■UNITED STATES
Long eyebrows get trimmed
A 72-year-old man from Bloomfield, Indiana, with eyebrows so long he brushed them each morning raised US$1,600 for charity from people who paid to take turns trimming his out-of-control brows. Some of the hairs shorn from Si Burgher’s eyebrows measured more than 8cm long. Burgher agreed to have his brows tamed last week by the Bloomfield Rotary Club to raise money for a polio eradication campaign. His wife, Amy, got the first whack at the overgrown hairs. “I don’t care if they ever grow back,” he told the Herald-Times. “My wife says I look 20 years younger.” Amy Burgher said she liked his new look: “Beneath the eyebrows is a really handsome man.”
■UNITED STATES
Bank honors McCain
Barack Obama has the presidency and John McCain has a framed photograph next to one of John Kerry at a rural northwest Kansas bank. First State Bank’s “They Also Ran” gallery, a tribute to losing presidential candidates, added the Republican candidate’s image on Tuesday to a row of black-and-white drawings and photographs that starts with Thomas Jefferson, who lost to John Adams in 1796. Curator Lee Ann Shearer — who is also the bookkeeper at the Norton bank — said about 30 people showed up to watch. The gallery was started in 1965 by William Walter Rouse, bank president at the time, after he read Irving Stone’s book They Also Ran, about presidential campaign losers.
■MEXICO
Three heads found
Three heads were found in an ice box south of Ciudad Juarez, prosecutors said. The local prosecutor’s office said the victims were unidentified men and were found in a town about 50km from Ciudad Juarez. A headless body was discovered in a canal a few kilometers away, but the prosecutors’ statement said on Tuesday that the body might belong to one of six police officers kidnapped over the weekend. The heads of four of the officers had previously been found. More than 5,300 gang killings were reported last year countrywide.
■PERU
Rains affect Nazca lines
Heavy rains in recent days have affected the famed Nazca Lines, the 2,000-year-old giant outlines that are one of the country’s top tourist attractions, officials said on Tuesday. The precipitation left a layer of white clay on parts of two of the geoglyphs, “giving another color to the figures,” said archeologist Mario Olaechea of the National Institute of Culture. The Nazca Lines are considered one of the world’s great mysteries and depict people, animals and simple lines.
■MEXICO
Kissing capital named
When you come to Guanajuato, pucker up. Mayor Eduardo Romero is declaring the city “the kissing capital” of the world to disprove claims he banned smooching in public. A flap arose over an anti-obscenity law that many people believed would fine anyone caught kissing in public. The government denied it banned kissing, but suspended the law to review its wording. Romero unveiled ads on Tuesday featuring a couple kissing on one of Guanajuato’s streets. They read: “Guanajuato, the kissing capital.” A legend gives the city claim to the title: It tells of a young woman whose father prohibited her from seeing her lover because he was too poor. But the couple lived across from each other on a street so narrow they could lean out their windows to kiss in secret. The street is known as “Kissing Alley.”
■ITALY
Police seize cocaine
Customs police have arrested five people in separate drug busts, including two Brazilians who tried smuggling in cocaine hidden between packaged meat slices. Police at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci airport said on Tuesday they seized 15kg of the drug last week. Police Lieutenant Giuseppe di Stasio said officers became suspicious when they found packages of red meat in the luggage of the Brazilian man and woman. Inspection showed small packets of cocaine had been hidden between the meat slices. In a separate operation, police arrested three Argentines who tried to bring in cocaine in a hidden compartment of their suitcase.
■YEMEN
German hostage released
A German contractor taken hostage has been released, a tribal source close to the kidnappers told reporters on Tuesday. “The kidnappers handed the German hostage over to tribal mediators an hour ago,” along with two other Yemenis who had also been kidnapped, the source told reporters. “They are now on their way to the city Ataq, capital of the eastern province of Shebwa,” where the German was taken hostage, the source said. Armed tribesmen kidnapped the German contractor working for gas firm Yemen LNG on Sunday. The tribesmen were demanding the release of one of their kinsmen from a prison in Yemen. They have “received promises” from a top security official to fulfill their demands, the tribal source told reporters.
■FRANCE
Paris brushes off ‘snub’
Paris on Tuesday brushed off a decision by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) to skip France when he makes a fence-mending tour of European capitals next week, denying it was a snub to the government. “I do not sense an attempt to go everywhere in Europe but France,” foreign ministry spokesman Eric Chevallier told reporters after Beijing announced plans for the week-long visit, starting next Tuesday. “I do not believe that the Chinese prime minister’s schedule includes all the countries in the EU, or even all the countries considered to have the most economic and demographic weight in the Europe,” he said. Relations between France and China hit a low point when Beijing postponed summit with the EU last month due to be hosted in France. Beijing was protesting at a decision by President Nicolas Sarkozy, then holder of the rotating EU presidency, to meet Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama. Wen’s visit to Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Britain, and the EU headquarters in Brussels was presented by Beijing as a move to mend ties with Europe hurt by tensions over Tibet, but France has been left off the list.
