■ Australia
New twist on knickers
PHOTO: AFP
A grandmother sick of having her underwear peek over the top of the latest low-cut trousers has designed a pair of backless briefs. "You'll never have to pull your knickers out again," 44-year-old Jan Digney said of her revolutionary design which rides neither up nor down buttock cheeks. After a new pair of "hipsters" revealed a little too much of her underwear last Novem-ber, Digney decided some-thing had to be done. "I asked my daughters and
they said they wore micro-mini G-strings but some-times they didn't wear anything at all," she said.
"I was horrified. I didn't bring my daughters up like that." So five months, 50 prototypes and A$300,000 (US$213,000) of savings later, the grandmother of
two has come up with what she thinks is the answer.
The "Pert Backless Brief," patented in 123 countries, features two adjustable bra-like straps which extend around each thigh, sit under the buttock cheek and come together at the gusset.
■ New Zealand
Car thief picks wrong target
A thief who stole a car with
a four-year-old boy in the back seat in Coromandel soon discovered he had chosen the wrong town, the New Zealand Herald reported yesterday. Five drivers who had seen the incident gave chase and a cafe owner telephoned residents on the thief's escape route to organize road blocks. Finding his escape blocked the thief headed back toward town before a car driven by the boy's uncle drove the thief off the road. Police said
the 19-year-old thief had been watching when the child's aunt left the car with the boy and a nine-year old niece in the back seat. The girl escaped as the vehicle drove off.
■ Malaysia
Ritual killing suspects freed
A court yesterday acquitted three men charged with killing an American woman in an occult ritual to obtain lottery numbers. The remains of 35-year-old Carolyn Janice Ahmad were discovered in a shallow grave in June 2001. The Minnesota native was married to a Malaysian doctor and had lived in Malaysia since 1987. High Court Judicial Commis-sioner Balia Yusuf Wahi
said discrepancies in the testimony of key witnesses showed that prosecutors did not have a solid enough case against the three men.
■ Nepal
25 feared dead in crash
At least 25 people, including a number of foreign tourists, were feared killed yesterday when their bus plunged about 100m into a raging river in central Nepal, police said. The accident occurred near the town of Bhaisi Gauda, about 90km west of the Kathmandu early yes-terday, police said. The bus was traveling between Pokhara and Kathmandu when the driver apparently lost control, an official said.
■ Australia
Nike pulls TV ad
Nike withdrew a TV ad featuring young girls trying to impress a male tennis coach yesterday after morals groups complained it trivialized pedophilia. "We apologize to those who
have been offended by the television commercial," Nike Australia managing director Tony Balfour said in a statement.
■ United States
Olympian kills wife, self
Police believe a former Olympic athlete killed his neurosurgeon wife before committing suicide by jumping from a 10th-story dormitory window, a source familiar with the investigation said. Police were not releasing the name of the man who died early Saturday, but the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity Sunday, said he was Robert Howard, a University of Arkansas medical student who competed in track and field events in the 1996 and 2000 Olympics. Police arrived at the dormitory room and tried to talk to the man, but he jumped out the window about 20 minutes later.
■ United Kingdom
Blazing bunny spreads fire
A rabbit set alight by a bonfire at a British cricket club got its revenge when it ran burning into a hut and set it ablaze, destroying costly equipment, the club said on Friday. Members of Devizes cricket club in Wiltshire, western England, were burning dead branches when a rabbit caught up in the waste sped burning from the flames, spreading a fire which destroyed lawnmowers and tools worth US$110,000. "After it had been going 5 minutes, the rabbit shot out of the bonfire on fire and went into the hut which is our equipment store," club chairman John Bedbrook told Reuters. The rabbit's skeleton was discovered in the charred hut.
■ Mexico
5 killed in drug spree
In an especially gruesome 24 hour period, police discovered the bodies of five men and one woman who were killed and dumped around this violent border city in cases that all appear to involve drug-trafficking, authorities said Sunday. Police found four of the men strangled to death in the back of a Chevy Suburban abandoned in an urban parking lot. The bodies were wrapped in blankets and their hands and feet were bound with brown masking tape, both telltale signs the killers were professionals with links to drug pushers, said Mauro Conde, a spokesman for the attorney general's office of Chihuahua sate, which includes Juarez.
■ United States
Wildfires destroy homes
An out-of-control wildfire roared through an old mining town in the Northern California mountains, destroying 20 homes and forcing nearly 300 residents to flee, officials said. The day-old blaze quickly grew to 3,040 hectares on Sunday and was only about 10-percent contained. Nearly 100 homes and 20 other buildings were threatened in French Gulch, about 30km west of Redding. Another fire that began on Wednesday when a lawnmower struck a rock in dry grass cut through the pine and oak-covered hills of Shasta Lake, about 225km northwest of Sacramento.
■ Israel
Bread older than thought
People were making bread from wild grass flour 12,000 years before the birth of agriculture, according to new findings by scientists in the Middle East. A site on the shore of the Sea of Galilee in Israel has yielded evidence of wild barley being ground and turned into bread dough at least 22,000 years ago. The earliest signs of the domestication of wheat and barley date back do the Middle East 10,000 years ago. The new find is the first clear evidence that humans learned to reap and process wild cereals long before the start of organized farming, The team of scientists was led by Dolores Piperno from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
ANGER: A video shared online showed residents in a neighborhood confronting the national security minister, attempting to drag her toward floodwaters Argentina’s port city of Bahia Blanca has been “destroyed” after being pummeled by a year’s worth of rain in a matter of hours, killing 13 and driving hundreds from their homes, authorities said on Saturday. Two young girls — reportedly aged four and one — were missing after possibly being swept away by floodwaters in the wake of Friday’s storm. The deluge left hospital rooms underwater, turned neighborhoods into islands and cut electricity to swaths of the city. Argentine Minister of National Security Patricia Bullrich said Bahia Blanca was “destroyed.” The death toll rose to 13 on Saturday, up from 10 on Friday, authorities
Two daughters of an Argentine mountaineer who died on an icy peak 40 years ago have retrieved his backpack from the spot — finding camera film inside that allowed them a glimpse of some of his final experiences. Guillermo Vieiro was 44 when he died in 1985 — as did his climbing partner — while descending Argentina’s Tupungato lava dome, one of the highest peaks in the Americas. Last year, his backpack was spotted on a slope by mountaineer Gabriela Cavallaro, who examined it and contacted Vieiro’s daughters Guadalupe, 40, and Azul, 44. Last month, the three set out with four other guides
Local officials from Russia’s ruling party have caused controversy by presenting mothers of soldiers killed in Ukraine with gifts of meat grinders, an appliance widely used to describe Russia’s brutal tactics on the front line. The United Russia party in the northern Murmansk region posted photographs on social media showing officials smiling as they visited bereaved mothers with gifts of flowers and boxed meat grinders for International Women’s Day on Saturday, which is widely celebrated in Russia. The post included a message thanking the “dear moms” for their “strength of spirit and the love you put into bringing up your sons.” It
‘LIMITING MYSELF’: New Zealand’s foreign minister said that the omments by Phil Goff were ‘disappointing’ and made the diplomat’s position in the UK ‘untenable’ New Zealand’s most senior envoy to the UK has lost his job over remarks he made about US President Donald Trump at an event in London this week, New Zealand Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters said yesterday. Phil Goff, who is New Zealand’s High Commissioner to the UK, made the comments at an event held by international affairs think tank Chatham House in London on Tuesday. Goff asked a question from the audience of the guest speaker, Finnish Minister of Foreign Affairs Elina Valtonen, in which he said he had been re-reading a famous speech by former British prime minister Winston
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