■INDIA
Tourist gets ride, husband
A 26-year-old US tourist hitched a ride in a rickshaw last week and married the driver a few days later, a report said yesterday. Whitney from Chicago, whose surname wasn’t given, met her prince charming in Jaipur after hailing a motorized rickshaw and hiring the driver for her stay in the city, the Mail Today newspaper said. “On the third day, he surprised me by popping the question,” Whitney told the paper. “‘I want to spend the rest of my life with you’, he told me. I fell in love.” After meeting last Saturday they were married on Wednesday in a simple ceremony. Whitney was pictured in the paper, standing with new husband Harish Hotala, wearing a traditional sari that covered her head. The paper said Hotala was “a cabbie with a difference,” however. “Though a school dropout, he is fluent in English and owns three autorickshaws,” it said. “My father was surprised but my mother took it sportingly,” she said.
■NEPAL
Maoists protest pageant
Scores of Maoist activists protested outside the venue of the “Miss Nepal” contest on Thursday, saying the beauty pageant was an insult to women. They chanted “you can’t expose the women” as they sat on the street outside a high security army club in Kathmandu. Many protesters waved black flags in protest as 15 contestants took center stage on the catwalk. “The contest is a forum where women are used by companies to popularize and sell their products,” said Manu Humagain, head of an anti-pageant Maoist panel. “It is a blow to the dignity of the women. We oppose it.” Contestants said the event helped them forge a “separate identity” for themselves. The winner will represent Nepal at the Miss World contest in Johannesburg in December, organizers said.
■AUSTRALIA
Muslims approve guide dogs
Twenty-five Muslim leaders visited a Brisbane school for guide dogs on Thursday to show blind Muslims that there was no religious prohibition against companion animals. The groundbreaking visit was organized by Guide Dogs Queensland and came after complaints that Muslim taxi drivers were refusing to allow seeing eye dogs in their cabs. “If a person has a dog for a valid reason there’s no problem at all,” Islamic Council of Queensland spokesman Imam Mohammed Akram Buksh said. “God Almighty has created the dog and without a doubt this certain breed has changed many things in many people’s lives and is a great benefit in society.”
■HONG KONG
Police arrest triad boss
A triad gang leader has been arrested for the killing of a feared rival who was hacked to death outside a luxury hotel, police said yesterday. The man known as Ah Ting was ambushed by police on Thursday after failed attempts to flee Hong Kong following the Aug. 4 killing of Lee Tai-lung, 44. Lee, known as the “Baron of Tsimshatsui East,” was run down by a van and then hacked to death outside the five-star Kowloon Shangri-la Hotel by three knifemen. Lee was a senior member of the Sun Yee On triad faction in Tsimshatsui with a reputation as a ferocious fighter who often played the role of enforcer on behalf of his gang. His killing appeared to be linked to a long-running battle between Lee’s Sun Yee On and the Wo Shing Wo triad factions for control of the entertainment district in Tsimshatsui. A report in the South China Morning Post said police believe Ah Ting and an accomplice called Tattoo Chung, were key figures in the plot to kill Lee. Chung is still being sought by police.
■POLAND
Cold War-era meat on sale
Some 200 tonnes of Cold War-era meat — some as old as 26 years — has been delivered to preschools, nursing homes and grocery stores after controllers overlooked the expiration dates, local media reported on Thursday. The Swedish canned products were made in the early 1980s for Sweden’s army. The cans were later exported for use as animal feed only, TVN 24 reported. But food local companies have been using the meat for products like dumplings and sausages, which have been served in the country for the past three years, TVN 24 reported. Sweden decided to sell the canned meat in 1999 and made a deal with Warsaw in 2007 for the sale of 100,000 cans. Sweden’s farming ministry said the sales agreement specified the meat couldn’t be sold for human consumption inside the EU. The meat was marked unsellable to keep if from affecting industry prices, not because of health reasons, the ministry said.
