■HONG KONG
Maid forced to kowtow
A couple assaulted their Filipino maid and forced her to kowtow 100 times after she served an inadequately cooked meal, a court report said yesterday. Secretary Wan Sau-yee grabbed maid Julieta Binggas Selga by the hair and pushed her head to the floor, forcing her to bow down repeatedly. She also slapped her across the face and head three times. Following the incident in March, Wan, 37, pleaded guilty to two charges of assault causing actual bodily harm, said the report in the Standard newspaper. She appeared on Thursday in court with her husband, Henry Kwok, 42, who admitted one charge of common assault for hitting the maid on the head and neck with a rolled up newspaper later the same night. Their lawyer claimed Wan was angry when she discovered the maid had not thoroughly cooked a meal for her son. Kwok was fined US$650 and ordered to pay Selga US$390 in compensation. However, the magistrate deferred sentencing on Wan to allow for the preparation of probation and community service reports, warning her that she faced a much stiffer penalty.
■AFGHANISTAN
Bean mystery stumps Brits
The British military is mystified after what was first announced as a major haul of opium poppy seeds amounted to nothing more than a hill of beans. British troops came across a bag of seeds — weighing 1.3 tonnes — during an operation near the provincial capital of southern Helmand last week, a British military spokesman said. The find was originally trumpeted as a big haul of opium poppy seeds. However tests on the seeds by the UN appeared to show they were in fact mung beans. Asked if the suspect kernels were in fact mung beans, Tekeste Tekie, UN Food and Agriculture Organization spokesman in Kabul, said: “There is no question, yes.” The British military spokesman would not confirm the mung bean mystery, saying the true nature of the suspect seeds had not yet been determined.
■NEW ZEALAND
Airline staff get naked
Air New Zealand has come up with an imaginative way of encouraging passengers to pay attention to the pre-flight safety video — showing cabin crew in the nude. The video for domestic flights features staff covered in body paint mimicking their uniforms, their modesty concealed by careful camera angles and strategically placed seat belts and other equipment. “We wanted to find a way to deliver these important pre-flight messages to our domestic travelers in a way that was genuine, engaging and fun,” said Air New Zealand general manager for marketing, Steve Bayliss. The safety video follows a domestic advertising campaign using the same eye-catching stunt. Even chief executive Rob Fyfe had a brief cameo role as a baggage handler.
■HONG KONG
Would-be hit man jailed
A Chinese would-be hit man arrested in Hong Kong with a gun and bullets in a suspected plot to shoot pro-democracy champion Martin Lee (李柱銘) was yesterday jailed for 16 years. Huang Nanhua (黃南華), 50, was found guilty in Hong Kong’s High Court of possessing a pistol and five rounds of ammunition after being arrested in a routine police check on a taxi last August. He is believed to have been sent to Hong Kong with instructions to target 71-year-old Lee. A photograph and the home address of media tycoon Jimmy Lai were also found on him when he was arrested. Huang later told police he had been instructed to come to Hong Kong to “teach someone a lesson,” the court was told.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Warming shrinks sheep
The mysterious shrinking sheep on the island of St Kilda far off the west coast of Scotland, sounds like a job for Sherlock Holmes. A rare herd of wild Soay sheep on the remote island are refusing to bow to conventional evolutionary pressure, which says big is best. Experts say the island’s shorter and milder winters mean that lambs do not need to put on as much weight during their first few months. Smaller animals that would have perished in harsh winters a few decades ago can survive to their first birthday. As a result, the average weight of the sheep has dropped by 81g each year.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Life becomes art
A housewife from Sleaford in Lincolnshire will be the first of thousands of people to stand for one hour on top of a plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square as part of a 100-day “live sculpture” exercise. One & Other is a work devised by sculptor Antony Gormley for the square’s empty plinth, now a platform for temporary works of art. The first of 2,400 people to feature in Gormley’s work is Rachel Wardell, 35, a housewife and mother-of-two. She will appear on the plinth at 9am on Monday and will be followed at 10am by Jason Clark, a 41-year-old nurse from Brighton. Gormley said of his work: “In the context of Trafalgar Square with its military, valedictory and male historical statues, this elevation of everyday life to the position formerly occupied by monumental art allows us to reflect on the diversity, vulnerability and particularity of the individual in contemporary society.”
