■AUSTRALIA
Unlucky day for aged ewe
The world’s oldest sheep, Lucky, has died after succumbing to a record heat wave that scorched much of the country’s southeast, its owner said yesterday. Despite her best efforts to nurse Lucky through the searing heat, Delrae Westgarth said the ewe died on Monday, aged 23 years, six months and 28 days, at the farm in Victoria state where she was born. “We brought her into the shed where she was reared and put air conditioners on her, which kept her going a bit longer,” Westgarth told public broadcaster ABC. Lucky was recognized by Guinness World Records as the world’s oldest sheep in 2007. The normal top age for a sheep is 10 to 12 years.
■INDONESIA
Ferry passenger rescued
Rescuers plucked a woman from choppy waters on Monday, some 25 hours after she jumped from a crowded ferry that sank in a storm off Sumatra. At least 29 people drowned and 20 others were missing. A total of 255 survivors have been pulled from the sea since Sunday, when the Dumai Express 10 was hit by towering waves and sank about 90 minutes into an inter-island trip from Batam to Dumai in Riau. The rescued woman in her 30s was spotted by fishermen and was in stable condition in a hospital, a navy officer said. Patrols were still searching for 20 people, but bad weather was hampering the mission, the navy said.
■AUSTRALIA
Kangaroos smuggle drugs
Drugs are being smuggled into Aboriginal communities in the far north inside dead kangaroos, the Northern Territory parliament was told yesterday. Former indigenous affairs minister Alison Anderson said cannabis was being sewn inside kangaroo carcasses to get it past police patrols. Outback roads are often littered with kangaroos killed by vehicles and the roadkill is often collected. Anderson said women were also stuffing cannabis into their underwear as police are not permitted to frisk females.
■AUSTRALIA
Jetstar apologizes to athlete
Budget airline Jetstar apologized on Tuesday after making a Paralympic champion check in his wheelchair before a flight. Kurt Fearnley, who had just completed a grueling 96km crawl along a Papua New Guinea jungle track, complained bitterly about the weekend incident. Fearnley, 28, hauled himself around Brisbane airport using his hands and onto his flight in protest when Jetstar asked him to check in his personal wheelchair. He spurned the airline’s wheelchair, specially designed for planes, complaining that he would lose his mobility and have to be pushed around by airport staff.
■FRANCE
Bank robber turns cult hero
A suspected bank robber may not be most girls’ idea of Mr Right, but women are proposing marriage to a jailed van driver accused of stealing millions of euros, his lawyer said on Monday. Toni Musulin, 39, has become a cult sensation after he drove off from Lyon with 11.6 million euros (US$17 million) in his van on Nov. 5, before surrendering to police after 11 days on the run. “Contrary to what you might think, Toni Musulin is far from being the crook that we want to describe him as. He is an interesting man,” defense lawyer Herve Banabanaste told a press conference in Lyon. “He receives marriage proposals and requests for his face to appear on T-shirts. We are in quite an absurd situation, but he is taking it with a lot of humor,” he said, without saying how many proposals he had received. More than 9 million euros were recovered by police in an underground Lyon parking lot two days after his disappearance, but Musulin has refused to provide any information on the missing 2.5 million euros.
■UNITED STATES
Nude model released
A New York judge dismissed public lewdness and other charges on Monday against a model who posed for a nude photo shoot at a museum while visitors looked on. Kathleen “K.C.” Neill was arrested in August during photographer Zach Hyman’s shoot in the arms and armor department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Defense lawyer Thomas Hillgardner said Neill did nothing indecent while posing in an institution full of depictions of nudes. He said she was making art and he noted court rulings saying public nakedness isn’t necessarily lewd. Prosecutors said they weren’t sure they could prove the charges beyond reasonable doubt.
■UNITED STATES
Mosque arsonist sentenced
A court in Tennessee sentenced a man to more than 14 years in prison for burning down a local mosque, the Justice Department said on Monday. Michael Corey Golden, 24, was sentenced to 14 years and three months in prison after pleading guilty to having vandalized and burned down the mosque in February 2008. Golden admitted to using Molotov cocktail explosives to destroy the mosque, which he ignited while a co-defendant painted swastikas and the phrase “White Power” on the walls of the building in the town of Columbia. “The right to worship without fear of this kind of violent interference is among our most fundamental civil rights,” said Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general for civil rights. “We will aggressively prosecute anyone who seeks to intimidate or injure any congregation because of what they believe, how they worship or who they are.”
■NORWAY
Gingerbread town destroyed
The people of Bergen rolled out the cookie dough on Monday as local police tried to sniff out vandals who destroyed the city’s traditional Christmas decoration — a town of gingerbread houses. On Saturday vandals entered a massive tent in central Bergen and crushed most of the 650-cookie-house town, topping off the ruins with paint and fire extinguisher foam. Police in the country’s second-biggest city asked the public to offer information that could lead to the perpetrators. Local media reported that the destruction had shocked the residents of Bergen, a picturesque city on the North Sea coast where children decorate hundreds of gingerbread houses every year before Christmas.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
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