■SOUTH KOREA
Cleavage bothers colleagues
Almost three-quarters of male office workers feel uncomfortable when female colleagues show too much leg or cleavage in the workplace, a survey of 1,254 employees by the job portal site CareerNet has found. Some 56 percent of male respondents cited micro-miniskirts as their chief complaint, while 51 percent objected to excessive cleavage. Low-rise trousers that reveal women’s underwear, “killer heels” and flashy outfits in general were also cause for complaint. Women complained mostly of stains on the shirts and ties of their male colleagues.
■AUSTRALIA
Rudd slammed for saint bid
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was accused of “sheer arrogance” yesterday over moves to press Pope Benedict XVI to create the country’s first saint. Opposition frontbencher Christopher Pyne hit out at Rudd’s plan to raise the canonization of nun Mary MacKillop during a meeting with the pope this week. “The sheer arrogance of the prime minister, believing he can lobby the Pope on behalf of Mary MacKillop, is quite frankly offensive,” Pyne told Sky News. “The path to sainthood is a very serious process and it doesn’t include lobbying by the leaders of countries.” But Labor Member of Parliament David Bradbury said there was no suggestion that Rudd, a Catholic, would produce evidence of the miracle needed to turn MacKillop into a saint. MacKillop, founder of the Sisters of St. Joseph, was beatified in 1995 after the Vatican agreed that prayers to her in 1961, some 52 years after her death, had saved a woman from cancer. MacKillop needs one more approved miracle to become a full saint.
■MALAYSIA
Judge can’t cane robber
A court has overruled a judge who sparked a legal stir because he wanted to personally cane a convicted robber, a lawyer said yesterday. Sessions Court Judge Zainal Abidin Kamarudin last month ordered that a 20-year-old man be whipped with a rattan cane 10 times and insisted that he wanted to carry out the sentence himself in court on July 15. Muhammad Syafiq Abdul Wahab had pleaded guilty to a charge of armed robbery after he was arrested for brandishing a knife while stealing a mobile phone from a student. The High Court decided on Monday that the judge should not cane offenders himself. It also ruled that Muhammad Syafiq should serve 200 hours of community service instead of being caned.
■AUSTRALIA
Police seek skull’s owner
Baffled police launched an appeal for information yesterday after a 700-year-old skull washed up on a beach. Police believe the skull must belong to a private collector or museum, but are mystified as to how it arrived on the Sydney beach in September. “Detectives are now looking for the owner of the skull, who they believe may be a private collector or from a museum or research facility,” they said. Tests showed the skull belonged to a non-Aboriginal child aged between four and six who lived about seven centuries ago.
■INDIA
Court rejects injections
The nation’s top court has refused to replace hanging with lethal injection as the country’s sole method of execution, saying there is no evidence it is less painful than other ways. Monday’s ruling rejected a petition by rights activist Ashok Kumar Walia, who said hanging was a “cruel and painful” method of execution and should be replaced by lethal injection. The judges suggested that Walia instead campaign for abolition of the death penalty.
■GERMANY
Thieves nab potency pills
A gang of four looted 4.9 million euros (US$6.9 million) worth of potency pills in a burglary at Bayer AG’s headquarters in Frankfut, the company said on Monday. Five weeks after burglars stole two barrels filled with 320,000 of Bayer’s Levitra pills, Bayer said it had put up a reward of 20,000 euros for information leading either to the perpetrators being caught or the retrieval of more than half the swag. The thieves cut through a wire fence and smashed a window in a building where the pills were stored before escaping, police said. Bayer, whose products range from Aspirin painkillers to Yasmin birth control pills, said on its Levitra Web site that the pill may help men fight erectile dysfunction when other oral treatments do not work.
■SWEDEN
C-section may hurt immunity
Swedish researchers have detected a possible link between babies born by planned Cesarean section and the increased risk of developing diseases like diabetes, cancer and asthma in later life, a study published in this month’s edition of Acta Paediatrica said. Babies delivered with planned Cesarean section had changes to the DNA pool in their white blood cells, possibly connected to altered stress levels, the study conducted at the Karolinska Institute said. “Our results provide the first pieces of evidence that early so-called epigenetic programming of the immune system during birth may have a role to play,” Mikael Norman of the Department of Clinical Science, Intervention and Technology said. The findings are interesting as Cesarean section delivery is on the rise worldwide. At present it is the most common surgical procedure among women of child-bearing age. The team took blood samples from umbilical cords from 37 newborn infants just after delivery, and collected new samples three to five days after birth. The blood samples were analyzed to study the degree of DNA-methylation, or chemical altering of the DNA, in the white blood cells. These cells are a key part of the immune system.
■SERBIA
Tito’s widow granted ID
The widow of former Yugoslavia’s communist dictator Josip Broz Tito has been granted a Serbian passport after nearly 30 years of life in seclusion. Jovanka Broz, 84, has lived in Belgrade without travel or identity documents in a decrepit government-owned house since Tito’s death in 1980. Interior Minister Ivica Dacic handed her the documents on Monday at a highly publicized ceremony. “This means a lot to me,” Broz told Dacic. Told by Dacic that it was “nothing special” and everyone had the right to the documents, she responded: “To me, it is special.” Jovanka Broz fell out of favor shortly before Tito’s death and was forced out of the dictator’s luxurious Belgrade residence. Some reports at the time said that she had ambitions to take over the country after his death.
■IRAQ
Hussein grave visits banned
The government imposed a ban on Monday on all organized visits to the grave of executed president Saddam Hussein after some schools near his stronghold of Tikrit arranged trips for their pupils. “The Cabinet secretariat has sent instructions to the education ministry and to Salaheddin Province and its provincial council banning the organization of visits to the tomb of the president of the former regime,” a statement said. Saddam loyalists regularly hold commemorations by his graveside in his native village of al-Awja, outside the northern town of Tikrit, on the anniversaries of his birth and execution.
‘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
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
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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