■NEW ZEALAND
Teen fined for random pee
A teenager dubbed “The Piddler on the Roof” by police admitted on Wednesday to urinating into a parking machine and was ordered to pay NZ$200 (US$142) to the city council. Sarron Malot, an 18-year-old cook, has become the butt of jokes around the country as photos and videos of him aiming into the machine’s coin slot have circulated on Web sites. Police dubbed him “The Piddler on the Roof” because of the second-floor location of the city council parking meter. “He pees up in the air in a big arc, so it goes in the coin slot and out the hole where people collect their tickets,” police said.
■NEW ZEALAND
Boobs on bikes parade
Thousands of spectators turned out to watch about 30 topless women take part in a so-called Boobs on Bikes parade through Auckland’s main street on Wednesday after a judge rejected a city council bid to stop it. The council failed on Tuesday to get a court injunction to stop the parade organized by a self-confessed pornography baron, with Judge Nicola Mather saying it may be tasteless but that “in a mature society the vast majority might consider it harmless.” Anti-pornography campaigners staged protests before and after the parade down Queen Street. Parade organizer Steve Crow told reporters: “It’s nice to see a few protesters exercising their right to free speech.”
■NEW ZEALAND
Father tried for flicking
James Mason, 49, who has admitted he disciplined his two sons by flicking them on the ear, was sent for trial on assault charges yesterday, news reports said. Mason, a Christchurch musician, was one of the first parents to be prosecuted under a so-called anti-smacking law passed by parliament last year that removed the right to physically discipline children without being charged with assault. His sons were aged two and five in December when Mason, who denies the assault charges, was reported to have hit the children by a teacher and an off-duty police officer. A minor political party will campaign at this year’s general election for a referendum to overturn the anti-smacking law.
■HONG KONG
Cocaine shipment seized
Cocaine with a street value of about HK$1.6 million (US$204,000) was posted to the special administrative region from California in parcels containing children’s books, customs officials confirmed yesterday. The haul weighing 2kg was discovered in four parcels, hidden inside hollowed-out books which were gift-wrapped and tied with ribbons. The drugs had been wrapped in aluminum foil first in an effort to avoid being detected by X-ray, a spokesman for the customs drug investigation group said. They were sent by express mail arriving at the airport last Friday and addressed to a non-existent residence in the New Territories.
■INDONESIA
Rare leopard spotted
A new population of rare leopard has been found living in thick forests on Borneo island, a researcher said yesterday. Camera traps in Sebangau National Park in Central Kalimantan Province have snapped pictures of two adult male Bornean clouded leopards in an area once decimated by logging, British zoologist Susan Cheyne said. The discovery by researchers from Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit and Indonesia’s Pangkalan Raya University is the first confirmation the clouded leopard, which is classified as vulnerable, lives in the park.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Ex-con working for prince
A former convict is now washing windows at Prince Charles’ new estate in Wales after having been apparently hired without any screening, the Daily Mirror reported on Wednesday. Matthew Bell, 35, has previously served two jail terms, nine months for burglary and 21 days for not paying a traffic fine. Bell had worked two days cleaning the windows of the new residence before Prince Charles and his wife Camilla arrived. Bell received £1,200 (US$2,200) for his work. “I’m a changed man and I’ve worked bloody hard for this,” Bell said. “I did an absolutely beautiful job up there and nothing went missing. I don’t go to houses thinking, ‘I could get £100 for that TV,’ because that’s a part of my life that’s gone,” he said. “Prince Charles has talked of offenders being given a second chance. Now it’s his chance to give me one.” A spokesman for Prince Charles said that Bell had been hired on the basis of a recommendation and that he was “under supervision at all times.”
■IRELAND
PM: call my predecessor
Three months after Prime Minister Brian Cowen took office, callers to two numbers for the prime minister’s office listed in Dublin’s telephone directory were still being redirected to the previous incumbent. “Thank you for calling the office of the Taoiseach [prime minister], however if you wish to call Bertie Ahern’s constituency office, please ring ...” a recorded message told callers.
■GERMANY
Gorilla mourns dead baby
A gorilla at a zoo in the city of Muenster is refusing to let go of her dead baby’s body several days after it died. Allwetter Zoo spokeswoman Ilona Zuehlke says the three-month-old male baby died on Saturday but its mother continues to carry its body around. Zuehlke says such behavior is not uncommon to gorillas. Zuehlke says the mother “is mourning and must say goodbye.”
