■NEW ZEALAND
Student sells virginity
A cash-strapped student who auctioned off her virginity to help pay for university said yesterday she had accepted an offer of US$32,000 to sleep with a stranger. The 19-year-old offered her virginity to the highest bidder in an online auction and said there had been more than 1,200 bids. The highest bid was “way beyond what I dreamed,” the student said on her Web page when the auction ended. “Thank you to the more than 30,000 people who viewed my ad and to the more than 1,200 offers made.” Calling herself “unigirl,” the young woman had described herself as attractive, fit and healthy, and said she had never been in a sexual relationship. She did not respond to media requests for an interview. The advertisement drew wide reaction in New Zealand, which has some of the world’s most liberal laws on prostitution. Bruce Pilbrow of the organization Parents Inc told the New Zealand Herald it was “horrifically sad” the woman had to sell herself to meet tuition costs. Sexologist Blair Bishop described it as “just a novel form of sex work.”
■CAMBODIA
US man sentenced to jail
A court yesterday convicted and sentenced a US man to one year in prison for sexually abusing a teenage girl. Phnom Penh Municipal Court Judge Chhay Kong found Harvey Alexander Johnson, 57, guilty of committing indecent acts with a 13-year girl. The court also ordered him to pay US$3,000 in compensation to the victim’s parents and another 4 million riel (US$1,000) in fines. Johnson, a private English teacher in Phnom Penh, was arrested in August in his rented house after police received complaints from the girl accusing him of sexual abuse. Chhay Kong ordered Johnson, from Texas, expelled from the country after he completes his prison sentence.
■HONG KONG
Fake will sparks probe
Police said yesterday they may investigate a feng shui master after the High Court ruled the will granting him an eccentric tycoon’s massive property fortune was fake. Authorities will probe the high-profile judgment released on Tuesday, which described Tony Chan (陳振聰) as a liar who created the will in a failed bid to inherit Nina Wang’s (龔如心) estimated US$13 billion estate. The pig-tailed tycoon, who at one stage was Asia’s richest woman, died of cancer in April 2007 at the age of 69, triggering a bitter feud between Chan and her charity over her estate. The probe raises the possibility that Chan — a former bartender who was — Wang’s spiritual adviser and lover — could be charged with fraud.
■MALAYSIA
PM’s aide to resign
An aide to the prime minister plans to resign after allegedly calling ethnic Indian and Chinese citizens “immigrants,” in an embarrassment for the government’s faltering campaign to promote harmony in the multiracial country. The prime minister’s office made the announcement in a statement received yesterday, saying that aide Nasir Safar’s alleged remarks did not “in any way reflect the views of the prime minister.” “Nasir never intended to make any derogatory remarks,” the statement said. According to local news reports, Nasir said during a speech in Malacca that Indians and Chinese were “immigrants,” and that the government would revoke Indians’ citizenship if they demanded equal rights. Nasir could not immediately be reached for comment.
■FRANCE
Nationality denied over veil
Immigration Minister Eric Besson said he had signed off on a refusal to grant citizenship to a man who forced his wife to wear a burqa-style veil that covers her face. Besson said the man acknowledged compelling his wife to wear the veil and thus “very clearly denied the principles of male-female equality” and secularism. Besson’s office said the minister signed a decree on Tuesday denying citizenship to the man and sent it for approval to Prime Minister Francois Fillon. The government is considering whether to ban face-covering Muslim veils. A parliamentary panel has said they should be banned in places of public service, including mass transport and hospitals.
■UNITED KINGDOM
French military help needed
London is calling for greater military co-operation with France in a bid to map out a more secure future for the country’s cash-strapped armed forces, a newspaper reported yesterday. A government blueprint on the way ahead for the forces, cited by the Financial Times, puts an unexpectedly heavy emphasis on its need to work with the EU to maintain its role on the world stage. In particular, the document praises the decision by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to take France fully back into the military alliance NATO and raises the prospect of joint defense work.
■SOUTH AFRICA
Zuma child a ‘personal affair’
The ruling party on Monday dismissed a storm over President Jacob Zuma’s lovechild, as political opponents told him to stop behaving like a “gigolo” and get sex addiction therapy. “Our view is that the matter between any two consenting adults remains their own personal affair,” the African National Congress said in a statement. “This unjustified attack to the president is disingenuous. There is nothing wrong that the president had done. There is nothing ‘shameful’ when two adults have a relationship.” Opposition parties reacted angrily to a weekend media report that Zuma had fathered a child with the daughter of one of his close friends, a top organizer of the World Cup.
