■Australia
Britney banned at funerals
Soccer club songs and pop or rock music have been banned from funerals in Catholic churches under new guidelines distributed this week to priests and funeral directors. A funeral should not be a “celebration” of the deceased’s life, but a final sacred farewell, Archbishop of Melbourne Denis Hart said in the rules. Celebrations of that life should be held at social occasions before or after the funeral, he said. “The wishes of the deceased, family and friends should be taken into account ... but in planning the liturgy, the celebrant should moderate any tendency to turn the funeral into a secular celebration of the life of the deceased,” the guidelines state. Some funeral directors, however, said the directive was insensitive to relatives’ needs as many grieving families wanted to incorporate multimedia presentations, including photographs and video of the deceased person’s life as well as music. “Funerals have become a celebration of people’s lives and there aren’t many that don’t include a DVD presentation,” John Fowler, the general manager of Le Pine Funerals, told Melbourne’s Herald Sun newspaper.
■Australia
Men take python to dinner
Two men were arrested after bewildered diners at a McDonald’s spotted them wrestling a 1.5m long python named Boris in the restaurant parking lot, police said on Thursday. Victoria state police say the men stole the 8-year-old black-headed python and a lizard from a pet shop on Wednesday. They then brought the snake to the McDonald’s parking lot, where they began wrestling with it in front of puzzled customers, police said. The men, aged 22 and 24, were arrested and charged with burglary and theft. “In all honesty, it’s just a case of dumb and dumber,” detective sergeant Andrew Beams told Australian Broadcasting Corp. “Anyone who gets out there with a 1.5m python in a McDonald’s car park — they’re pretty dumb.” The snake was returned to a relieved Jodie Graham, owner of the Totally Reptiles pet shop. The lizard is still missing. “He was a bit cold and stressed so I have him in the tank warming up,” she said.
■China
Retirees attacked
An unknown assailant attacked people at a retirement home yesterday, killing four and wounding two others. The attack happened in a district of Yichun City in Heilongjiang Province, Xinhua news agency said. It gave no other details. Calls to the city police were referred to the district police, who said call the city police. Calls to government and Communist Party offices rang unanswered, as did calls to the only retirement home listed in the Nancha district of Yichun.
■China
Anti-graft official sentenced
A Chinese court has sentenced a top provincial official responsible for rooting out corruption to death for accepting more than US$1 million in bribes. The Xinhua News Agency said on Thursday that 62-year-old Wang Huayuan (王華元) was sentenced by a court in eastern Shandong Province for abusing his position. Wang was given a two-year reprieve, which means if he shows good behavior the sentence will likely be commuted to a life term. Xinhua said Wang took the cash in exchange for helping corrupt businesses avoid arrests. Calls to the Zaozhuang Intermediate People’s Court rang unanswered on Thursday. Wang was detained last year when China launched a nationwide crackdown on corruption, gangs and violence. The campaign has yielded 256,000 arrests.
■Australia
Kidnap victim reads book
Hundreds of fans of Natascha Kampusch crammed into a Vienna bookstore late on Thursday to hear the kidnap-victim-turned-author read from her newly published memoirs and recount her eight years of imprisonment. Snatched on her way to school when she was 10 years old by Wolfgang Priklopil, Kampusch was held in a windowless cell under his house outside Vienna before escaping in August 2006. He committed suicide hours later. Kampusch’s memoirs 3,096 Days, which appeared in Austria earlier this week, recount how her captor starved her, beat her, sexually abused her and forced her to clean his house half naked, calling her his “slave.” However, they also show how Kampusch, now 22, survived by obeying her kidnapper, learning to see him as a disturbed human being and avoid being “consumed with hate.”
■Romania
Witch tax rejected
Abracadabra, we’ll turn all of you into toads! That’s what senators may have been fearing when they rejected a proposal to tax witches and fortune tellers. Lawmakers Alin Popoviciu and Cristi Dugulescu of the ruling Democratic Liberal Party drafted a law where witches and fortune tellers would have to produce receipts, and would also be held liable for wrong predictions, a measure which was part of the government’s drive to increase revenue. Romania’s Senate voted down the proposal on Tuesday. Popoviciu claimed lawmakers were frightened of being cursed. It’s unclear if Popoviciu and Dugulescu will try to redraft the law. Maria Campina, a well-known Romanian witch, told Realitatea TV on Thursday it is difficult to tax thousands of fortune tellers and witches partly because of the erratic sums of money they receive.
■France
Plans to track children
With its generous benefits and subsidized facilities, France’s childcare system is one of the most admired in the world. However, psychologists and unions were up in arms on Thursday over proposals they believe would turn creches into “Big Brother-style” surveillance zones. From next year, a creche in Paris is planning to introduce a system to monitor children’s movements using tracking chips in their clothing. The center, understood to be the first in Europe to use the technology, hopes the measure will enhance the safety of its children. “The experiment ... aims to prove the effectiveness of the system from the perspective of child safety,” said Patrick Givanovitch of Lyberta, a Toulouse-based technology company. “Thanks to the chip carried by each child, it will be possible to know immediately if one of them has left the creche.” The plan by the creche, which is privately run, has provoked criticism from the childcare industry, with experts warning the measure is both pointless and potentially damaging.