■RUSSIA
Medvedev visits Ingushetia
President Dmitry Medvedev visited the southern region of Ingushetia on Tuesday and pledged to spend billions of roubles on the province where violence has threatened to dent the Kremlin’s control. In an apparently unrelated incident, news agencies reported on Tuesday that gunmen had shot and wounded a senior official from one of Ingushetia’s regions in his car on the outskirts of the town of Nazran. “Despite the fact that we don’t have the simplest financial situation at the moment, we have allocated 29 billion roubles (US$881.5 million), and this is big money,” Medvedev said during a meeting with Ingushetia’s President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov. He did not specify when the money would be allocated or exactly how it would be spent.
■HONG KONG
Murder rate doubles
Twice as many people were murdered in the Special Administrative Region last year than the previous year as the region saw a spate of cases involving the killing of prostitutes, police said yesterday. There were 36 murders in the relatively low-crime territory of 6.9 million in the last year, twice as many as in 2007. More than half of the cases involved family and relationship disputes, police said. In five of the murders the victims were prostitutes, a trend that has led welfare groups to call on the government to give sex workers greater protection against attack.
■SRI LANKA
Blast kills two in east
A blast authorities blamed on Tamil Tiger rebels killed two people and wounded 11 yesterday in the eastern part of the country, police said. The explosion in the town of Batticaloa came as the military has cornered the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the northeast of the Indian Ocean island nation and is fighting toward a decisive battle to end the 25-year-war. “An explosion in Batticaloa town has killed one police officer, a civilian and injured 11 others including four schoolchildren,” police spokesman Ranjith Gunasekara said. He blamed the LTTE for the blast. The LTTE could not be reached for comment.
■VIETNAM
Case could embarrass PM
The prosecution of two senior government officials for embezzling more than US$50,000 from a state-funded IT project could tarnish the reputation of former prime minister Phan Van Khai, a prominent lawyer said yesterday. The government announced on Monday it would try Vu Dinh Thuan, 67, former deputy head of the Government Secretariat, and his former assistant Luong Cao Son, 52, for alleged embezzlement committed between 2001 and 2007. The two are charged with submitting inflated expenses and pocketing the difference while administering Project 112, a failed program to set up a national electronic network for government offices.
■INDIA
PM undergoes heart tests
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh underwent medical tests on Tuesday and yesterday for heart-related problems at a top state-run hospital in New Delhi, the Press Trust of India (PTI) reported. The tests included an angiogram that revealed some arterial blockages in his heart and doctors were debating the next course of action, PTI said. The 76-year-old premier had visited the All India Institute of Medical Sciences on Tuesday for an “overall medical checkup,” the report said.
■INDONESIA
Airline official jailed
The Supreme Court sentenced a former senior official from Garuda Indonesia airlines to one year in jail for aiding in the murder of a prominent human rights campaigner who was poisoned on a flight to Amsterdam four years ago, state-run media said yesterday. The Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s acquittal of Rohainil Aini, the former secretary to the chief pilot of national carrier Garuda Indonesia, linked to the murder of Munir Said Thalib. The court sentenced Rohainil to one year in prison, saying that she had been proven guilty of falsifying an assignment letter enabling an off-duty Garuda pilot, Pollycarpus Budi Priyanto, to travel on Munir’s flight.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
HOLLYWOOD IN TURMOIL: Mandy Moore, Paris Hilton and Cary Elwes lost properties to the flames, while awards events planned for this week have been delayed Fires burning in and around Los Angeles have claimed the homes of numerous celebrities, including Billy Crystal, Mandy Moore and Paris Hilton, and led to sweeping disruptions of entertainment events, while at least five people have died. Three awards ceremonies planned for this weekend have been postponed. Next week’s Oscar nominations have been delayed, while tens of thousands of city residents had been displaced and were awaiting word on whether their homes survived the flames — some of them the city’s most famous denizens. More than 1,900 structures had been destroyed and the number was expected to increase. More than 130,000 people
A group of Uyghur men who were detained in Thailand more than one decade ago said that the Thai government is preparing to deport them to China, alarming activists and family members who say the men are at risk of abuse and torture if they are sent back. Forty-three Uyghur men held in Bangkok made a public appeal to halt what they called an imminent threat of deportation. “We could be imprisoned and we might even lose our lives,” the letter said. “We urgently appeal to all international organizations and countries concerned with human rights to intervene immediately to save us from
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
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