■SOUTH AFRICA
‘Lion killer’ to be freed
A man dubbed by the media as the “lion killer,” whose murder conviction for feeding a former employee to lions was overturned last year, was to be released on parole yesterday, his lawyer said. “After serving two thirds of his sentence, Mark Scott-Crossley will be a free man by lunch time tomorrow,” Charl van Tonder said on Wednesday. Scott-Crossley was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2005 for beating Nelson Chisale and throwing him into a lion enclosure the previous year. Co-accused Simon Mathebula is serving 15 years in jail for the murder. Last year, the Supreme Court of Appeal reduced Scott-Crossley’s sentence to five years after it found that the High Court had failed to prove that Chisale was alive when he was thrown to the lions. Scott-Crossley’s murder conviction was set aside for a lesser charge of being an accessory, after the fact, to murder.
■SWEDEN
Holocaust knowledge lacking
Teachers consider it is important to teach about the Holocaust but many lack knowledge of it, a survey released on Wednesday suggested. Only two of the roughly 5,000 teachers polled were able to answer all 11 questions in the poll while 70 percent of the teachers had at least eight wrong answers, the Swedish government agency Living History Forum said. For instance, many teachers thought that the Gulag — the extensive prison system and forced labor prison camps in the Soviet Union — were extermination camps set up by Nazi Germany.
■UNITES STATEd
Hybrids to make more noise
Electric and hybrid vehicles may be better for the environment, but the California Legislature says they’re bad for the blind. The State Senate passed a bill on Tuesday to ensure that the vehicles make enough noise to be heard by visually impaired people about to cross a street. The measure would establish a committee to study the issue and recommend ways the vehicles could make more noise. The state Department of Motor Vehicles says more than 300,000 of the vehicles are on state roads. Officials say they don’t keep statistics on pedestrian accidents involving those vehicles.
■BRAZIL
Gay adoption bill rejected
The lower house of Congress has rejected part of a pending adoption law that would have allowed gay couples to adopt children. A Wednesday statement from the Chamber of Deputies says a measure giving gay couples the right to adopt was withdrawn because federal law doesn’t recognize same-sex civil unions. A proposal granting same-sex couples the same rights as married heterosexuals has stalled in Congress for more than 10 years, prompting some states to take their own actions. Southern Rio Grande do Sul state has permitted same-sex civil unions since 2004, and a Sao Paulo state court allowed a gay couple to adopt a five-year-old girl in 2006.
■UNITED STATES
Teacher jailed for illicit sex
A former gym teacher will spend up to three years in prison for having sex with a 14-year-old freshman and sending the boy erotic text messages and nude photos of herself by cellphone. Twenty-seven-year-old Beth Ann Chester pleaded guilty to statutory sexual assault, corruption of a minor and criminal use of a cellphone. Moon Township police say the health and physical education teacher met the teenager last year at Moon Area High School, where she taught 9th grade and coached volleyball. Chester resigned in December and was arrested in early January after she confessed to having sex with the boy, including once in a school parking lot.
■PUERTO RICO
Man denies abuse charges
An animal control employee is denying charges that he abused animals when he helped round up some 80 pets from a housing project last year. Edgardo Santiago is one of three men accused of tossing the dogs and cats off a bridge to their deaths in the northern town of Barceloneta. Santiago testified on Tuesday that he stepped on a dog’s snout but only after it tried to bite him. He denied allegations that he dragged another dog across the floor. The killings received international condemnation and prompted calls for a tourist boycott of the US Caribbean territory.
■UNITED STATES
Elephant allowed to stay
Jenny the elephant isn’t going anywhere. The Dallas Zoo announced on Wednesday that the pachyderm that weighs around 4,535kg will remain at her home of 22 years following an intense controversy over plans to send the animal to a wildlife park in Mexico. The decision to keep the elephant in Dallas “serves Jenny’s best interests,” said the zoo’s executive director Greg Hutton. Dallas Zoo officials had planned to ship Jenny to Mexico after her companion died in May. African elephants become unhappy when left alone. But activists ripped the plan, saying 32-year-old Jenny is a nervous elephant who fears cars and would be miserable at the drive-through park in Mexico.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
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