■SPAIN
Barcelona may fine U2
Barcelona authorities might fine the band U2 for rocking too long and loudly during rehearsals for their latest world tour, the city council said on Thursday. While the city said it is proud to host the beginning of U2’s world tour, it also said that that one of its districts received a formal complaint by residents about the band playing after permitted hours and making noise. The council said they had given the band permission to rehearse until 10pm. Regional newspaper El Punt said the band had rehearsed till midnight at sound levels measured at 70 decibels — the equivalent of a vacuum cleaner at 1m.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Heat kills two police dogs
Two British police dogs have died after being left in a car during a heat wave. The German shepherds died on Tuesday in a car in the parking lot of Nottingham police headquarters. Temperatures in the area reached 29˚C that day, according to Britain’s weather office. Police did not say how long the dogs were in the car.
■SWITZERLAND
Counterfeiters hit trash bags
Counterfeiters who already make a fortune from fake Swiss watches and army knives have now turned to making a business out of fake Swiss rubbish bags. Zurich police said on Thursday that they have uncovered thousands of counterfeit rubbish bags carrying the region’s waste disposal tax and recycling label, smuggled in from Serbia. Each 35 liter so-called “Zueri-sack” is sold for about 2 Swiss francs (US$1.80). “A 37-year-old man has over several months smuggled thousands of fake rubbish bags from Serbia to Switzerland where they are sold,” Zurich police said in a statement, noting that the value of the offense reached SF26,000.
■UNITED STATES
Deodorant disarms thief
Police in suburban Chicago say a taxi driver who didn’t have Mace handy when he was attacked by a knife-wielding passenger instead disarmed the man with a can of aerosol deodorant. Elgin Deputy Police Chief Jeff Swoboda says the 51-year-old cabbie picked up the male passenger early on Thursday outside a casino. Swoboda said the driver grew suspicious when the man offered several destinations, so he surreptitiously placed the small can of deodorant between his legs. Shortly afterward, the passenger put a knife to the driver’s neck and demanded money. The cabbie sprayed the deodorant in the man’s eyes, causing him to drop the knife.
■UNITED STATES
Girl beats mom’s boyfriend
Police say a Connecticut girl overheard her mother’s screams during sex and thought she was being assaulted, so she rounded up some friends to attack the woman’s companion. The 16-year-old girl, two boys and a 19-year-old man were arrested on Tuesday and arraigned on Wednesday on assault and conspiracy charges. Torrington police and the woman said the girl thought her mother was being attacked on June 6. Police say the teens went into the bedroom and beat the mother’s 25-year-old companion with a baseball bat and punched him. The man, Roger Swanson of Torrington, says he suffered a black eye and several bruises. The woman, Melanie Arnold, denies she screamed. She said her daughter heard a slap and thought it was an assault.
■ECUADOR
‘Simpsons’ loses key slot
Hit US cartoon series The Simpsons will no longer be shown during prime-time in Ecuador while the government ponders its impact on children, a broadcaster said on Thursday. Teleamazonas said it would no longer be allowed to broadcast the often satirical exploits of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie, between 6am and 9pm, pending a government investigation. A government-backed regulator will assess the program’s impact on “boys, girls and teenagers,” and wants to restrict its broadcast “to assure the protection” of younger audiences.
■UNITED STATES
Naked man rerouts plane
A US man who stripped off mid-flight, forcing flight attendants to cover him with a blanket and the pilot to reroute the flight, will face psychological evaluation, reports said on Thursday. The 50-year-old passenger, Keith Wright, was aboard US Airways flight 705 to Los Angeles from Charlotte, North Carolina, on Tuesday night when he shocked fellow passengers by standing up and starting to disrobe. Two police officers, who happened to be on the flight, forced him to the back of the plane and he was removed from the plane with just a blanket around his body after it landed at Albuquerque, New Mexico.
■UNITED STATES
Gay Mennonites protest
Gay and lesbian Mennonites dressed in bright pink have gathered with others outside the church’s biannual convention in Columbus, Ohio, to criticize its leaders for trying to push them out. About 100 ministers and lay people prayed, sang hymns and spoke of feeling ostracized from the church at the protest in downtown Columbus on Thursday. The “pink Menno” campaign is an effort to get the church to address the deeply divisive issue of allowing homosexuality within its congregations.
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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