■ North Korea
Dear Leader can't sleep
Kim Jong-il's relentless push to advance the communist movement in his state has turned him into a bit of an insomniac, according to the North's state media. Kim is rarely seen in public except for sporadic trips to unidentified military bases and industrial plants. The strain of keeping an eye on all parts of the country means many sleepless nights for the North's "Dear Leader," official Rodong Sinmun reported. "I spend days and months on field guidance, so I've never slept comfortably for one night," Kim was quoted as saying on Thursday. "The people are concerned about my health and want me to rest if only for one day, but I cannot rest lest it slows the movement of the motherland," he said. Kim does manage to catch up on sleep in the car, which is "the sweetest kind," the newspaper quoted him as saying.
■ Japan
Pet hotel open for business
Pet owners can now embark on their travels safe in the knowledge that their dogs and cats will be living in the lap of luxury at a five-star "pet hotel" that opened on Thursday at Tokyo's Narita airport. The Pet Inn Royal boasts 170 well-appointed rooms for up to 250 animals, as well as veterinary and grooming services, an exercise field. The service is not limited to dogs and cats: rabbits, hamsters, and even ferrets are welcome at the inn. The rate for a standard cage starts at around ?4,000 (US$33) a night, and rises to ?20,000 for a deluxe suite. All rooms are fitted with air conditioning and purifiers to leave them smelling sweet for the next occupant. The operators of the inn are hoping to cash in on Japan's pet boom. The country is home to an estimated 19 million pets -- more than the number of children under 15.
■ Australia
Roof injures children
At least eight children were injured when a roof collapsed at an exclusive private school in Sydney, a hospital official and local media said yesterday. "There has been a roof collapse at a school," said Charles Maddison, a spokesman for Sydney's Prince of Wales Hospital. The hospital was on standby to receive at least eight students and one teacher with mild to moderate injuries, he said. Local media reports said the incident occurred at the elite Ascham school in the eastern suburb of Edgecliff.
■ Australia
Storms kill three people
Wild storms that blew through Australia's southeast yesterday were blamed for the deaths of three people while another was missing amid widespread blackouts and damage, officials said. Two people died in New South Wales state when a light aircraft crashed in stormy conditions near the town of Condobolin and burst into flames, police said. The pilot and a passenger were confirmed dead but rescue teams, hampered by bad weather, had yet to recover the body of a missing passenger, police said. A man was crushed by a falling tree in Canberra as two small tornadoes lashed the city, uprooting trees, cutting power lines and damaging the two main hospitals, emergency services spokesman Peter Dunn said. In Canberra's surrounds, two storms ripped roofs from homes.
■ Cambodia
Brother beats sister to death
A brother allegedly beat his younger sister to death with a bamboo pole after he argued with her about whether he could make off with the family cow, police said yesterday. The deputy chief of police for Thmor Khol district in the northwestern province of Battambang, Poum Mot, said by telephone that Poup Porn, 39, had allegedly approached his sister, Poup Outh, 36, on Nov. 27 and demanded access to the family cow to take to market. However, she would not agree to sell it and the pair fought, at which point Poum Mot said witness accounts allege that Porn produced a bamboo stick and beat his sister four to five times with it until he realized she was dead.
■ Philippines
Journalist shot and killed
A hard-hitting newspaper and radio journalist was fatally shot in the central Philippines, and police said yesterday they were investigating whether his reporting on alleged corruption by customs officials led to his murder. George Benaojan, 27, was talking to a man in front of a store in Cebu city on Thursday evening when an unidentified man shot him in the mouth, chest and neck with a .45-caliber pistol, regional police commander Chief Superintendent Edward Gador said.
■ Britain
Coren wins `bad sex' award
Food-critic-turned-novelist Giles Coren won one of Britain's most dreaded literary accolades on Thursday -- the prize for bad sex in fiction. The prize is awarded each year "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel." Coren won it for a raunchy passage from his debut novel Winkler which included a description of the main character's penis "leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath." "It was the overexcited shower ... which clinched the deal for Giles Coren," judges said. "That and the endlessly long sentence, which squirms and wriggles like the shower head."
■ Britain
Cow flatulence cure found
Cows belching and breaking wind causes methane pollution, but British scientists say they have developed a diet to make pastures smell like roses -- almost. Biochemist John Wallace, leader of the microbial biochemistry group at the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen, said in some experiments, they got a "staggering 70 percent decrease" in methane emissions. Wallace said the secret to sweeter-smelling cows is a food additive based on fumaric acid, a naturally occurring chemical essential to respiration of animal and vegetable tissues. A 12-month commercial and scientific evaluation of the additive has begun. If it proves successful, it could be a boon to cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions.
