World Briefs

The United Nations has won an environmental prize for using sheep to cut its lawns and other organic maintenance work at its palatial offices in Geneva.

The 46-hectare grounds of the Palais des Nations, built to house the League of Nations and now home to UN humanitarian, economic and trade agencies, are cared for with compost while shunning pesticides.

UN mouthpiece Elena Ponomareva said the Swiss non-profit Fondation Nature & Economie awarded the Ariana Park a "nature reserve certificate" for initiatives to boost biological diversity and avoid ecological damage.

These include "avoiding pesticides, utilising compost and making use of sheep instead of lawnmowers", she told a news briefing at the UN European headquarters yesterday.

Between 300 and 400 sheep are allowed to graze on the 68,000 square metres of grassland surrounding the sprawling Palais des Nations every October and November, though the lawn is cut mechanically once in the spring and again in mid-summer. (Reuters)

Three escape jail in hijacked helicopter

Three prisoners escaped from a jail outside the Belgian city of Bruges in a hijacked helicopter on Thursday, authorities said. Media reports said the escapees flew to the town of Aalter, then seized a black Mercedes from its female driver and robbed a service station before heading for the Belgian coast.

A Justice Ministry spokesman said no one had been hurt, and that the jailbreak had not been from the high-security wing, which had nets to prevent such escapes.

However, media said the escapees included one of Belgium's most dangerous criminals, Ashraf Sekkaki, who had more than 16 convictions for violence, including kidnappings for ransom.

The Belga news agency quoted the spokesman as saying that one of the accomplices who flew the helicopter into the jail had been left behind, perhaps because there was not enough room for all to get away in the helicopter. (Reuters)

Toilets-for-passports scheme in Nepal

A remote region of Nepal is hoping to improve local sanitation by asking everyone who applies for a citizenship card or passport whether they have a toilet at home, an official yesterday.

Authorities in the rural midwestern district of Surkhet say only one in three households there has a toilet, below the national average of 45 per cent, while the district headquarters has only one public toilet for 44,000 people.

They say there is a lack of awareness of the health risks related to open defecation, and are hoping the proposed scheme will help to eradicate the practice.

"We decided we have to motivate and put pressure on people to build toilets in their houses," regional sanitation engineer for Surkhet, Prem Krishna Shrestha, said. (AFP)

Arrested after TV sex boast

A Saudi man has been arrested for boasting about his sex life on television, the English-language daily Arab News reported yesterday.

Jeddah resident Mazen Abdul Jawad was arrested after he appeared last week on Red Line, a programme on Lebanon-based LBC television which is also popular in Saudi Arabia, the newspaper said.

On the programme Mr Jawad said he first had sex with a neighbour when he was 14, and he also described in detail some of his later adventures.

He explained how he uses the Bluetooth function on his cellphone to try to pick up Saudi women, who are forbidden to mix with or reveal their faces to men who are not related to them. He also gave a recipe for an aphrodisiac.

The segment sparked about 100 complaints to local justice officials, leading to his arrest, the paper said.

Mr Jawad could face charges under Saudi Arabia's strict Islamic sharia law of speaking openly about vice and admitting he engaged in pre-marital sex, it said, adding that if convicted he could be jailed and flogged. (AFP)

Wanted: Women to eat chocolate for a year

Scientists in Britain are looking for women willing to eat chocolate every day for a year - all in the name of medical science.

Researchers at the University of East Anglia and a hospital in Norwich, eastern England are trying to find out whether chocolate can cut the risk of heart disease and need 40 women to step forward and help.

Most of the women will have to eat two bars of "super-strength chocolate specially formulated by Belgian chocolatiers" daily for one year and undergo several tests to measure how healthy their hearts are.

The others will have to eat regular chocolate as a placebo.

One possible catch, for chocolate fans spotting an opportunity: volunteers for the research should be menopausal but aged under 75 and have type two diabetes. (AFP)

Three-metre snake on the loose

German police on the hunt for a three-metre-long Brazilian black ratsnake, nearly as thick as a man's arm, which had escaped from its cage and slithered into town.

The owner was at pains to stress that the snake was not poisonous and fed only on small rodents like mice and rats, police in the central German town of Minden said in a statement.

Police nevertheless advised passers-by who might encounter the snake to exercise extreme caution. "The snake is very sensitive and tender and people who react in a panicky way might hurt it," they said.

No effort is being spared to track down the reptile.

"Officers on the beat will not just be looking out for criminals and traffic offenders. The constrictor is also on the official search list," the police said. (AFP)