■ AUSTRALIA
Swimmer attacked by shark
A shark attacked a swimmer at Bondi Beach, leaving him with deep bite marks on his arm before he fought it off by punching it on the nose. It was the first such attack at Bondi in 70 years. Channel Ten news said Scott Wright was enjoying a Friday night swim at the Sydney beach, which attracts thousands of people every day, when felt the shark latch on to his arm. Wright told the network that he fought off the shark, then made his way to shore but passed out on some rocks, where his girlfriend found him hours later on Saturday morning. "The shark attacked me, grabbed hold of my arm and wouldn't let go," Wright told Ten. So I ended up punching him in the nose and trying to fight him off. "I thought I was a goner, I thought I was going to die."
■ CHINA
19 missing after accident
Nineteen people were missing yesterday after a Liberian ship collided with a fishing boat in the East China Sea, the Xinhua news agency said. Only one person was rescued after the accident late on Saturday in which the fishing boat, from the eastern province of Zhejiang, capsized, Xinhua said, quoting the Zhejiang Maritime Affairs Bureau. It gave no further details.
■ INDIA
Man bites dog
Upset that a stray rabid dog was fleeing with a duck from his compound, a man in the southern part of the country caught the animal, wrestled with it and bit it hard in the throat before it was beaten to death, a newspaper said. A report in the Hindustan Times on Friday said that the dog had become a menace to villagers in Pakakkadavu, in the Kollam district of Kerala state, which, like most of the country, has a large stray dog population. The 65-year-old man wrestled with the dog in a ditch near his home on Wednesday and bit it so hard that it bled from its neck while one of his hands was in the grip of the animal's mouth, the report said. Neighbors separated the two and beat the dog to death. The man was in the state capital receiving anti-rabies treatment, the paper said.
■ INDIA
Protesters demand college
Police fired at thousands of protesters who turned violent during a demonstration demanding a college in their town in the country's portion of Kashmir on Saturday, killing one person and wounding at least five others, police said. Violence erupted as the protesters blocked the main highway connecting Srinagar, the summer capital of the country's Jammu-Kashmir state, with the rest of the country, said Ashiq Bukhari, a police officer. They were protesting the government decision on Friday rejecting their demand to set up a new college in Magam, a town 25km north of Srinagar. Chanting anti-government slogans, they torched a government bus and threw rocks at police who tried to disperse them, Bukhari said.
■ NEW ZEALAND
Inventor eases concerns
The inventor of a worm-driven composting toilet has flushed away concerns from bureaucrats that the system traumatized the wriggly creatures, local media reported yesterday. Coll Bell, who built the "wormorator" as an alternative to septic tanks, was asked to get an expert's report on its mental impact on the tiger worms after an official became concerned during a site visit, the Sunday Star Times said. "She felt that the worms were being unfairly treated, being expected to deal with human feces, and that it could affect them in a psychological way," Bell told the newspaper.
■ ALGERIA
Four militants killed
Security forces killed four Islamic militants and captured two more during an anti-terrorism sweep in the northwest, news reports said on Saturday. The operation on Thursday in Oum El Drou, near the town of Chlef, some 210km west of Algiers, came after a bomb attack that killed five civil security guards three days earlier, the daily the Expression reported. The militants were quickly surrounded by security forces in a forest, leading to a gunfight in which the four militants, ages 18 to 24, were killed and two others detained, the Liberte newspaper reported.
■ GERMANY
Teenager out of jail
A teenager who was held in a Turkish jail for several months after he was accused of sexually abusing a 13-year-old British girl returned home early on Saturday. The 17-year-old boy was released on Friday by a court in the Turkish city of Antalya, which adjourned his trial until April 1. A private jet with the teenager on board landed at Nuremberg airport shortly before 1:30am on Saturday, airport police said. The boy was then taken to an undisclosed destination. He had been in jail since April 11, accused of abusing the girl he met on vacation in the spring. He denies the accusations.
■ NETHERLANDS
Speeding tickets on the rise
Police have issued nearly 10 million speeding tickets this year, prosecutors said on Friday -- more tickets than the country has drivers. Almost three quarters of the tickets were for driving between 4kph and 10kph above the limit, said Koos Spee, who heads the Bureau for Traffic Enforcement of the National Prosecutors Office. The figure of 9.6 million tickets is 12 percent higher than last year, Spee said, but he didn't think that was excessive. "We have around 7 million drivers, and everybody speeds sometimes, so this just means they get caught a little more than once a year."