■MALAWI
Gay rights activist nabbed
A man was arrested for putting up posters championing gay rights, police said on Tuesday, adding they were searching for other people they believe are working with foreigners in the campaign. There is debate over gay rights in this conservative country, sparked by the trial of a gay couple charged with unnatural acts and gross indecency, felonies for which they could be imprisoned for up to 14 years. In an interview on Tuesday, police spokesman Dave Chingwalu said the man arrested on Saturday would be charged with conduct likely to cause a breach of peace, a misdemeanor that could be punished with a fine of up to 5,000 kwacha (about US$35) or up to three months in jail.
■RUSSIA
Seven businessmen slain
The bodies of seven businessmen have been found in a car on a remote road in Siberia after they were apparently murdered, officials said yesterday. Interfax news agency said the seven local men were found on a road 120km from the town of Zakamensk, close to the border with Mongolia, in the Siberian region of Buryatia. “The bodies had signs of a violent death,” it quoted an official as saying. A spokeswoman for the investigative committee of prosecutors in Buryatia confirmed by telephone from the regional capital Ulan Ude that the bodies of seven murdered people had been discovered.
■UNITED STATES
PRC boosts spying: Blair
President Barack Obama’s top intelligence official said Chinese spies had increased their work in the US. National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair said in written testimony to Congress that China over the last year had boosted its intelligence collection and processing operations against the US. He said Chinese intelligence services “continue to expand and operate in and outside the United States.”
■UNITED STATES
‘Jaws’ producer dies at 93
David Brown, the producer of a string of Hollywood hits including Jaws, died of kidney failure at his home in New York on Tuesday. Brown, 93, was responsible for putting on screen some of the most memorable and profitable film classics of recent times, including The Sting, which won an Oscar in 1973 for best film; Jaws (1975), which broke records and established its director Steven Spielberg; the highly praised Cocoon in 1985; Driving Miss Daisy, which won an Oscar for best picture in 1989; A Few Good Men, nominated as best film in 1992; and the director Robert Altman’s critically acclaimed 1992 Hollywood satire The Player.
■UNITED STATES
Elderly robber kills self
Authorities said a 71-year-old painting contractor driving a silver Jaguar robbed at least four banks before killing himself during a police chase. The final robbery was on Monday, when Frank Palazzo shot himself while police chased his car down a highway. The car was wrecked, but no one else was hurt. Horry County police said Palazzo may have robbed the banks in recent months because he needed money for his failing construction business. Detectives identified Palazzo using surveillance footage. His sister-in-law, Marian Palazzo, said Palazzo had struggled with depression and had difficulty coping with the deaths of his wife and mother.
■UNITED STATES
Twitter aids scam targets
Twitter on Tuesday blocked the accounts of users who evidently fell prey to a “phishing” scam that stole their log-in information. The microblogging service locked the apparent victims of the con job out of their Twitter accounts and sent them e-mail messages directing them to create new passwords. “OMG just looked at someone’s Twitter who got hacked [and it] made me have shivers,” a member of the online community wrote in a text message on Tuesday. Twitter declined to reveal the extent of the problem, but said in an e-mail response to press inquiries that it reset a “small number” of accounts that it believes were “compromised off-site.”
■UNITED STATES
Sentence too lenient: court
A federal appeals court said on Tuesday a 22-year prison sentence was too lenient for an al-Qaeda-trained terrorist convicted of plotting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport at the end of the millennium. A divided three-judge panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Ahmed Ressam, 41, deserved a much longer prison term because he had reneged on a deal to cooperate with terrorism investigators around the world. Federal prosecutors said Ressam’s change-of-heart — which came after two years of cooperation — compromised at least two terrorist cases in the US, resulting in charges being dropped. “We are gratified that the Court of Appeals recognized the importance of public safety at sentencing and that Mr Ressam remains a threat to the public,” US Attorney Jenny Durkan of Seattle said.
A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It might sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this point, it’s: ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
CHEER ON: Students were greeted by citizens who honked their car horns or offered them food and drinks, while taxi drivers said they would give marchers a lift home Hundreds of students protesting graft they blame for 15 deaths in a building collapse on Friday marched through Serbia to the northern city of Novi Sad, where they plan to block three Danube River bridges this weekend. They received a hero’s welcome from fellow students and thousands of local residents in Novi Said after arriving on foot in their two-day, 80km journey from Belgrade. A small red carpet was placed on one of the bridges across the Danube that the students crossed as they entered the city. The bridge blockade planned for yesterday is to mark three months since a huge concrete construction