World briefs

Multi-millionaire English artist Damien Hirst yesterday said he was donating four major works to Britain's Tate Gallery, including a sliced and pickled cow and calf.

It is the first time Mr Hirst, who recently sold a diamond-encrusted skull for $100 million, has made a major donation to a museum. "It means a lot to me to have works in the Tate. I would have never thought it possible when I was a student," he said. "I think giving works from my collection is a small thing if it means millions of people get to see the work displayed in a great space," he added.

Tax refund over chocolate cakes

Marks & Spencer is entitled to a full refund of wrongly paid value-added tax on sales of its chocolate teacakes, an adviser to the European Union's top court said yesterday.

When VAT was introduced in 1973, the store's "teacakes" were classified as biscuits therefore subject to the standard sales tax rate. Cakes are zero rated.

In 1994, Britain's customs authority admitted the teacakes should not be subject to VAT and the company claimed a £3.5 million refund. Customs only paid £88,440 to the company, saying that most of the VAT burden had been passed on to customers in any case and that paying the refund in full would amount to "unjust enrichment". Advocate General Juliane Kokott, an adviser to the European Court of Justice, said the "unjust enrichment" objection cannot be invoked as long as it offended the principle of equal treatment. The full court backs an advocate general in most cases.

Baby mix-up pays off

A Chinese hospital has been ordered to pay 500,000 yuan (Lm21,700) to two families 21 years after they took home the wrong newborn babies, state media reported yesterday.

A woman surnamed Pan, who gave birth to twin boys at a hospital in Beijing in 1986, watched as her "sons" became less alike as they grew older, the Beijing Youth Daily said.

One grew to 1.84 metres in height with strong features, the other grew into a "skinny and delicate" child about 14 centimetres shorter, the paper said.

After neighbours and her sons' class-mates mentioned seeing a boy "exactly the same" as the older "twin", Pan took her sons to be tested. The results showed only her younger son was biologically related.

Mr Pan eventually found her biological son in the care of another family surnamed Rao, who had delivered a baby boy at the same hospital four days before.

Fake chatroom flirting

Internet chatroom romantics beware: your next chat may be with a clinical computer, not a passionate person, trying to win your personal data and not your heart, an online security firm says.

A Russian website called CyberLover.ru is advertising a software tool that, it says, can simulate flirtatious chatroom exchanges. It boasts that it can chat up as many as 10 women at the same time and persuade them to hand over phone numbers.

An Australian anti-virus software firm, PC Tools, has warned that the software could be abused by identity fraudsters trying to harvest people's personal details online. The Russian site denied it was intended for identity fraud.

Maradona wants Chavez tattoo

Argentine soccer great Diego Maradona wants to add an image of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to his well-known collection of tattoos of leftist leaders. "I'd like to get some sort of Chavez tattoo, really," Maradona told reporters on Wednesday ahead of a celebrity indoor soccer match. Maradona has a tattoo of Argentine-born revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara on his right shoulder and another of Cuban leader Fidel Castro on his left leg.

Clearing '1,000-year-old' trash

Officials running China's huge Three Gorges Dam have vowed to clear the last of the "1,000-year old" trash mountains fouling the reservoir, state media reported yesterday.

The 300,000-tonne slope of garbage teetering on the shores of the Yangtze River dates back to the Song Dynasty (960-1279) and has been rising rapidly in recent years, an official at Luoqi Town in southwest China told the Xinhua news agency.

False terracotta 'warriors'

Supposedly ancient Chinese terracotta warriors on show at a German museum are fakes, China confirmed yesterday, condemning the organisers for cheating the public.

The Hamburg Museum of Ethnology has offered refunds to about 10,000 visitors who have already viewed the Power in Death exhibition since it opened on November 25 as police probed the authenticity of the warriors. The display of eight clay warrior figures, two horses and 60 smaller objects has remained open, with a sign stating that its authenticity was in dispute.