■ India
Blonde-crazy Bollywood
Indian film directors are recruiting young, fair and blonde leading ladies from abroad to reach out to a larger international market, it was reported yesterday. A slew of new Bollywood films feature little-known actresses from Britain, South Africa and the US, the Telegraph reported. Flashy Bollywood director Subhash Ghai held lengthy auditions in London to find the female lead for his film Kisna. His latest discovery
is British actress Antonia Bernath. "My story needed Antonia," Ghai said, adding that she was busy practicing the dance steps required in every Bollywood film.
■ China
Life in jail for porn barons
Chinese makers and distributors of pornographic materials sent through the Internet, mobile phones and other communication devices will face penalties as severe as life imprisonment under new rules that took effect yesterday. The crackdown is part of a renewed campaign for greater control over the Internet by authorities, who have closed thousands of Internet cafes, stepped up surveillance and fortified filters aimed at shutting out such material. The tougher punishments also apply to phone-sex services, it said. Cases involving pornographic Web sites that have been clicked on more than 250,000 times will be considered "very severe," with convictions resulting in life sentences, Xinhua said.
■ China
Flooding kills 76
Torrential floods in southwest China have claimed at least 76 lives, prompting beleaguered officials to seek help from the military in rescuing hundreds trapped by mudslides and caved-in roads, state media reported. Days of heavy rain in Sichuan province and the municipality of Chongqing have swamped entire villages and ruined huge swathes of farmland, Xinhua said. The downpours, which began on Thursday, were forecast to last through today, the agency said.
■ Singapore
Bullies targeted by SMS
Singapore's latest behavior modification campaign is taking on schoolchildren
as the city-state tackles bullying through mobile-phone text messaging, local media reported yesterday. The campaign is organized by the independent, nonprofit Singapore Children's Society. The Straits Times said "Bully Free Week" starting Sept. 13 will be counting on "SMS-keen teens" to spread the anti-bullying message by mobile phone. Students will be encouraged to send the common "Be cool, be bully-free" message to their friends, the paper said. In Singapore, "taunting and name-calling are the most-often cited forms of bullying," the paper said, quoting the society.
■ North Korea
Power plants on hold
The international consortium overseeing a frozen plan to build two nuclear power plants in North Korea have agreed to extend the suspension by another year, according to reports yesterday. The decision by Japan, South Korea and the US to extend the freeze is aimed at making Pyongyang completely abandon its nuclear development programs, the Yomiuri Shimbun said. The project had been promoted by the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), an international consortium set up in 1995. Board members consist of Japan, the EU, South Korea and the US. KEDO's board is expected to formally adopt the agreement at a meeting scheduled for Oct. 13 in New York, the paper said.
■ United Kingdom
Cigarettes worse than cars
Cigarette smoke produces 10 times more air pollution than diesel car fumes, according to research by British scientists. The study in the magazine Tobacco Control, published by the British Medical Journal, also showed that air pollution levels from cigarettes in a confined space were 15 times more than those recorded outside. The experiment was carried out in a garage in the town of Chiavenna, northern Italy, which enjoys low levels of outdoor particulate matter (PM). PM is the most dangerous element of air pollution and comes from various sources including cigarettes and car exhausts.
■ Turkey
Adultery plan defended
Turkey's devout Muslim leader, Tayyip Erdogan, has defended his government's plans to criminalize adultery, despite protests that have shown the issue is dividing the country. Erdogan, whose AK party has its roots in political Islam, said this weekend that outlawing marital infidelity is a vital step towards preserving the family and "human honor." Although Turkey aspires to join the EU, it did not have to adopt its "imperfect" western morals, he said.
■ Germany
Castles getting cheaper
The financial woes of former East Germany mean that people of relatively modest means can aspire to become castle-owners, with many edifices now costing little more than the land they stand on. In the village of Ribbeck, 30km from Berlin, one castle has been put on the market for just 104,000 euros (US$126,500). Dozens of other chateaux are on offer for similar prices. The collapse of Nazi Germany left much of former Prussia and Saxony, with their hundreds of castles, in the hands of the Communists. Political reforms turned them into schools, clinics and administrative centers, but with high unemployment and a virtually stagnant economy, the villages and towns that inherited them have no funds for maintenance.
■ United Kingdom
Babies favor attractive faces
Babies are born with an eye for beauty. Infants only hours old will choose to stare at an attractive face rather than an unattractive one -- and they also prefer to listen to Vivaldi straight, rather than Vivaldi backwards. According to Alan Slater, a developmental psychologist at the University of Exeter in southwest England, humans may have a biologically-ingrained preference for beauty. He presented a photographic choice to almost 100 newborns, on average only 2.5 days old. His subjects were held upright, looking at photographs or other imagery, while being watched by psychologists. "Attractiveness is not simply in the eye of the beholder, it is in the brain of the newborn infant right from the moment of birth and possibly prior to birth," he said.
■ Germany
Social Democrats trounced
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and his Social Democrats suffered a stinging loss in the western state of Saarland on Sunday in the first of several regional elections whose outcome will measure the political price of unpopular cuts in social welfare programs. The conservative Christian Democrats retained power in the state by increasing their share of the vote to 47.5 percent from 45.5 percent , while the Social Democrats' share plummeted from to 30.8 percent from 44.5 percent. It was the Social Democrats' worst performance in Saarland, once a party stronghold, since 1960.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
CYBERCRIME, TRAFFICKING: A ‘pattern of state failures’ allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, it said Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Cambodia’s government of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centers and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including in the Southeast Asian nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
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