■ 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.
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
ENTERTAINMENT: Rio officials have a history of organizing massive concerts on Copacabana Beach, with Madonna’s show drawing about 1.6 million fans last year Lady Gaga on Saturday night gave a free concert in front of 2 million fans who poured onto Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro for the biggest show of her career. “Tonight, we’re making history... Thank you for making history with me,” Lady Gaga told a screaming crowd. The Mother Monster, as she is known, started the show at about 10:10pm local time with her 2011 song Bloody Mary. Cries of joy rose from the tightly packed fans who sang and danced shoulder-to-shoulder on the vast stretch of sand. Concert organizers said 2.1 million people attended the show. Lady Gaga
SUPPORT: The Australian prime minister promised to back Kyiv against Russia’s invasion, saying: ‘That’s my government’s position. It was yesterday. It still is’ Left-leaning Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday basked in his landslide election win, promising a “disciplined, orderly” government to confront cost-of-living pain and tariff turmoil. People clapped as the 62-year-old and his fiancee, Jodie Haydon, who visited his old inner Sydney haunt, Cafe Italia, surrounded by a crowd of jostling photographers and journalists. Albanese’s Labor Party is on course to win at least 83 seats in the 150-member parliament, partial results showed. Opposition leader Peter Dutton’s conservative Liberal-National coalition had just 38 seats, and other parties 12. Another 17 seats were still in doubt. “We will be a disciplined, orderly
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