A farmer offers flowers to riot police during a demonstration in central Brussels. Several hundred European farmers, including those from Germany and Belgium, protested against the quota and the low price of milk. (Reuters)
Tour de France for jailbirds
Close to 200 prisoners will cycle around France next month, watched by scores of guards on bicycles, in the first penal version of the Tour de France, authorities said.
The 196 prisoners will cycle in a pack and breakaway sprints will not be allowed. They will be accompanied by 124 guards and prison sports instructors. There will be no ranking, the idea being to foster values like teamwork and effort.
"If we behave well, we might be able to get released earlier, on probation," he told reporters. (Reuters)
Greek court frees 'nuns'
Seventeen British men stood trial dressed in nun's habits on the Greek island of Crete for flashing their bottoms in public, but walked free after no one showed up to testify their behaviour was offensive.
Police said they had arrested the 17 men, aged between 18 and 65, early on Sunday at the popular resort of Malia and a prosecutor charged them with exposing themselves in public and offending religious symbols.
"They were dressed like nuns, carrying crosses, but wearing thongs under their skirts and showing people their bottoms and the rest," said a police official. (Reuters)
Sex spies
The manager of a Croatian subsidiary of Germany's Deutsche Telekom has said she will sue the parent company after a report that it spied on her sex life, Croatian media reported yesterday
"I am very angry. I'm going to sue Deutsche Telekom and I will force them to pay for everything," the woman was quoted as saying in Croatia's daily Jutarnji List, which only identified her as "Maja."
German daily Handelsblatt reported last week that according to documents it obtained, a woman seeking a job at Telekom's Croatian subsidiary was screened and described as a "very experience and imaginative sexual partner."
The woman was "known by her friends as a female predator with a seriously elevated sex-drive" and "preferred older men," according to the report. (AFP)
Single mother caned
A 22-year-old unmarried Bangladeshi woman who was caned 39 times for alleging a neighbour was the father of her son is fighting for her life in hospital, police said Tuesday.
The case has shocked the impoverished Muslim-majority nation, with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina ordering the woman to be shifted from her village home to the capital for proper medical treatment.
Local police chief Moshiur Rahman told AFP that the woman, from Comilla, 70 kilometres east of the capital Dhaka, had angered Islamic clerics when she told friends that a neighbour had fathered her six-year-old son.
The woman was seriously injured after the caning. (AFP)
Italy's urban squalor 'more like Africa'
The litter-strewn streets and graffiti-covered walls of Rome, Naples and Palermo make them look "more like African cities," Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said.
"It disheartens me to ride through cities like Rome, Naples and Palermo and to see how the graffiti and the filth in the streets make them look more like African cities than European ones," Mr Berlusconi said on a Rome radio station.
In Tokyo and Beijing, he said, "nothing is lying around on the ground." (AFP)
Croatian father kills family, himself
A 43-year-old Croatian father killed his wife and two children with a semi-automatic rifle before turning the weapon on himself, national radio reported yesterday, citing police.
The bodies of the father, his 38-year-old wife and their five- and 10-year-old children were found by a relative in their apartment in a posh neighbourhood of the coastal city of Split, the report said.
The father was a former soldier who fought during the war between Serbs and Croats in 1991-1995.
More than 1,600 soldiers and veterans committed suicide during and after the conflict, according to official figures cited by local media. (AFP)