■HONG KONG
Sex offender told to exercise
A TV reporter who quit his job after he was arrested for masturbating naked on a bus said he was only trying to “ease his stress,” reports said yesterday. Chiu Yu-kit, a former journalist at Asia Television, admitted in court to the act while he was alone on the top tier of a double-decker bus on July 31, the Standard reported. An off-duty officer made the arrest after he jogged past the bus and saw Chiu standing on a seat naked and facing a window. Chiu, 31, pleaded guilty to one count of indecency in public. Principal magistrate Josiah Lam (林偉權) put Chiu on a one-year good behavior bond and advised him to exercise or talk to others if he wanted to relax. Last month, a “lonely and disturbed” man became stuck and had to be freed by emergency services after attempting to have sex with a park bench.
■JAPAN
Monk burns down temple
A monk trying to rid his temple of a hornet’s nest panicked when the hornets attacked him and dropped a torch, burning his temple to the ground, police said on Thursday. The Buddhist monk had put lighted rags on a stick into the nest in the temple, but dropped it and ran when the hornets flew out and attacked him, a Niigata prefectural police official said. The fire occurred on Wednesday. Atsushi Sato, 41, suffered burns on his ears, face and left hand, but he was not stung.
■CHINA
Elephant completes detox
An elephant rescued from smugglers in China has undergone a detoxification program to cure it of heroin addiction, state media said on Thursday. The seven-year-old male Asian elephant was scheduled to return to Yunnan Province this weekend after finishing its three-year rehabilitation program on the southern island province of Hainan, Xinhua news agency said. The elephant, named Xiguang, became addicted after smugglers used heroin-smeared bananas to lure it across the border from Myanmar into Yunnan, the agency said. Wildlife experts in Hainan gave Xiguang regular injections of methadone at five times the normal human dose, it said. Xiguang and three rescued female elephants were scheduled to arrive today at the Yunnan Wild Animal Park.
■JAPAN
Geeks seek PC blessings
At Tokyo’s Kanda-Myojin Shinto shrine, the faithful can bring their computer and have the priests use ceremonies to ask the gods for help and protection for their computer, a shrine spokesman said yesterday. The shrine is located near the Akihabara quarter, Tokyo’s technology hub and popular destination for geeks and lovers of the latest electronic gadgets.
■NEW ZEALAND
Farmer impales cow
Two farmers face animal cruelty charges after a live cow was impaled on the steel fork of a tractor’s front-end loader, police said yesterday. Sergeant Mike Craig said he stumbled on the incident near the farming town of Ohakune. “It was actually impaled on one of the forks. I couldn’t believe what I saw and did a U-turn and went back,” he said. Craig said it appeared the farm manager had been asked to slaughter the cow, which was sick, and had shot it in the side of the head. However, it did not die and a short time later the farm owner arrived with the tractor, impaling the cow by stabbing it below its spine. The sergeant said that after his intervention, the cow was released “and it walked away into a neighboring paddock in an obviously distressed state.” The animal was eventually killed by the farmer.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Discount sex on offer
Brothels offering full sex for as little as £15 (US$26.50) can be found widely across London and employ women from more than 75 different nationalities, a charity said on Thursday. Researchers from the Poppy Project, which campaigns against the trafficking of women, posed as clients looking for sex and telephoned ads listed in newspapers. They found 921 brothels across London offering full sex for between £15 and £250. They estimated that at least 1,933 women aged between 18 and 55 were working in the establishments, an average of two per brothel. The charity said the full scale of prostitution was likely to be much larger as the survey did not cover ads placed in telephone booths or on Web sites. But it estimated that between £50 million and £130 million a year was being earned by the brothels identified through newspaper ads. Many of the brothels were licensed as saunas or massage parlors, although the majority were private apartments in residential areas.
■GERMANY
Bad weather halts windfarm
Violent weather has delayed construction on the country’s first offshore wind farm, a consortium planning the project said on Thursday. The plan was to place the first three foundations — each weighing 635 tonnes and standing some 45m high — by this week. But the wind they plan eventually to reap is causing construction problems. “We’ve had a really, really shocking summer,” said Jonny Stokes, a spokesman for E.ON AG, one of three firms in the project. Crews are waiting for a four-day block of good weather to install the three foundations for the first of 12 five-megawatt turbines 72km off the shores of Borkum Island in the North Sea.