■ Britain
Mosquito keeps teens away
A Welsh inventor claims to have found the perfect solution to rowdy youngsters -- noise. Howard Stapleton says his device, the "Mosquito," emits an uncomfortable high-pitched ultrasonic sound that can be heard by children and teenagers but almost no one over 30. It has successfully driven away noisy teens from a grocery store in the Welsh town of Barry and a shop in Stapleton's home town Merthyr Tydfil, making smoking, lounging and foul-mouthed youths a thing of the past. No one except young troublemakers appears annoyed, however. "All I'm getting is pats on the back," Stapleton said. "No bricks thrown at me yet."
■ Germany
Bar hosts 81st burglary
Brigitte Hoffmann wishes that her bar was not such a hit with some Berliners -- on Wednesday burglars robbed it for the 81st time in 12 years. "Why does it always have to be me?" she asked on Thursday. She said some seven televisions, 15 stereos, three telephones and countless bottles of schnapps had been stolen from the "Tages-Bar" in the eastern district of Treptow. "In January, robbers even rang up a sex hotline," Hoffmann, 61, said. "I am not going to be intimidated, no, I'm going to fight," she said. Hoffmann's regular clients have taken to guarding the bar themselves.
■ Sweden
Man read porn to kids
A Swedish drama student was fined 2,400 crowns (US$300) on Wednesday for reading out pornographic stories to a group of six-year-olds as part of a theater project on children's sexuality. A Stockholm court ruled that the stories were deeply pornographic and completely inappropriate for the age group, the Dagens Nyheter newspaper's Web site said. It said the stories were about children having oral sex with each other. The man's lawyer said he would file an appeal.
■ United States
Volcanic shelf collapses
A massive section of volcanic shelf has collapsed at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, bringing down a section of sea cliff and sending molten rock and boulders into the air. The collapse of 44 acres into the ocean on Monday exposed a 18m cliff and a 1.8m-diameter stream of lava shooting from the cliff face 13.5m above the water. The glowing lava has since formed a ramp of new land as it continues to pour out into the ocean, sending up a tower of steam. The collapse of solidified lava and sea cliff is the largest since Kilauea Volcano began its current eruption in 1983.
■ United States
Caretakers abused
Two former caretakers who refused to bare their breasts to a 136kg, sign-language-speaking gorilla named Koko have settled a lawsuit against the Gorilla Foundation. Nancy Alperin and Kendra Keller claimed they were fired after they refused to expose their bosoms to the primate, and after reporting sanitary problems at Koko's home in Woodside, an upscale town south of San Francisco. The pair claimed they were threatened that if they "did not indulge Koko's nipple fetish, their employment with the Gorilla Foundation would suffer," the lawsuit alleged. Alperin and Keller claimed that Francine "Penny" Patterson, the gorilla's longtime caretaker and president of the Gorilla Foundation, pressured them to expose their breasts as a way to bond with the 33-year-old female simian.
■ Mexico
Volcano bang on time
Popocatepetl, a volcano 60km southeast of Mexico City, kept up its pattern of erupting every December for 10 years, when it spit a plume of ash into the sky on Thursday. "An explosion occurred at 6:53 this morning," said Ramon Pena, director of a government agency that monitors the volcano, Popocatepetl Operating Plan. The plume of ash shot 5km into the sky, raining ash on villages north of the volcano. No alert was sounded, however. The army is permanently stationed there and the public is barred within 12km of the crater. The volcano has been increasingly active in the month of December over the last 10 years.
■ Canada
Frequent flyer reaches goal
After two months of zig-zagging across Canada by plane, frequent flyer Marc Tacchi has reached his goal of accumulating 1 million miles of credits -- and become something of an Internet celebrity in the process. On his blog "The Great Canadian Mileage Run 2005," Tacchi reported on Wednesday that he had racked up 1,003,625 mileage points and spent 56 of the last 61 days in an airplane. "I myself need to get to bed in a prone position for some serious rest," he wrote. The 30-year-old embarked on his venture using Air Canada's North America Unlimited Pass -- a US$6,000 ticket that allowed passengers limitless travel within the continent between Oct. 1 and Wednesday.
■ United Nations
Committee can't agree
The UN General Assembly's legal committee failed to reach agreement on a comprehensive convention against terrorism, stymied over a definition of terrorism which has divided UN members for years. Secretary-General Kofi Annan expressed disappointment on Thursday that it was not possible to reach agreement and plans to consult with UN members to see if he can assist their efforts to reach agreement by September next year, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
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