World briefs

Cannot afford to install a sauna in your home? A Russian inventor might have the answer - the mobile sauna. Converted from a military truck, Igor Chupin offers clients a session in the back of his GAZ-66 truck for 1000 roubles (€28.25) per hour.

"What Russian guy doesn't love his banya! One day I had the idea to put a bathhouse on wheels and to drive wherever I want!" said Mr Chupin, a self-taught inventor from the Altai region of southern Siberia. Russians adore saunas, or banyas, spending hours in the steam rooms with friends, swapping stories over tea or vodka. Mr Chupin's travelling banya offers the real Russian experience. It has a 400-litre water tank on top to provide the steam and is heated with a wood-fired stove.

Sacked for fake pigeon

A Chinese photographer has apologised for his "bad behaviour" forging an award-winning picture of pigeons, Xinhua news agency said yesterday. Zhang Liang, a former photographer for the Harbin Daily newspaper, admitted that he added a pigeon to a photo, using Photoshop software, which showed pigeons receiving bird flu vaccine shots from medical workers. The photo won the top prize in the first China International Press Photo Contest, held by the Photojournalist Society of China in 2005.

"I would like to apologise to the public," Mr Zhang, who was dismissed from Harbin Daily four days ago, was quoted as saying. He copied the pigeon in the top right corner of his photo and pasted it in the top left corner to make the picture 'perfect'.

Haircuts no snip at $1,700

A Chinese hair salon has been shut down and fined 500,000 yuan (€47,870) for holding two customers hostage and charging wildly excessive fees for haircuts, a newspaper reported yesterday.

College students Zhang Yi and Yuan Sha Sha went for a haircut at Baolou International Beauty Salon in Zhengzhou, in the central province of Henan, expecting to pay the 38 yuan (€3.61) advertised on the window.

But when the barbers were done, they produced a joint bill for 12,000 yuan (€1,133), enough to make anyone's hair curl, the Beijing News reported. "After borrowing from 16 people, the two were only able to come up with 9,800 yuan and it wasn't until after 10 p.m. that they allowed to leave the hair salon," it reported.

Noisy 'no-honking day'

Drivers hooted their way through Mumbai's first no-honking day yesterday, ignoring efforts to cut the ear-splitting cacophony of life in India's most bustling city. Residents said they were unable to heed the police appeal to reduce the din because they could not make their way through the usual snarled traffic.

"I urged my driver to not honk, but on crowded roads it was impossible to move ahead while observing complete silence," chartered accountant Sushil Deshpande said.

Police had appealed to automobile associations, schools and colleges to get the city's 1.5 million vehicles to take part in the campaign and give the congested financial capital some rare peace. The city of 18 million suffers from severe noise pollution, with not even designated "no honking zones" - such as for hospitals and educational institutions - spared by impatient drivers.

Soviet shuttle goes... upriver

Three Rhine barges are hauling a former Soviet space shuttle on a 600-kilometre journey up the river to a museum in western Germany because the spacecraft is too unwieldy to be tran-sported in any other way.

The sight of the 36 metre-long, black and white shuttle, which weighs nearly 100 tonnes, contrasts with the usual pleasure boats which cruise up and down Germany's longest river.

Buran, on its way to the Technical Museum in the city of Speyer, started its barge journey in the Dutch port of Rotterdam and crossed the border into Germany yesterday but authorities are worried that the shuttle might have trouble navigating the Rhine's narrow and treacherous bends further upstream and could even run into trouble with low bridges.

The Buran, or "Blizzard" programme, launched an unmanned space shuttle into orbit in 1988 before it was scrapped due to a funding crisis.