■United Kingdom
Bombed car goes on display
The mangled remains of a bomb-ravaged car that illustrates life in Iraq is going on display at a London museum. The tattered wreckage was salvaged by Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller to show the changing nature of modern warfare. It aims to draw attention to the huge rise in civilian casualties in warfare. The car, a raw reminder of the six-year Iraqi conflict, was destroyed in a suicide bomb attack in Baghdad that killed 38 people in 2007. First shown as part of an art project led by Deller in New York’s New Museum last year, the installation was to open to the public yesterday at London’s Imperial War Museum.
■United States
Woman kills two at plant
A woman who had just been suspended from her job and escorted from a Kraft Foods Inc facility returned with a handgun and opened fire, killing two people and critically injuring a third before being taken into custody about an hour later, police said. The shooting happened on Thursday in northeast Philadelphia inside a plant of the nation’s largest food manufacturer, whose products include Oreo cookies, lieutenant Frank Vanore said. Kraft said in a statement that in addition to the three employees who were shot, a contract worker sustained a less serious injury, but it did not elaborate.
■United States
Skyscraper ice rink to open
Ice skating in Chicago in January is nothing new. Doing it on the 94th floor of a downtown skyscraper certainly is. Officials at the 100-story John Hancock Center said on Thursday that they are installing a rink that will allow visitors to skate 300m up in the air. About 20 people at a time will be able to skate on the 300m² rink. It will be open from January through March. The rink won’t actually be made of ice. It will be made of a synthetic material that creates a hard, plastic floor with a slick silicone glaze. It’s an attempt to attract more visitors to the building during a normally slow time of year.
■United States
Code talker passes away
Allen Dale June, one of the 29 original Navajo Code Talkers who confounded the Japanese during World War II by transmitting messages in their native language, has died. He was 91. June died of natural causes on Wednesday night at the Veteran Assistance Hospital in Prescott, his wife, Virginia, said on Thursday. With his death, only two of the 29 original Code Talkers are still living. The Code Talkers took part in every assault the Marines conducted in the Pacific from 1942 to 1945. They sent thousands of messages without error on Japanese troop movements, battlefield tactics and other communications critical to the war’s ultimate outcome.
■Canada
Pot operation shut down
A marijuana-growing operation housed in an abandoned movie theater has been shut down by police, officials said on Thursday. Around 416 marijuana plants and about 4.5kg of harvested marijuana were found in the theater in the town of Grenfell in the western province of Saskatchewan. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said they raided the theater on Wednesday after a man was arrested trying to enter the country from North Dakota with a small amount of what was suspected to be hashish in his car. Police said the man was also carrying documents that suggested the presence of a sophisticated grow operation in Saskatchewan.
■Venezuela
Man held for Chavez tweets
An engineer for a state-run electric firm has been arrested for sending a Twitter message calling for the murder of President Hugo Chavez, the state news agency AVN said on Thursday. Authorities arrested Jesus Majano, an engineer for the national firm Corpoelec, saying he posted pictures of the president “with wounds to the face” and suggested different ways “to carry out the murder of the head of state,” police official Wilmer Flores said. Police also seized the man’s BlackBerry and a computer drive, officials said. The news comes months after authorities opened a probe into calls on the Web site Noticiero Digital that Chavez said were “inciting a coup” against his government.
The collapse of the Swiss Birch glacier serves as a chilling warning of the escalating dangers faced by communities worldwide living under the shadow of fragile ice, particularly in Asia, experts said. Footage of the collapse on Wednesday showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountainside into the hamlet of Blatten. Swiss Development Cooperation disaster risk reduction adviser Ali Neumann said that while the role of climate change in the case of Blatten “still needs to be investigated,” the wider impacts were clear on the cryosphere — the part of the world covered by frozen water. “Climate change and
Poland is set to hold a presidential runoff election today between two candidates offering starkly different visions for the country’s future. The winner would succeed Polish President Andrzej Duda, a conservative who is finishing his second and final term. The outcome would determine whether Poland embraces a nationalist populist trajectory or pivots more fully toward liberal, pro-European policies. An exit poll by Ipsos would be released when polls close today at 9pm local time, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Final results are expected tomorrow. Whoever wins can be expected to either help or hinder the
Packed crowds in India celebrating their cricket team’s victory ended in a deadly stampede on Wednesday, with 11 mainly young fans crushed to death, the local state’s chief minister said. Joyous cricket fans had come out to celebrate and welcome home their heroes, Royal Challengers Bengaluru, after they beat Punjab Kings in a roller-coaster Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket final on Tuesday night. However, the euphoria of the vast crowds in the southern tech city of Bengaluru ended in disaster, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra calling it “absolutely heartrending.” Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said most of the deceased are young, with 11 dead
DENIAL: Musk said that the ‘New York Times was lying their ass off,’ after it reported he used so much drugs that he developed bladder problems Elon Musk on Saturday denied a report that he used ketamine and other drugs extensively last year on the US presidential campaign trail. The New York Times on Friday reported that the billionaire adviser to US President Donald Trump used so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that he developed bladder problems. The newspaper said the world’s richest person also took ecstasy and mushrooms, and traveled with a pill box last year, adding that it was not known whether Musk also took drugs while heading the so-called US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after Trump took power in January. In a
RSS