German and Austrian scientists conducted a chemical analysis that shows the statue came from the Chinga meteorite, which crashed in the area of what is now the Russian and Mongolian border around 15,000 years ago. The Nazis were probably attracted to it by a left-facing swastika symbol on its front.
FRANCE
Iconic orangutan dies in zoo
A Sumatran orangutan believed to be the oldest reproductive specimen in captivity has died at a zoo in the western part of the country, a few weeks after celebrating his 50th birthday. Major, a 125kg father of 16 who celebrated his birthday in July, died overnight on Tuesday at the zoo in La Boissiere-du-Dore near Nantes, zoo director Sebastien Laurent said. “I saw him playing on Monday, as he often did, with his children ...” Laurent said. “And on Wednesday the guys found him dead on his bed, his body still warm. He lived at the zoo for 23 years and this is our mascot that has left us, it’s hard,” he said. He said Major’s body would be preserved and stored at the Museum of Natural History in Paris.
UNITED STATES
UN chief in comedy prank
Former victims include Bill Gates, Mick Jagger, Britney Spears and Sarah Palin. This week, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon joined the ranks of those pranked by a Quebec radio station, his office confirmed on Thursday. Montreal comedy duo Marc-Antoine Audette and Sebastien Trudel called Ban on Wednesday afternoon and pretended to be Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. “He quickly realized it was a prank ... and he took it as it was intended: as a joke,” said Eri Kaneko, associate spokeswoman for Ban’s office. Known as the Masked Avengers, the two are notorious for prank calls to celebrities and heads of state. The duo said in a news release that the world’s top diplomat was rushed out of an important meeting to speak to them. During the call, Ban appears to become suspicious when fake Harper complains he was too busy combing his hair with Krazy Glue to attend this week’s ministerial meeting of the UN General Assembly — a clear dig at the Canadian leader’s immaculate hairdo.
UNITED STATES
Police wary of neo-Nazi fest
The mayor’s office in Boise, Idaho, is fielding numerous complaints about a neo-Nazi music festival planned for early next month, the city’s police department said. Authorities have been on alert since advertisements for Hammerfest 2012 near Boise surfaced online, Sergeant Jeff Basterrechea of the police department’s gang intelligence unit said. The white supremacist group Hammerskin Nation plans to hold the event on Oct. 6, according to the flier circulating online. The gunman who killed six worshipers at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin last month described himself as a member. Former neo-Nazi skinhead Marine T.J. Leyden told a news station he previously recruited for the group with events like Hammerfest. Leyden, who famously left the movement in 1996 and has promoted tolerance ever since.
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