■AUSTRALIA
Father ‘hated’ right leg
A father-of-three who had “hated” his right leg for 25 years said yesterday that he plunged it in a bucket of dry ice for six hours so surgeons at a Sydney hospital had no choice but to amputate below the knee. “I’m tired of lying all the time and I just want people to know I’m not crazy,” David Openshaw, 29, told Channel Seven in his first TV interview since losing the limb last year. Openshaw said he has a rare neurological condition called body integrity identity disorder (BIID), which sufferers say is a medical condition characterized by an overwhelming desire to lose a limb or become a paraplegic. Openshaw, who gets about on crutches, admitted to “very conflicting” feelings about his right leg from the age of four. Learning of the supposed BIID syndrome, he said, was “absolute bliss.”
■HONG KONG
Feng shui nixes clog show
One of the territory’s tallest skyscrapers has declined to hold a Dutch charity exhibition of clogs because of worries the clunky footwear will bring bad luck, the Sunday Morning Post reported yesterday. The Cheung Kong Center refused to host the show, which was organized by the Dutch consulate, because of feng shui, a diplomat said. The tower’s management said the wooden footwear show would cause bad luck, because the Cantonese word for shoes hai sounds similar to a sigh of exasperation, the paper said. The exhibition, part of an effort to promote Dutch culture, which will raise money for Chinese children, is being held at another tower, the paper said.
■SOUTH KOREA
Prosecutors to call Roh
Prosecutors will summon former President Roh Moo-hyun for questioning on Thursday over his alleged involvement in a high-profile corruption scandal, an official said yesterday. Prosecutors already questioned Roh’s family members, including his wife and son, earlier this month on suspicion that they accepted US$6 million from a detained businessman when Roh was in office. Roh has admitted that his wife took US$1 million from Park Yeon-cha, head of a local shoe manufacturer, but suggested it was not a bribe. He also said he was aware that Park separately gave US$5 million to his relative but thought it was mere investment. The scandal is a major blow for Roh, a former human rights lawyer and liberal politician who took office in 2003 as a reformist with a clean image.
■AUSTRALIA
Asylum-seekers stopped
A boat carrying 56 people has been intercepted off the northern coast, the government said yesterday, putting further pressure on its policy on asylum seekers, which has been criticized as too soft. The boatload of 54 passengers and two crew was picked up on Saturday by a naval vessel, a spokeswoman for Minister of Home Affairs Bob Debus said. Their nationalities were not disclosed. They are to be transferred to Christmas Island, where the government has a processing facility for asylum seekers.
■INDONESIA
President ready to run again
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono announced his readiness to seek a second term in the July presidential polls yesterday. Yudhoyono told a Democratic Party meeting that he was receiving a “flood” of nominees for vice president from political and others: “Nineteen names have come in. All are good names and it will make my job easier to choose the best vice-presidential candidate to run with presidential candidate from Democrat.”
■GERMANY
Town races office chairs
An unusual spectacle greeted the residents of a small town near Darmstadt on Saturday, as participants took to the streets to race each other on office chairs. At the second annual office chair championships in Bad Koenig, 30km southeast of Darmstadt, around 80 participants competed on a downhill stretch of road using especially adapted desk furniture. The downhill course measured 200m and included an additional challenge in the form of a small ramp. Competitors reached speeds of up to 25km per hour, organizers said.
■GERMANY
Minister pans meetings
Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck said the hardest part of his 15-hour-per-day job is the long meetings — because they put a strain on a sensitive part of his anatomy. “There are some meetings that are so incredibly long that at some point your rear end starts to hurt,” Steinbrueck told a group of young school children in an interview for the Welt am Sonntag newspaper published yesterday.
■RUSSIA
Sochi residents go to polls
Voters in the city of Sochi, which will host the 2014 Winter Olympic Games, went to the polls yesterday to elect a mayor amid opposition charges of foul play during the campaign. Acting mayor and the ruling United Russia party candidate, Anatoly Pakhomov, is among the six candidates running in the election and is widely expected to win. The mayoral vote in Sochi, on the balmy palm tree-lined Black Sea coast, is seen as a key test for President Dmitry Medvedev, who has declared a commitment to political competition.
