■ 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.
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
A Zurich city councilor has apologized and reportedly sought police protection against threats after she fired a sport pistol at an auction poster of a 14th-century Madonna and child painting, and posted images of their bullet-ridden faces on social media. Green-Liberal party official Sanija Ameti, 32, put the images on Instagram over the weekend before quickly pulling them down. She later wrote on social media that she had been practicing shots from about 10m and only found the poster as “big enough” for a suitable target. “I apologize to the people who were hurt by my post. I deleted it immediately when I
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