■ AUSTRALIA
Calf rescued from river
A calf was rescued after being carried 70km down a raging river during flooding in eastern Australia, officials said yesterday. Barney, a young bull, was washed away from a farm in New South Wales state during torrential rains on Friday night and was rescued on Saturday, Tweed Shire Council General Manager Mike Rayner said. "It's amazing the beast is alive," Rayner said. "The water ripped half the road out of one particular cutting the bull calf went through -- the velocity would have been enormous," he said. Council ranger Wayne Haayer, who assisted in the rescue, said he spotted Barney, which he estimated to be two years old, headed for the ocean.
■ AUSTRALIA
Granny busted selling pot
An 81-year-old woman was arrested and charged with growing and selling marijuana, police said on Tuesday. The woman, whose identity was not immediately released, was the seventh person arrested in a police operation against drug dealers in the rural town of Young, about 250km southwest of Sydney, New South Wales state police said in a statement. The woman was charged with one count of cultivating marijuana and one count of supplying the illegal drug. She was granted bail and ordered to appear in the Young Local Court next month.
■ AUSTRALIA
Pot blamed for monkey theft
A teenager blamed the influence of marijuana for his decision to steal two crocodiles and a monkey, local media reported yesterday. Benjamin Glen Watts, 19, pleaded guilty in court on Tuesday to twice breaking into a wildlife park on the outskirts of the tropical city of Darwin last July, Australian Broadcasting Corp radio reported on its Web site. Watts said he planned to sell the stolen baby crocodiles and the marmoset but had been unable to find buyers, ABC reported. Crocodylus Park spokesman Grahame Webb said yesterday the animals were returned unharmed. Watts' lawyer told the court his client admitted it was a "dumb stoner" thing to do and had written to Crocodylus Park to apologize.
■ CHINA
Sex drug sites shut down
Authorities are shutting down about 200 Web sites for carrying illegal sex drug advertisements, state media said yesterday, the latest in a string of measures to clean up the Internet. About 6,000 Web sites have been found carrying illegal, sexually suggestive adverts involving sex-related drugs or health supplements, said the People's Daily, the Communist Party's newspaper. Some 199 would be closed and 130 "rectified," the newspaper said. It did not say what would happen to the rest. China has launched several campaigns to clean up online material and step up control of the Internet ahead of this year's Beijing Olympics.
■ NORTH KOREA
Pressure put on sex trade
Authorities have closed massage parlors as part of a crackdown on the illegal sex trade, a South Korean aid group said yesterday. The drive began last year, with masseuses asked to switch jobs, Good Friends said in a newsletter. Prostitution is illegal in the reclusive communist country. "Under a directive issued last year, North Korean authorities have shut down massage parlors, which were seen there as a hotbed of illegal sex service," a Good Friends official said. The group, which provides aid to the country, declined to give details. Defectors say poverty-driven prostitution has increased in the totalitarian country.
■ FRANCE
Bono meets Sarkozy
Rock star Bono pressed French leader Nicolas Sarkozy on Tuesday to live up to pledges to increase development aid during a "feisty" meeting at the Elysee presidential palace, the aid advocacy group DATA said. The organization, co-founded by Bono, front man of U2, has chastised France for lagging in fulfilling in a promise to raise development assistance to 0.7 percent of gross national income by 2012. In 2006, French aid stood at 0.31 percent of gross national income, DATA said. "The president admitted it would be very, very hard, but France would keep her word," the statement quoted Bono as saying following the meeting, which he described as "feisty" and "factual."
■ RUSSIA
Blast rips up apartments
A natural-gas blast ripped through an apartment building in the country's Tatarstan region early yesterday, killing at least one person and leaving several others feared trapped beneath the rubble, officials said. The explosion brought down an entire section of the three-story brick building in Tatarstan's capital, Kazan. Russian television showed footage of the ruins -- a jagged remnant of a wall and a pile of rubble with smoke or steam wafting into the frigid air. One woman was killed and two other people were hospitalized, Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman Viktor Beltsov said.
