■UNITED STATES
Santa helps find molester
A Texas man has been arrested after a nine-year-old girl wrote to Santa Claus asking that a relative stop touching her and her sister. The Monitor of McAllen reports that a man from the town of Pharr was arrested on Friday and is in the Hidalgo County jail. A criminal complaint says the girl turned the letter in at Cesar Chavez Elementary School. Authorities interviewed the girl after a school counselor reported the letter. The complaint says investigators believe the molestation occurred over a period of four years. The man is charged with continuous sexual abuse of a young child and could face as many as 99 years in prison if convicted.
■UNITED STATES
Burger King sells perfume
Still can’t think what to get him for Christmas? Socks don’t seem to cut it any more? Fret no longer because Burger King is here to help. The mass purveyor of grilled meat is offering, for a limited time, something even better than their usual piles of beef patties. This week, men were given the chance to smell like their favorite meat snack with the launch of Flame, Burger King’s contribution to the perfume market. The company describes Flame as “the scent of seduction with a hint of flame-broiled meat.” Astonishingly, this elixir costs a mere US$3.99. By contrast, one of its competitors, Chanel No 5, costs more than US$80.
■UNITED STATES
Web mogul pleads guilty
A cofounder of an Internet gambling company who ranks among the world’s richest people pleaded guilty on Tuesday to violating the Federal Wire Act and agreed to forfeit US$300 million as part of a cooperation deal. A smiling Anurag Dikshit, of Gibraltar, entered the plea in US District Court in Manhattan to charges that he used the Internet to transmit interstate and foreign wagering information. The charge carries a potential prison term of up to two years. The 37-year-old citizen of India is the cofounder of PartyGaming, a Gibraltar online gambling company that offered casino and poker games and catered to a US audience.
■UNITED STATES
Adolf Hitler denied cake
The father of three-year-old Adolf Hitler Campbell, denied a birthday cake with the child’s full name on it by one New Jersey supermarket, is asking for a little tolerance. Heath Campbell and his wife, Deborah, are upset not only with the decision made by the nearby ShopRite, but also with an outpouring of angry Internet postings in response to a local newspaper article about the cake. “They need to accept a name. A name’s a name. The kid isn’t going to grow up and do what [Hitler] did,” Heath Campbell said. Deborah Campbell, 25, said she phoned in her order last week to the ShopRite. When she told the bakery department she wanted her son’s name spelled out, she was told to talk to a supervisor, who denied the request.
■UNITED STATES
Face transplant successful
A woman so horribly disfigured she was willing to risk her life to do something about it has undergone the first near-total face transplant in the country, the Cleveland Clinic announced on Tuesday. Reconstructive surgeon Dr Maria Siemionow and a team of other specialists replaced 80 percent of the woman’s face with that of a female cadaver a couple of weeks ago in a bold and controversial operation certain to stoke the debate over the ethics of such surgery. The hospital was planning a news conference yesterday and would not give details until then.
■BANGLADESH
Doctor to annul marriage
A doctor whose parents held her captive for four months in Dhaka said yesterday she had been forced to wed a stranger and was trying to annul the marriage. Humayra Abedin, 32, left Dhaka for Britain on Monday after a court ruled on Sunday that her parents were holding her against her will and must free her. “On November 14, 2008, I was forced to marry a person of my parents’ choice,” she said in a statement issued by her lawyer in London. “I was removed to another province of Bangladesh. I entered into the marriage ceremony under duress.” Abedin lives in Britain but traveled to Dhaka on Aug. 3 after she was told by family members that her mother was seriously ill.
■UNITED KINGDOM
New extinct species found
British and Moroccan scientists said on Tuesday they had found the remains of two new species of extinct animals in the Saharan desert, describing the find as one of the most important of the past 50 years. The paleontologists said they had unearthed a species of pterosaur, a flying reptile from the Mesozoic era, and a sauropod, a giant four-legged herbivore from the Jurassic period. The two animals, which were found in southeast Morocco near the Algerian border, date back around 100 million years, Portsmouth University said in a statement. Researchers found what they described as a large fragment of a beak from a giant flying reptile, along with bone from a sauropod measuring more than 1m in length. The bone indicates the animal was around 20m in length.
■ISRAEL
Russian guides die in crash
A bus filled with Russian tour guides crashed through a roadside barrier and tumbled down a steep ravine, killing at least 26, the rescue service said, in one of the worst traffic accidents in Israel’s history. The tour guides had come to check out spots for future Russian tourists and were heading for the popular Red Sea resort of Eilat. The driver of another bus said the vehicle sped by in a no-passing zone, crashed through a guard rail and rolled down the slope, said Rami Vazana, the driver of the bus that was overtaken.
■SUDAN
Coalition uncovers slavery
Government soldiers and militia have forced kidnapped men, women and children into labor and sexual slavery in the war-torn region of Darfur, a coalition of African charities said yesterday. The Darfur Consortium said it had uncovered evidence for the first time that men were abducted and enslaved as agricultural laborers during attacks in the region, where the conflict is poised to enter a seventh year. Most of those abducted are women and girls, who are subjected to rape and forced marriage, even used as sex slaves and domestic workers by soldiers in Khartoum, while men and boys are forced into farm work, the study said.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Pint spared by EU decision
Beer drinkers found a measure of good news on Tuesday amid a flood of economic downers: The fabled pint won’t have to be renamed. After a long debate over whether the EU would force pubs to serve beer by the half-liter, the European Parliament decided on Tuesday to let Britain retain the pint, the mile and other imperial measurements. The bill scraps a deadline next year to end the use of imperial measurements alongside metric units.
■JAPAN
Smoking toilets recalled
A toilet-maker has pledged to repair nearly 82,000 electric bidet toilets after several units overheated and emitted smoke. Inax Corp made the announcement on Tuesday after receiving six reports that covers on toilets with electric bidets melted and began smoking, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said. No injuries were reported from the faulty DV-200 series, manufactured between March 2004 and June 2005.
■AUSTRALIA
Bogus engineer jailed
A bogus aircraft engineer accused of putting thousands of Qantas passengers’ lives at risk was jailed for more than three years yesterday. Timothy McCormack forged his qualifications and posed as a licensed aircraft engineer for nearly nine months, checking planes leaving Sydney Airport, before being exposed in July last year. The 27-year-old, described by his defense lawyer as a pathological liar, pleaded guilty — and then faked four character references for the court as it considered his sentence.
■PHILIPPINES
ADB approves justice loan
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) said yesterday that it had approved a US$300 million loan to help the government improve the integrity and efficiency of its justice system. The Manila-based bank said the loan would be used to increase budget resources, improve public expenditure management and introduce new internal controls in the judiciary. “By supporting more competitive salaries and higher budgets, the loan is expected to reduce vacancies among judges and prosecutors, improve information and case management systems and help cut delays in the justice system,” the bank said.
■SOUTH KOREA
Actress sentenced for affair
Actress Ok So-ri, 40, who challenged a law that criminalizes adultery, was given a suspended eight-month jail term yesterday for her affair.In October the Constitutional Court rejected her petition against the decades-old law. Ok had admitted having an affair with a pop singer but blamed it on a loveless marriage to actor husband Park Chul. She had argued that the law infringes the right of individual choice.
■NDIA
Government to keep cash
The government will keep 10 million rupees (US$213,000) waved around in parliament in July by opposition lawmakers protesting against what they said were government attempts to bribe members of parliament (MPs) to abstain from a no-confidence vote, Speaker Somnath Chatterjee said on Tuesday — unless it receives a request for the money in one month.
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
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees
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