World Briefs

Trouble, the pooch who inherited $12 million from hotel mogul Leona Helmsley, has died, heading to the hunting grounds in the sky and leaving a trail of money and legal disputes behind.

The pampered Maltese bitch with a curly off-white coat died on December 13, media officer Eileen Sullivan said, but news only emerged yesterday.

She was 12 in human years, or 84 in doggie years, just shy of the 87 years at which her eccentric mistress and benefactor Ms Helmsley died in 2007.

Hoax

French broadcaster France 24 is taking legal action for an alleged hoax in which a woman claiming to be Syria’s ambassador to Paris announced her resignation live on air, the channel said yes­terday.

“France 24 has officially filed a complaint to the Paris public prosecutor regarding identity theft and impersonation,” the channel said in a statement.

Ambassador Lamia Shakkur went on other channels denying the announcement after the woman surprised France 24, which had contacted her via the embassy, by making the declaration in an interview on Tuesday evening.

“France 24 has no option but to take Ms Shakkur’s denials seriously,” the channel said yesterday.

It “commissioned comparative analyses which show that the voice heard during the interview conducted on France 24 on Tuesday evening is different from the voice which later issued the denial broadcast on BFM TV,” another channel.

Google Earth prank

New Zealand students have put their school on the map by etching giant phallic symbols onto its playing fields with weedkiller, in a prank immortalised on internet satellite service Google Earth.

While the stunt took place more than two years ago, its effects coincided with satellites taking photographs of Hamilton for Google Earth, meaning web users cop an eyeful whenever they view Fairfield College.

Local resident David McQuoid told the Waikato Times he was online searching for a property when he came across the crude etchings, some of which measure almost 15 metres long.

“At first I thought it was a large piece of art work,” he told the newspaper.

The school’s acting principal Gerhard van Dyk was less convinced of the symbols’ artistic merit, telling The Times he had been unable to catch the pranksters, who burned the phalluses into the grass on a weekend in May 2009.

By the time he arrived at the school the next Monday, the grass was already dying and giant penises were emerging all over the property.

Hides in suitcase

A flexible thief squeezed into a large suitcase and then emerged to plunder valuables from other bags while inside the luggage com­partment of a Spanish airport bus, police say. The thief had a partner who would buy a bus ticket and place the suitcase in a bus from Girona airport to Barcelona in northeastern Spain, police said in a statement late on Tuesday.

“Once the trip began, he would get out of the suitcase, search for valuable objects and hide them in a smaller bag he carried with him,” regional Catalan police said.

The thief would then get back into the suitcase, to be reclaimed by his partner at the end of the 90-minute trip.

Alerted by the repeated thefts, police inspected a suspicious bag on the bus on June 3 and opened it up. “They saw there was a man doubled up almost like a contortionist,” the statement said.

Slave for a year

A German family of three has been arrested on charges of keeping a 20-year-old woman as a slave for nearly a year in their home until her escape last weekend, prosecutors said yesterday.

A police commando unit raided the home in the southwestern town of Hassmersheim on Wednesday and detained the father, mother and son on suspicion of imprisoning the woman and brutally forcing her to perform household tasks.

In an least one instance, the father allegedly raped the victim. A source close to the investigation said the son was a minor.

Citigroup hacked

US banking giant Citigroup admitted yesterday that computer hackers had accessed information from around 210,000 US credit card customers.

“During routine monitoring, we recently discovered unauthorised access to Citi’s Account Online. A limited number – roughly one per cent – of Citi bankcard customers’ account information... was viewed,” the bank said in a statement.

The hackers gained access to customers’ names, account numbers and contact information, including email addresses, Citi said.

“The customer’s social security number, date of birth, card expiration date and card security code (CVV) were not com­promised.”

Shocking footage

Pakistan yesterday arrested five soldiers for shooting dead a young man at point blank range in a park after the killing was filmed live and broadcast on television, shocking human rights activists.

Five members of the Rangers paramilitary rounded on unarmed 22-year-old Sarfaraz Shah in Karachi’s most exclusive neighbourhood of Clifton on Wednesday, claiming he had tried to rob a policeman’s family.

Footage of the incident, filmed by an unidentified cameraman, was broadcast repeatedly on local television stations and uploaded to internet site YouTube.