■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.
BLOODSHED: North Koreans take extreme measures to avoid being taken prisoner and sometimes execute their own forces, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Saturday said that Russian and North Korean forces sustained heavy losses in fighting in Russia’s southern Kursk region. Ukrainian and Western assessments say that about 11,000 North Korean troops are deployed in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces occupy swathes of territory after staging a mass cross-border incursion in August last year. In his nightly video address, Zelenskiy quoted a report from Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi as saying that the battles had taken place near the village of Makhnovka, not far from the Ukrainian border. “In battles yesterday and today near just one village, Makhnovka,
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
Some things might go without saying, but just in case... Belgium’s food agency issued a public health warning as the festive season wrapped up on Tuesday: Do not eat your Christmas tree. The unusual message came after the city of Ghent, an environmentalist stronghold in the country’s East Flanders region, raised eyebrows by posting tips for recycling the conifers on the dinner table. Pointing with enthusiasm to examples from Scandinavia, the town Web site suggested needles could be stripped, blanched and dried — for use in making flavored butter, for instance. Asked what they thought of the idea, the reply
US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen on Monday met virtually with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (何立峰) and raised concerns about “malicious cyber activity” carried out by Chinese state-sponsored actors, the US Department of the Treasury said in a statement. The department last month reported that an unspecified number of its computers had been compromised by Chinese hackers in what it called a “major incident” following a breach at contractor BeyondTrust, which provides cybersecurity services. US Congressional aides said no date had been set yet for a requested briefing on the breach, the latest in a serious of cyberattacks
RSS