■ITALY
Anti-Nazi uprising marked
Rome commemorated the anniversary of its anti-Nazi uprising on Saturday amid a fierce debate over a proposal by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s conservative forces to honor people who died fighting for the fascists. The proposed legislation would grant a special honor and pensions to all those who fought in World War II — those who fought for Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and anti-fascist partisans alike — essentially equating the two.
■SAUDI ARABIA
Women face gym ban
Increasingly popular sports clubs and gyms for women face shut-down because the government only licenses men’s clubs, a newspaper reported yesterday. Dozens of privately established women-only gyms around the country could be closed because there is no regulatory authority for them, the Arab News said. While the General Presidency for Sport and Youth Welfare has the authority over men’s gyms, it has not been allowed to regulate those for women, the report said. That means that the women’s gyms springing up in major cities are unlicensed and illegal, the report said.
■GERMANY
Hitler paintings auctioned
Two watercolors attributed to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and dated 1914 have been sold at auction to a private collector for 32,000 euros (US$42,375), the Weidler auction house said on Saturday. Depicting farms and landscapes, with no political symbolism, the two paintings — created the year Hitler turned 25, and 20 years before he became fuehrer — each had a starting price of 3,500 euros. Last Thursday, 13 watercolors by Hitler — most of them landscapes found in a garage earlier this year by the seller — went for £95,589 pounds (US$140,000) at auction in Britain.
■MEXICO
Los Zetas hitman arrested
Police on Saturday said they arrested a drug cartel hitman wanted in connection with the abduction of a US anti-kidnap expert in December and the death of at least five people. German Torres Jimenez, who allegedly works for the powerful Gulf drug cartel, was detained after a shootout in the eastern city of Veracruz, the Public Safety Secretariat said in a statement. Two other suspected hitmen and two women were also arrested when police raided a home in the Poza Rica neighborhood of Veracruz. Torres is allegedly one of the founders of Los Zetas, the armed wing of the Gulf cartel. Los Zetas reportedly took control of the organization when cartel boss Osiel Cardenas was arrested, then extradited to the US in 2005.
■UNITED STATES
Beatrice Arthur dies at 86
Beatrice Arthur, one of the stars in the 1980s TV series The Golden Girls, died on Saturday in Los Angeles from cancer, her spokesman told local media. She was 86. Arthur died at her home on Saturday morning after suffering from cancer, Dan Watt told The Envelope entertainment magazine. He did not specify what type of cancer the actress had. Arthur, widely acclaimed for her role in the 1964 Broadway production of the musical Fiddler on the Roof, went on to TV plaudits in Maude, a TV series in the 1970s, and NBC’s The Golden Girls, between 1985 and 1992.
■UNITED STATES
Man kills wife, two others
A university professor on Saturday shot and killed his wife and two others at a community theater in the college town of Athens, Georgia, after getting into an argument with a man, local news media reported. The gunman, identified as University of Georgia professor George Zinkhan, 57, drove off in his car and was being sought by police, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on its Web site. Two others were wounded in the shooting, the newspaper reported. Zinkhan’s motives were unclear, but witnesses told the Journal-Constitution he argued with an unidentified man at the Athens Community Theater before he left and returned minutes later brandishing two handguns.
■UNITED STATES
Obama ratings shine
President Barack Obama, who is approaching his first 100 days in office, is enjoying the best presidential job approval rating at this point in 20 years, a new opinion survey showed. The poll, by ABC News and the Washington Post, showed 69 percent of Americans approve of the job he is doing, the highest evaluation in about two decades. But the president faces a partisan divide. While 93 percent of Democrats approve of his activities, only 36 percent of Republicans do so, the poll showed. Fifty-four percent said Obama was doing a better job than expected, far above former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton at their 100-day mark.
■SAUDI ARABIA
Women may be able to vote
Riyadh is considering allowing women to vote in municipal elections this year, but they would still be barred from running for office, a senior government official was quoted as saying yesterday. The country is the world’s biggest oil exporter and a key ally of the US. The absolute monarchy applies an austere form of Sunni Islam which bans unrelated men and women from mixing. Prince Mansour bin Muteb, deputy minister for municipal and rural affairs, made the comments after attending a conference of municipal councils in the Eastern Province, newspapers said.
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
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