■ TUNISIA
Group highlights illiteracy
The Arab League's educational arm urged its member countries on Tuesday to get serious about fighting illiteracy, citing a report that showed nearly one in three people in the Arab world cannot read. The Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization based in the country said numerous efforts to reduce the illiteracy rate across the 21-country region still had not done enough. The group cited a UN Development Program report showing nearly 100 million people of the 335 million in the Arab world were illiterate.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Cop fired for on-duty sex
A senior police officer who admitted to having sex while on duty has been sacked, the police watchdog confirmed on Tuesday. Inspector Masood Khan, 41, who worked for the British Transport Police, was dismissed over his tryst with a 43-year-old woman in a room at Gatwick Airport railway station in July 2006. At a misconduct hearing on Tuesday, he pleaded guilty to one charge of "discredit" under the Police Code of Conduct after orginally facing three charges.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Worker loses crucifix case
A British Airways worker suspended for wearing a crucifix lost her employment discrimination case on Tuesday. Nadia Eweida, an airport check-in clerk, sued BA after refusing to comply with a ban on employees wearing visible religious symbols in late 2006. She said the policy amounted to religious discrimination because Sikhs and Muslims were allowed to wear head coverings. The controversy over the crucifix received considerable media coverage and the airline's actions touched off a storm of disapproval. More than a hundred lawmakers and the Church of England came out in support of Eweida, and then-prime minister Tony Blair publicly scolded BA's chairman, saying the company's dress code rules weren't worth the fight.
■ UNITED STATES
Executions to remain hidden
A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit by journalists seeking to open Arkansas' executions to more scrutiny, saying there was no guaranteed right to see the whole process,. The US District Court judge rejected journalists' argument the public had a constitutional right to see every step of an execution. A case before the US Supreme Court focuses on a three-drug cocktail used by 37 states, claiming the condemned could suffer intense pain without being able to cry out. That pending case in effect stopped executions in Arkansas and other states.
■ UNITED STATES
Soldier to be court-martialed
The US Army said it will court-martial a soldier for premeditated murder in the killing of an unarmed Iraqi last summer. Sergeant 1st Class Trey Corrales is accused of shooting when his platoon raided a house near Kirkuk in search of men they believed were planting roadside bombs. Major General Benjamin Mixon, 25th Infantry Division commander, also decided Corrales should be tried for ordering a soldier in his platoon to shoot the Iraqi after Corrales shot him. The trial also will examine allegations that Corrales wrongfully impeded an investigation by planting an AK-47 next to the victim.
■ UNITED STATES
Cold cat blacks out city
A cat picked the wrong place to come in from the cold, and caused a power outage that blacked out more than 12,000 homes and businesses. The cat entered an electrical substation in Nampa, snuggled up to a warm transformer and contacted a live circuit, causing a short that blew out nine feeder lines on Monday afternoon, Idaho Power officials said. The short circuit killed the cat. Service was restored in less than three hours to most customers, including City Hall where the lights came on in time for a City Council meeting, utility spokesman Dennis Lopez said. The outage also disabled traffic lights in the city of about 77,000 people.
■ UNITED STATES
Teens suspended over hair
Texas teens were suspended from school on Tuesday for refusing to get their hair cut over the Christmas break, school officials said. The students had been warned that the district was cracking down on dress code violators after they repeatedly let their locks loose on school grounds. "Our policy states that the hair [on male students] cannot extend beyond the collar in the back," said Kevin Stanford, superintendent of the Kerens Independent School District. After several complaints from parents in the small rural town south of Dallas, school officials decided to eliminate a loophole that allowed students to bind their hair. Strict dress codes are common in Texas, Stanford said, and have been upheld by challenges which went as far as the Texas Supreme Court.
■ UNITED STATES
Town mulls cursing ban
A St. Louis-area town is considering a bill that would ban swearing in bars, along with table-dancing, drinking contests and profane music. City officials in St Charles, Missouri, contend the bill is needed to keep rowdy crowds under control because the historic downtown area gets a little too lively on some nights. City Councilman Richard Veit said he was prompted to propose the bill after complaints about bad bar behavior. He says it will give police some rules to enforce when things get too rowdy. But some bar owners worry the bill is too vague and restrictive, saying it may be a violation of their civil rights.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency