■INDIA
Naked girls to entice rain
Farmers in an eastern state have asked their unmarried daughters to plough parched fields naked in a bid to embarrass the weather gods to bring some badly needed monsoon rain, officials said on Thursday. Witnesses said the naked girls in Bihar state ploughed the fields and chanted ancient hymns after sunset to invoke the gods. They said elderly village women helped the girls drag the ploughs. “This is the most trusted social custom in the area and the villagers have vowed to continue this practice until it rains very heavily,” Upendra Kumar, a village council official, said from Bihar’s remote Banke Bazaar town.
■INDIA
Snake halts parliament
A stray snake brought parliament to a standstill for several hours on Thursday in Orissa state, officials said. A cleaner spotted the intruder, believed to be a king cobra, while sweeping in the morning and called the assembly’s watchman. The speaker of the assembly in the state capital, Bhubaneswar, adjourned the house as security personnel, wildlife officials and a member of a local snake helpline searched unsuccessfully for the creature with the help of a sniffer dog.
■HONG KONG
Child-stomper sent to jail
A father who kicked and stomped his three-year-old son, rupturing his intestines and liver, was jailed for two years, a newspaper reported yesterday. Lo Siu-ting, 24, had previously been convicted of mistreating the boy’s five-year-old brother, the Standard said. Lo, who pleaded guilty to wounding the three-year-old, said the incident occurred during a dispute with his pregnant 23-year-old wife. Prosecutors said Lo kicked his wife out of bed and told her to take care of the son. When she turned on the lights and switched on the television, he hit her, they said. Lo then kicked his son four or five times when he was hugging his mother on the floor, they added. The boys now live with foster families.
■AUSTRALIA
Literacy, genetics linked
A study conducted over 10 years on three continents and involving the monitoring of 500 pairs of identical twins during their first three years of school showed that a dedicated teacher plays only a minor role in a child acquiring literacy skills. “The single biggest player in a child’s learning outcome seems to be genetic endowment,” Australian educational psychologist Brian Byrne said yesterday. The professor at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, found only an 8 percent variation in literacy levels between twins in different classrooms he studied in Australia, the US and Scandinavia. “It seems to say that teachers are effective and that they’re roughly equally effective,” he said.
■VIETNAM
Skyscraper workers die
Four construction workers died in two accidents this week at the site of what is to be the country’s tallest skyscraper, a government official said yesterday. The workers were killed in two scaffolding collapses on Tuesday and Wednesday, said Nguyen Van Tien, chief inspector at the Hanoi Department of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs. They were working on the Hanoi Landmark Tower, a 336m office complex being built by South Korean company Keangnam. Tien said an investigation had begun into why the scaffolding collapsed. The Hanoi Landmark Tower is expected to be the world’s 17th-tallest building when it is completed next year. It is more than twice as tall as any other building in Vietnam.
■BELGIUM
Convicts in chopper escape
Three prisoners, among them one of the nation’s most dangerous criminals, escaped on Thursday in an audacious jailbreak in broad daylight aboard a hijacked helicopter, the Justice Ministry said. Two accomplices rented a helicopter, took the pilot hostage and forced him to land in the courtyard of the jail, located in the northern city of Bruges, a ministry spokesperson told Belga news agency. When the helicopter took off with the three convicts one of the accomplices stayed behind, possibly because of limited space aboard the helicopter, the spokesperson said. “This accomplice is in any case guilty of hostage taking,” the spokesperson added. The escaped convicts and the accomplice were dropped off near a major road and the helicopter was abandoned at Aalter, on the outskirts of Bruges.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Saucy sausage ad criticized
A saucy radio advert for sausages that encouraged listeners to reveal “where you like to stick yours” was criticized by the advertising watchdog on Wednesday. The ads for Mattesons smoked sausages elicited 21 complaints from listeners who said they were offensive because of the sexual innuendo and should not have been aired when children were likely to be listening. “Think about all the things you can stick this tasty, extraordinarily large sausage in,” one advert said. “Mmm ... pizza, pasta, stir fry. You have any ideas? Give me a call and tell me where you like to stick it.” Kerry Foods, which makes the sausages, said its adverts were intended to be tongue-in-cheek and were not designed to be offensive. The Advertising Standards Authority did not uphold the complaints about the innuendo because it was not sexually explicit, but said the ads could “cause harm to children.” It ruled the ads should not be aired at times when they were likely to be heard by children.
■SAUDI ARABIA
TV sex life boaster arrested
A man has been arrested for boasting about his sex life on television, the English-language daily Arab News reported on Thursday. Jeddah resident Mazen Abdul Jawad was arrested after he appeared last week on Red Line, a program on Lebanon-based LBC television which is also popular in Saudi Arabia, the newspaper said. On the program, Jawad said he first had sex with a neighbor when he was 14 and he also described in detail some of his later adventures. He explained how he uses the Bluetooth function on his mobile phone to try to pick up Saudi women, who are forbidden to mix with or reveal their faces to men who are not related to them. He also gave a recipe for an aphrodisiac. The segment sparked about 100 complaints to local justice officials, leading to his arrest, the paper said. Jawad could face charges under Saudi Arabia’s strict Islamic sharia law of speaking openly about vice and admitting he engaged in premarital sex, it said, adding that if convicted he could be jailed and flogged.
■GERMANY
Hunters to get health check
Two prehistoric hunters, whose remains were discovered near Bonn almost a century ago, are to be subjected to extensive “health checks” by an international team of scientists, museum directors announced on Thursday. Modern research methods are to be applied to the 14,000-year-old couple, to find out more about eating habits, diseases, inherited traits and even possible “marriage networks” existing at the end of the Ice Age. The announcement was made by experts in prehistoric man at the Bonn museum where the couple has been housed since its discovery in 1914.
■UNITED STATES
Church leader jailed
A Wisconsin church leader was sentenced to two years in jail for keeping the body of a dead elderly parishioner in a bathtub to cash in on her pension checks. The macabre money-making scheme also involved another woman and her two children, who were ordered to pray for the dead woman so that she would be resurrected, the Wisconsin Rapids Tribune reported on Thursday. The children, aged 12 and 15 when the body heist occurred, and their mother were told that if they prayed and believed enough, the woman would come back to life. The children were punished and beaten with a stick when the body began to decompose.
■UNITED STATES
Land mine donated
A land mine found in a suburban Denver Goodwill donation box forced the evacuation of a strip mall. The rectangular, olive-green box with the words “Front Toward Enemy” raised the suspicions of Goodwill workers on Tuesday. Arvada police say the Claymore land mine didn’t go off in the donation box and no one was hurt. A bomb squad disposed of the device.
■UNITED STATES
Bloody display removed
The luxury retailer Barneys New York has removed a window display that made it appear blood-spattered mannequins were fending off attackers. Creative director Simon Doonan says it was installed in a vestibule window at the Manhattan store while he was away on business. He had it removed on Tuesday after an inquiry from the Daily News. Doonan said he encourages creativity, but “this clearly crossed the line.”
■CANADA
Lottery win worth jail
For Canadian Barry Shell, 45, the C$4 million (US$3.7 million) was worth a night in jail. Shell showed up at the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp delighted to claim his win earlier this week, only to be pulled aside by detective Kevin Finley and informed he was under arrest. “I hate to wreck your happy dance,” Finley told Shell, according to the Toronto Star on Thursday. Shell had several outstanding warrants from 2003 for theft of cameras, global positioning systems, memory cards and watches. “I’m still kind of in shock that I won this money, so it’s not a big deal that I have to spend the night in jail,” he said. Instead of dancing, he had a “happy cigarette,” Finley said. Shell was released on Tuesday on bail of C$1,500 and must return to court on next Thursday. When he bought his lottery ticket on Sunday, he had C$0.50 in his pocket.
■CANADA
‘Honor killing’ suspected
Authorities on Thursday charged an Afghan immigrant, his wife and their oldest son with four counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of three sisters in the family and an older female relative. The three teenage sisters were found dead with Rona Amir Mohammed, 50, in a submerged car on June 30 in the historic Rideau Canal near Kingston, Ontario. Investigators were baffled how the car negotiated obstacles to end up in the canal tail first, without leaving any skid marks. Kingston police said the teenage girls’ father, Mohammad Shafia, mother Tooba Mohammad Yehya and brother Hamid Mohammad Shafia, 18, have each been charged with four counts of first-degree murder and four counts of conspiracy to murder. An official said that investigators are looking into whether the deaths were an “honor killing.” It emerged during a press conference that Rona Amir Mohammed was actually Mohammad Shafia’s first wife, not a cousin as reported.
CONDITIONS: The Russian president said a deal that was scuppered by ‘elites’ in the US and Europe should be revived, as Ukraine was generally satisfied with it Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing. Ukraine last month launched a cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, sending thousands of troops across the border and seizing several villages. Putin said shortly after there could be no talk of negotiations. Speaking at a question and answer session at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin said that Russia was ready for talks, but on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul, Turkey,
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious
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