■GREECE
Anarchists give away food
Anarchists stormed a supermarket on Thursday and handed out food for free in the latest of a wave of raids provoked by soaring consumer prices. About 20 unarmed people, mostly wearing black hoods, carried out the midday robbery in Thesaaloniki, police said. They took only packets of pasta, rice and cartons of milk, which they drop in the middle of the street for people to collect, a police official said. “They have never stolen money or hurt anyone. They ask people to remain calm but use ambush tactics, jumping over cash desks … When they attack without hoods, people are surprised to see that they are mostly women.”
■UNITED KINGDOM
Hendrix’s burnt guitar sold
An electric guitar that Jimi Hendrix set on fire while playing on stage sold last night at a London auction for £322,000 (US$569,260) with fees. The Fender Stratocaster, ignited with lighter fluid by Hendrix at London’s Finsbury Astoria theater on March 31, 1967, was the first instrument the guitarist burned during a performance, said the specialist rock and pop memorabilia auctioneers, the Fame Bureau. The guitar was bought in the saleroom by Daniel Boucher, a US collector and dealer based in Boston.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Pop star tells almost all
Pop star Cliff Richard says his relationship with a former Roman Catholic priest has been a blessing, according to autobiography excerpts carried in the Daily Express on Thursday. Richard shares his home with John McElynn. The 67-year-old singer comments on the relationship in his new autobiography titled My Life, My Way but insists that his sexuality is no one’s business.
■UNITED STATES
Stamp callers get sex line
People calling a federal telephone number to order duck stamps are instead greeted by a phone-sex line thanks to a printing error the government says would be too expensive to correct. The carrier card for the duck stamp transposes two numbers, so instead of listing 1-800-782-6724, it lists 1-800-872-6724. The first number spells out 1-800-STAMP24, the second 1-800-TRAMP24. People calling that second number are welcomed by “Intimate Connections” and enticed by a husky female voice to “talk only to the girls that turn you on,” for US$1.99 a minute. Duck stamps, which cost US$15 apiece, are required to hunt migratory waterfowl. The government uses nearly all the revenue to buy waterfowl habitat for the National Wildlife Refuge System. Duck stamp sales brought in nearly US$22 million in the 2006-2007 period. This year’s stamps, which feature a pair of northern pintail ducks, went on sale on July 1 and are good through June 30 of next year. The error will not be corrected until next year’s duck stamps are printed. A spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service, which administers the program, said it would cost US$300,000 to reprint the 3.5 million duck stamps.
■MEXICO
Two Cubans arrested
Two Cubans are being held by Mexican police for their alleged involvement in the beheadings of a dozen men in the Yucatan Peninsula. A Public Safety Department statement says the man and woman were arrested on a beach in Cancun. Police also raided a house, seizing an AK-47, a grenade and ammunition. They acted after questioning three Mexicans detained in the case last week. Public Safety officials declined to provide further details on Thursday, citing the ongoing investigation. The 12 decapitated bodies were found on Aug. 28 outside Merida, the capital of Yucatan state.
■UNITED STATES
Man gets leg back
After being shot five times, a western Nebraska man had to go to court to get his prosthetic leg back from prosecutors. The Box Butte County Attorney’s office gave Val McCabe’s leg back on Wednesday after a judge ordered it returned. McCabe’s prosthetic left leg had been held since Friday’s shooting because prosecutors wanted to run tests on it and a bullet lodged inside. The 58-year-old McCabe, who lost his leg below the knee in a railroad accident roughly 30 years ago, filed his lawsuit on Tuesday. McCabe lawyer argued it wasn’t practical for him to replace the specially built, US$28,000 prosthesis. Police removed the bullet from the leg before returning it. No arrests had been made by Wednesday.
■CHILE
Storm victims rescued
Emergency crews used helicopters on Thursday to rescue some of the nearly 100,000 people hit by the worst rains in three decades in the southern part of the country, where at least four people have died, officials said. A storm has dumped torrential rain on the Araucania region 700km south of Santiago since Saturday, damaging at least 10,000 homes as waters flooded rivers and canals, blocked roadways and inundated 200,000 hectares of farmland. The towns of Carahue, Nueva Imperial, Puerto Saavedra and Teniente Schmidt were all inundated after nearby rivers overflowed. The region was designated a “catastrophe zone” by Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, who toured some of the worst-hit areas on Wednesday.
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
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
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
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