HONG KONG
Women can spot infidelity
Women can tell with some accuracy whether an unfamiliar male is faithful simply by looking at his face, but men seem to lack the same ability when checking out women, according to an Australian study published yesterday. In a paper that appeared in the journal Biology Letters, the researchers found that women tended to make that judgement based on how masculine-looking the man was. “Women’s ratings of unfaithfulness showed small-moderate, significant correlations with measures of actual infidelity,” wrote the team, led by Gillian Rhodes of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders at the University of Western Australia. “More masculine-looking men [were] rated as more probable to be unfaithful and having a sexual history of being more unfaithful.” Attractiveness was not a factor in the women making the link. “We provide the first evidence that faithfulness judgements, based solely on facial appearance, have a kernel of truth,” they wrote in the paper. Men, on the other hand, seemed to have no clue. They tended to perceive attractive, feminine women to be unfaithful, when there was no evidence that they were, the scientists said.
AUSTRALIA
Pupil ‘shows’ hand grenade
A school was evacuated yesterday after a child took a hand grenade into the classroom for a “show and tell” lesson, police said. The grenade resembles a World War II “pineapple” model and was believed to be inert, but police said it would not be moved from a teacher’s desk until specialists were satisfied it was safe to do so. “At this time we anticipate an early resolution to this issue, but we will await specialist advice as to the safety of moving the item,” Inspector Gerrard Lawson of Newcastle City Local Area Command said. “I want to warn members of the public that if they have or are aware of military ordnance they should not touch or move it, but contact police immediately.” He added that it was not yet known where the student obtained the grenade.
ITALY
Man who killed son jailed
A man who killed his 16-month-old son by throwing him off a bridge in Rome after a custody row with his partner was sentenced to 30 years in jail on Tuesday, Italian media reported. Patrizio Franceschelli, 26, threw his son Claudio into the freezing waters of the Tiber in February after arguing with the boy’s mother. The toddler’s body was found more than a month later after it washed up on the shore kilometers downstream. Franceschelli had been seen throwing his son into the river by a passing prison officer and had tried to flee, but was quickly caught by police.
FRANCE
French men losing sperm
The sperm count in French men dropped by nearly a third between 1989 and 2005, and the quality of sperm also declined, a study said yesterday. The sperm count fell at a rate of about 1.9 percent a year, said the authors of the report covering more than 26,600 men over the 17-year period and published in the journal Human Reproduction. The percentage of normally shaped sperm fell by 33.4 percent. “To our knowledge, this is the first study concluding a severe and general decrease in sperm concentration and morphology at the scale of a whole country over a substantial period,” wrote one of the report’s authors, epidemiologist Joelle Le Moal. “This constitutes a serious public health warning.” For the average man of 35 the number of sperm dropped from 73.6 million to 49.9 million per milliliter, the study showed.
FRANCE
Dati paternity case unfolds
A court on Tuesday ordered a hotel and casino tycoon to take a paternity test to determine whether he is the father of former justice minister Rachida Dati’s daughter. Dati, 46, a glamorous protege of ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, took a case against Dominique Desseigne to try to make him accept paternity in the latest case to cast light on the hitherto taboo sexual antics of France’s political elite. Desseigne, 68, the boss of the Lucien Barriere casino, hotel and restaurant group, has confirmed he had a fling with Dati, but has refused to take a paternity test that would establish if he is the father of three-year-old Zohra. The law stipulates that a court cannot force Desseigne to take the test, but can interpret a refusal as confirming he is the father and thus potentially liable to support the child financially. According to a report last month in Le Monde, the lawyer has argued that his client could not have been the father and to highlight the fact that Dati had seven other lovers around the time of the conception.
UNITED KINGDOM
‘Stuntman’ given jail time
A man who climbed naked onto an equestrian statue in London’s government district, ripped off its sword and bit it has been sentenced to 12 weeks in jail. Dan Motrescu brought central London traffic to a standstill when he mounted the bronze statue of the 19th-century Duke of Cambridge on Nov. 23. Police cordoned off Whitehall, a street that is home to several government departments, as Motrescu climbed up and down the statue, at one point balancing himself on the duke’s head. It took several hours for officers to talk him down. Motrescu, a Ukrainian citizen with no fixed address, was convicted on Tuesday of possession of an offensive weapon, criminal damage and a public order offense.
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
Man chains self to embassy
A man behind a US$180 million lawsuit against the US embassy in the Dominican Republic chained himself to the building’s fence in protest on Tuesday, claiming that a botched DNA test led officials to wrongly deny his daughter US citizenship while also ruining his marriage. Miguel Familia, a naturalized US citizen from the Dominican Republic, alleged that a DNA test ordered by the embassy to prove the girl was his daughter came back negative and she was denied residency in 2005. After he received the test results, Familia divorced his wife and accused her of having an extramarital affair, said his lawyer, Carlos de la Rosa. For years his ex-wife continued to insist the girl was his daughter. That led Familia to seek two separate paternity tests earlier this year and both tested positive, de la Rosa said.
UNITED STATES
Inmates claim sauce abuse
The warden at a prison in the North Carolina where inmates said they were forced to rub hot sauce on their genitals has been suspended pending the outcome of an investigation. Department of Public Safety spokeswoman Pamela Walker on Tuesday said that Sampson Correctional Institution administrator Lafayette Hall has been put on paid leave while the State Bureau of Investigation probes what happened at the Clinton facility. A second employee has also been reassigned. Six inmates allege correctional officers forced them to perform numerous humiliating acts, including gulping hot sauce and slathering it on themselves, resulting in painful blisters. The male inmates also reported being forced to simulate sex acts for the entertainment of guards, as well as to capture and kiss wild snakes while working on a road crew.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was