FRANCE
Woman offers breastfeeding
A woman has posted an offer on a Web site to breastfeed babies of gay couples for 100 euros (US$130) a day. The post, which the Web site said it verified as genuine and legal, reads: “I am a young mother in perfect health, a trained nurse of 29, and I am renting my breasts to milk-feed infants.” The offer promises up to 10 breast-feeds a day. Alexandre Woog, chief executive of the e-loue Web site where the offer appeared, said its staff had contacted the woman and had no doubt about her identity and the seriousness of the proposal, nor the legality of the service proposed. “Our legal advisers are sure of this. It’s illegal in France to sell maternal milk, but this is a person proposing a service, not selling the milk in flasks,” Woog said. He said his Web site, created in 2009 as a platform where users can offer or hire anything legal online, checks any posts that raise eyebrows. The poster told Reuters that she had “received more than a dozen requests, but only half of them were serious. The rest were from perverts.” The breastfeeding offer was the second major eyecatcher since the Web site was founded, Woog said. Another user previously offered to rent out two goats as lawn-cutters.
UNITED STATES
Daredevil skydives in coffin
A daredevil freed himself from shackles and a locked casket while plummeting to the Earth at 20kph on Tuesday, eventually parachuting gently into a northern Illinois field. Anthony Martin, 47, waved to the cameras and the crowd that turned out to watch his stunt after he landed at a farm in Serena, about 112km southwest of Chicago. Martin said the escape was exhilarating, but that he was disoriented because the plywood casket whipped wildly from side to side while he picked the locks, and he struggled to open the door. “I didn’t feel any force, but what I felt was lot a of jostling,” he said. “It seemed to me like I had a glimpse of the ground for a second then it [the door] came back and I had to give it another push.” Martin, who began teaching himself to pick locks at age six, somersaulted out of the box as he pushed his way out. Everyone involved in the stunt landed safely and no one was seriously hurt, although one of the skydivers trying to steady the box slammed into the door of the plane as they exited, giving him a fat lip and a scraped arm.
BRAZIL
Teen kills family, then self
A teenager killed his police officer parents, his grandmother and his great-aunt, and then, after a full day at school, took his own life, police said on Tuesday. The five bodies were found before dawn on Tuesday inside two houses located on the same property in northern Sao Paulo, they said. “Everything seems to indicate that [13-year-old] Marcelo [Pesseghini] killed his parents and relatives,” Itagiba Franco, of the Sao Paulo Civilian Police’s homicide department, told a press conference. Police said the teen’s parents were killed late on Sunday or in the early hours of Monday. Franco said Pesseghini had told a friend he wanted to kill his parents and become a hitman. “He always told me he wanted to become a hired killer. He had a plan to kill his parents during the night, so that no one would notice, and escape in the parents’ car and live in an abandoned place,” police quoted the unidentified friend as saying. The teenager died from a shot to the left temple, while his father’s police-issue service revolver was found nearby, Sao Paulo police commander Benedito Roberto Meira said.
SEEKING CHANGE: A hospital worker said she did not vote in previous elections, but ‘now I can see that maybe my vote can change the system and the country’ Voting closed yesterday across the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific nation’s first general election since the government switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing and struck a secret security pact that has raised fears of the Chinese navy gaining a foothold in the region. The Solomon Islands’ closer relationship with China and a troubled domestic economy weighed on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots. As many as 420,000 registered voters had their say across 50 national seats. For the first time, the national vote also coincided with elections for eight of the 10 local governments. Esther Maeluma cast her vote in the
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
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