■ NETHERLANDS
New rules for brothels
Amsterdam said on Friday it would introduce new measures to crack down on pimps and stop the exploitation of prostitutes. Under the proposed policies, brothel owners, escort service companies and "security" firms that work with prostitutes will be forced to seek a license and will be subject to financial auditing, the city said in a statement. The proposals are part of a larger strategy to reduce criminality surrounding prostitution. "The removal of the ban on brothels in 2000 that made prostitution legal hasn't achieved what was expected," the city said in a statement. "Instead it gave free reign for the exploitation of women in the sex industry."
■ NORWAY
Parking meter surcharges
It can be tough enough to make ends meet during the holiday shopping season without being charged 800,000 kroner (US$148,000) just to park a car for a couple hours. At least 26 motorists were left baffled and broke when they used their bank debit cards to buy parking time in the city of Trondheim last week. Because of a computer glitch, the machine multiplied the amount of parking time they bought by 10,000 and automatically deducted it from their bank accounts, the city-owned Trondheim Parking company said on Friday. "People were charged between 200,000 kroner and 800,000 kroner," parking official Steinar Myhr said on state radio.
■ UNITED STATES
Judge deports trucker
Federal officials said on Friday that a Canadian truck driver who has repeatedly tried to cross the border into Washington state is a war criminal. An immigration judge in Seattle ordered 41-year-old Bozo Jozepovic deported to Canada and barred him from entering the US again. Dorothy Stefan, chief counsel with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Seattle, said the man is originally from Bosnia and served in the Croatian Defense Council during the civil war in the early 1990s. Witnesses told the immigration court that Jozepovic took part in the brutal murder of seven Bosnian Muslim men in the village of Poljani in 1993.
■ UNITED STATES
Not so wonderful Tiggers
Officials in a California school district might not think Tiggers are such wonderful things after paying US$95,000 in lawyers' fees to five families who sued the school over its dress code. The suit was filed after a student was disciplined for wearing socks with the Winnie the Pooh character Tigger to school last year. A district superintendent said on Thursday that the settlement money is for the plaintiffs' lawyers. The settlement also says Redwood Middle School may no longer require students to wear only solid-color clothing.
■ CANADA
Phone bill shocks lonely guy
An oil-field worker, stunned to get a C$85,000 (US$83,700) cellphone bill, has had the charges reduced to C$3,400, but is still fighting them. Piotr Staniaszek, a 22-year-old oil and gas well tester in rural northwest Alberta, became a figure of media attention last week when his father went to the press to complain about the size of his son's bill. He said his son thought he could use his phone as a modem for his computer as part of his C$10 unlimited browser plan, and downloaded information unaware of the charges. "He's working in the field sometimes, alone, in the shack. What to do? Drink vodka or go on the Internet?" the father said.
■ CANADA
The perils of teen drug use
After catching his 15-year-old smoking pot, a father sold the hard-to-get Guitar Hero III video game he bought his son for US$90 for Christmas at an online auction, fetching US$9,000. The sale took place after the father spent two weeks searching for the video game. "So I was so relieved in that I had finally got the Holy Grail of Christmas presents pretty much just in the nick of time," the father wrote on eBay. "Then, yesterday, I came home from work early and what do I find? My innocent little boy smoking pot in the back yard with two of his delinquent friends." The man, a teacher, said he sold the coveted video game to punish his son and to discourage him from smoking dope.
■ VENEZUELA
Gucci wearer touts socialism
A video of a Gucci and Louis Vuitton-clad politician attacking capitalism then struggling to explain how his luxurious clothes square with his socialist beliefs has become an instant YouTube hit. Interior Minister Pedro Carreno was momentarily at a loss for words when a journalist asked if it was not contradictory to criticize capitalism while wearing Gucci shoes and a tie made by Louis Vuitton. "It's not contradictory because I would like Venezuela to produce all this so I could buy stuff produced here instead of 95 percent of what we consume being imported," he said. The clip had been viewed more than 15,000 times by Thursday, a day after being posted.
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
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
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
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