■NETHERLANDS
Typo loses money
A man lost 43,000 euros (US$63,566) when he made a typo during an Internet banking transaction, local media reported on Thursday. In late June, a typo led a man from the southeastern town of Wageningen to mistakenly transfer 43,000 euros to the account of an unknown woman from Almelo, instead of to his son’s bank account, as planned. The woman immediately used 75 percent of the money to pay her gambling debts and also bought a car. She ignored requests from the bank and the man to return the money to his account. The man subsequently reported the incident to the police, who searched the woman’s home and confiscated 10,000 euros in cash. On Tuesday, an Almelo court is to hear the man’s request to transfer the confiscated money back to him, along with the proceeds of any sale of the car the woman purchased. The public prosecutor in Almelo has instituted criminal proceedings against the woman.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Inmates use gel for alcohol
A prison says a bunch of inmates have been caught with their hands clean — using hand sanitizing gel to get drunk. Peter McParlin of the Prison Officers Association says inmates were using it to make illicit alcohol. The gel had been distributed around the prison to stop the spread of the swine flu virus. McParlin said on Thursday that giving inmates access to a gel with an alcohol content was unwise. The prison has now banned inmates from using it. McParlin said the use of illicit concoctions made by mixing alcohol with fruit, water and sugar was as bad as drug use — or worse. The claims of prison boozing follow reports of bare-knuckle boxing for money at the facility, the Verne prison in Dorset, in southwest England.
■TURKEY
Ottoman descendant dies
Osman Ertugrul Osmanoglu, the eldest member of the former Ottoman dynasty, has died, officials said on Thursday. He was 97. Osmanoglu died of kidney failure at an Istanbul hospital on Wednesday, the Culture Ministry said. He was the last surviving grandson of an Ottoman sultan and regarded as the head of the living members of the dynasty. Osmanoglu would eventually have become its sultan but for the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 following the collapse of the Ottoman dynasty and the exile of its members to Europe. Osmanoglu moved to New York City in 1933, and was married to Zeynep Tarzi, an exiled member of the Afghan royal family.
■UNITED STATES
Dog kicked out of Aspen
A Pomeranian has been kicked out of a Colorado resort town after getting in trouble for biting and other bad behavior. Municipal Judge Brooke Peterson on Wednesday told the dog’s owner, Melinda Goldrich, that if the dog is seen again in Aspen, it will be rounded up by animal control officers and put to death. An Aspen fitness club employee told the Aspen Times that the Pomeranian, named Gizmo, bit her last month while it was tied to a fence. The dog served 10 days in an animal shelter. Goldrich had been under a court order to not leave Gizmo unattended after the dog bit another person in February. She also was cited in 2006 for the dog’s bad behavior.
■UNITED STATES
Siblings find another sister
Two Maine men and a woman who reunited after discovering they were separated as youngsters have found another long-lost sibling. Kathleen Cooper showed up on the Today television show on Wednesday for a surprise reunion. Randy Joubert and Gary Nisbet discovered they are brothers this summer while working together as furniture movers in Waldoboro. They had been given up for adoption as babies about 35 years ago. After their story was publicized, half-sister Joanne Campbell showed up. While appearing with her brothers on Tuesday on the Today show, Campbell said a long-lost sister was still unaccounted for. Cooper called NBC after watching the show from her home in Sarasota, Florida. The four siblings ended up in foster care, then were placed with adoptive families.
■CANADA
Bardot protests seal hunt
French film legend Brigitte Bardot on Thursday renewed her protest at Canada’s commercial seal hunt by calling for a boycott of Canadian maple syrup. “Massive ethical reactions from consumers can sometimes convince a government or a corporation to change the way that it does business,” Bardot wrote on the Web site of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). “That is why I am supporting PETA’s boycott of Canadian maple syrup until the Canadian government agrees to ban the slaughter of seals on the ice floes, the largest massacre of marine mammals on Earth, forever,” she said. Canada’s maple syrup industry produces an estimated 70 percent to 85 percent of the world’s supply. Bardot, who will celebrate her 75th birthday on Monday, last came to Ottawa in 2006 in poor health to try to lobby Prime Minister Stephen Harper to halt the killing of some 325,000 seals that year, but was turned away. In her latest online posting, Bardot accused Canadian officials of being “accomplices to these massacres,” which are “a stain on their reputation in the eyes of the world.”
■UNITED STATES
Men try to pick teen ‘bride’
Two men are accused of trying to pick up a 14-year-old girl from her Kentucky school and take her to North Dakota to marry the 14-year-old son of one of the men. Bowling Green, Kentucky, police spokesman Barry Pruitt said the teens had been communicating over the Internet and decided they wanted to get married. Pruitt said the boy, his father and another man drove 15 hours to Kentucky. School officials called police when they tried to check the girl out of class on Monday. Pruitt said the girl had not reached the age of consent. The men, 42-year-old Dragan Jovanovic and 18-year-old Elvis Tahirovic, were arraigned on Tuesday on one charge each of attempted kidnapping. Their attorney did not immediately return a message seeking comment on Wednesday.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
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