■ JAPAN
Former priest arrested
Japanese police on Thursday arrested a former priest for allegedly embezzling more than US$1 million from his Buddhist sect to invest in oil and other commodities futures, officials said. Yoshifumi Kuwao, 52, was arrested on suspicion of embezzling ?47 million (US$1.3 million) from the Jodo Shu sect, according to a police spokesman. The centuries-old Buddhist sect went to authorities last year with their case against Kuwao, saying he embezzled ?45 million from February 1997 to September 2004.
■ JAPAN
Cellphone university classes
Japanese already use cellphones to shop, read novels, exchange e-mail, search for restaurants and take video clips. Now, they're taking a university course. Cyber University began offering a class on the mysteries of the pyramids on cellphones on Wednesday. The cellphone classes show Power Point images. Cyber University, which opened in April with government approval to give bachelor's degrees, has 1,850 students.
■ Thailand
Candidates pass out Viagra
Parliamentary candidates in the upcoming election are trying to buy the votes of elderly men by passing out free Viagra, a local government official said on Friday. Thais go to the polls on Dec. 23 for the first time since a bloodless coup last year. Residents in Prathumthani, north of Bangkok, reported some of the candidates were passing out the anti-impotence drug in exchange for promised votes, said a local government official. "The villagers told me they have been given one or two pills of Viagra by candidates," the official said.
■ NEW ZEALAND
Hacker kingpin arrested
Police questioned the suspected teenage kingpin of an international cyber crime network accused of infiltrating 1.3 million computers and skimming millions of dollars from victims' bank accounts, officials said yesterday. Working with the FBI and police in the Netherlands, New Zealand police raided the home of the 18-year-old in Hamilton and took him into custody along with several computers, said Martin Kleintjes, head of the police electronic crime center. The case is part of an international crackdown on hackers who allegedly assume control of thousands of computers and amass them into centrally controlled clusters known as botnets.
■ UKRAINE
Circus crocodile recpatured
Officials recaptured a crocodile on Wednesday which had escaped from a traveling circus six months previously and repeatedly eluded search teams. The reptile was found basking in a pool at a thermal power station in the east of the country, where the water was warmer than the nearby sea. "We caught the crocodile alive today," Oleksander Soldatov, a spokesman for the Emergencies Ministry said by telephone. "We are now contacting the owner so that he can come and fetch it." The crocodile escaped from the circus in late May and was spotted several times lurking around industrial sites near the city of Mariupol, on the coast of the Sea of Azov.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Relatives dispute will
Relatives of an elderly woman who left ?10 million (US$21 million) to a couple that ran a Chinese restaurant she frequented challenged the will in a court case that opened on Thursday. Kim Sing Man and his wife, Bee Lian Man, the owners of a Chinese restaurant in Witham, a town northeast of London, inherited the money in the will, which was drawn up for widow Golda Bechal in August 1994. She died in January 2004, aged 89. Bechal's five nephews and nieces are asking the High Court to declare the will invalid because they claim it was written when their aunt was suffering from dementia. They also are asking the judge to give the inheritance to them.
■ Ireland
Police hunt beer bandit
Police announced a manhunt on Thursday for a beer bandit who drove into the Guinness brewery and left with 450 full kegs. The national police force, the Garda Siochana, said a lone man drove into the brewery -- a Dublin landmark and top tourist attraction -- on Wednesday and hitched his truck to a fully loaded trailer awaiting delivery to city pubs. Diageo PLC, the drinks company that owns Guinness, said the brewery had never suffered such a large-scale theft before in its 248-year history. Police said the raider took 180 kegs of Guinness stout, 180 kegs of US lager Budweiser and 90 kegs of Danish beer Carlsberg.
■ United Kingdom
Toilet locator launched
A new service promises Londoners they'll never have to spend much time looking for the loo. Westminster City Council, which covers London's bustling Oxford Street, the West End and the Houses of Parliament, on Thursday launched "SatLav" -- a toilet-finding service for mobile phone users. Harried theatergoers, distressed shoppers and hard-pressed bar patrons in London's West End can now text the word "toilet" -- and receive a text back giving the address of the nearest public facility. The system, which covers 40 public toilets, triangulates a user's position by measuring the strength of the phone signal. The texts cost ?0.25 (US$0.52), while most of Westminster's toilets are free.
■ Sweden
Moose attraction planned
With little to attract tourists, a region in the north is pinning hope on a truly gargantuan wooden moose. When completed, the 45m tall, 47m long moose will have a restaurant in its belly, as well as a concert hall, conference rooms and a shop, project coordinator and local tourism promoter Thorbjorn Holmlund said on Thursday.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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