World Briefs

A German court handed a life term yesterday to an 88-year-old former Nazi assassin for the wartime murder of three Dutch civilians, more than 60 years after he was sentenced to death.

Heinrich Boere, who escaped a prisoner of war camp in 1947 and moved back to his birthplace in Germany, showed no emotion at the verdict, sitting pensively in a wheelchair in a red and white jumper, grey trousers, socks and sandals.

But his lawyers said they planned to appeal at Germany's highest court, setting the scene for another twist in the decades-long legal saga.

"These were murders that were carried out on a totally random basis," judge Gerd Nohl told a packed courtroom in the western city of Aachen.

Mr Boere was part of a special SS unit in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands who killed Dutch civilians deemed as "anti-German" as reprisals for resistance attacks.

Mr Boere - whose father was Dutch, whose mother was German and who grew up in the Netherlands - had argued he risked being sent to a concentration camp if he refused. But the court rejected this.

A Dutch court had sentenced him to death in 1949 in absentia, although the sentence was later commuted to life in prison, and Mr Boere managed to evade all subsequent attempts to bring him to justice. (AFP)

'Fishy' solution to inflation

While most countries use fiscal and monetary policies to control inflation, Argentina has rolled out a fleet of fish trucks to ease the pain of consumers whose food bills are increasing every month.

The government's latest bid to confront rising prices consists of about a dozen mobile fishmongers selling cheap haddock in poor neighbourhoods near the capital, Buenos Aires.

Trucks decorated with blue waves and the slogan: "Now There's Fish for Everyone" are pulling up beside local parks. They have been greeted by thousands of people, who stand in long lines to take advantage of steep discounts.

Argentines are the world's biggest consumers of beef and many profess to not liking fish. But with beef prices up 30 per cent over the last three months alone and the subsidised haddock selling at around half the normal price, the fish is hard to refuse. (Reuters)

Feminists slam 'check the breasts' campaign as sexist

Polish feminists have objected to a hospital's breast cancer prevention slogan which they say encourages workplace harassment, the Gazeta Wyborcza daily said on its website.

The slogan "I check the breasts of my workers on my own" was devised by a cancer hospital in the southern town of Opole and aimed at convincing employers to encourage their female workers to have their breasts checked regularly for cancer symptoms.

"This is a sexist slogan that obviously brings sexual molestation to mind," the head of the Feminoteka foundation, Joanna Piotrowska, was quoted on the website as saying.

"This campaign treats women as objects and is not far removed from advertisements in which girls flaunt their breasts over car bonnets. I wonder if this would be equally funny if it were changed to 'I check the penises of my workers on my own'." (Reuters)

Setting hitmen on her father

An Italian woman who hired two assassins to murder her overbearing father was arrested after the second hitman changed his mind and confessed to the police, authorities said yesterday.

Nineteen-year-old Ilenia Moretti had asked her father Rodolfo for €5,000 for a trip to America before using the money to hire a hitman to kill him, apparently with her mother's consent, a police statement said.

The teenager, from the small town of Luzzara near the northern Italian city of Milan, told authorities she could no longer bear her despotic father's ways. "She said she wanted to bring to an end years of intimidation suffered by both daughter and mother," an investigator said in the statement.

The hitman, thought to be a young north African, pocketed the money before going to the police. His confession led police to re-examine details of a previous attack on Rodolfo Moretti, a 42-year-old porter. (Reuters)

Prostitutes rent husbands for visas

Foreign sex workers in Malaysia are paying local men up to $1,500 a month to become their husbands so that they can stay on in the country to ply their trade, the New Straits Times newspaper said yesterday.

Under immigration laws, foreign spouses of Malaysians are initially given three-month visas before eventually obtaining year-long permits, which are renewed automatically.

Immigration Department director general Abdul Rahman Othman told the newspaper that the prostitutes had taken on husbands to become eligible for long-term visas.

And although prostitution is illegal in Malaysia, the women cannot be prosecuted under immigration laws because their marriages are legal, Mr Othman said. They can, however, be prosecuted under vice laws.

He said foreign sex workers could make up to 20,000 ringgit ($6,000) a month and that 5,000 ringgit ($1,500) a month for "marriages of convenience" was nothing compared to what they would lose if they had to leave the country to renew visas. (Reuters)