A fraudster posing as chairman of British bank Barclays plc tricked his own bank's credit card arm into issuing a new card before taking cash from his account, a Barclaycard source said yesterday. British tabloid The Sun said chairman Marcus Agius lost £10,000 from his account.

The source said the new card was wrongly issued after a caller gave card operator Barclaycard some of Mr Agius's personal details. But staff failed to follow security guidelines in asking for more information.

Barclaycard said it was not willing to provide details of the case. But like any customer Mr Agius had the money refunded to his account.

Staff fired for not smoking

The owner of a small German computer company has fired three non-smoking workers because they were threatening to disturb the peace after they requested a smoke-free environment.

The manager of the 10-person IT company in Buesum, named Thomas J., told the Hamburger Morgenpost newspaper he had fired the trio because their non-smoking was causing disruptions. Germany introduced non-smoking rules in pubs and restaurants on January 1, but Germans working in small offices are still allowed to smoke.

"I can't be bothered with trouble-makers," Mr Thomas was quoted saying. "We're on the phone all the time and it's just easier to work while smoking. Everyone picks on smokers these days. It's time for revenge. I'm only going to hire smokers from now on."

Body heat to warm office

A Swedish state-owned firm has found a cheap, eco-friendly source of energy to warm one of its offices: Body heat from a quarter million commuters steaming through Stockholm's central train station.

Body heat already warms the station itself but the surplus, currently let out in thin air, will be redirected to provide as much as 15 per cent of the heating in a planned 4,000-square-metre office building, real estate firm Jernhusen said.

"We had a look at it and thought 'We might actually be able to use this'," said Karl Sundholm, project leader at Jernhusen, which also owns the station. "This feels good. Instead of just airing the leftover heat out we try to make use of it."

The bodily warmth from the central station will be redirected to heat up water.

'Teenage boy' was adult woman

A student in Norway who posed as a 13-year-old boy turned out to be a 33-year-old woman on the run from police investigating a child abuse case in the Czech Republic, Norwegian media reported yesterday.

Barbora Skrlova duped Norwegian police, classmates, child care workers and teachers for four months into believing she was a teenage boy named "Adam", daily Dagbladet reported.

"Looking back, we can say that we wondered about "Adam's" behaviour. But this is not easy to know. Children at this age are very different, and can be masculine or feminine," Ingjerd Eriksen, principal at Marienlyst school in Oslo where the woman was a student, told Dagbladet.

Seoul subways add WCs

The Seoul subway authority will install toilets in drivers' compartments after one of its engineers plunged to his death, apparently relieving himself from a train that was in motion.

The Seoul Metro plans to provide nearly 400 toilets from this month in drivers' cabs and increase the number of staff bathrooms at stations, a spokesman said yesterday.

The incident that prompted the move took place in December when a driver apparently suffering from diarrhoea leaned out of his compartment and fell on the tracks. He was hit by another train, local media reported.

Found dead after a year

The death of an elderly man in his Sydney apartment, which went undiscovered for more than a year, had Australians questioning their loss of community spirit yesterday.

Jorge Chambe, 64, died a lonely death in Sydney's southwest and his decomposing body, dressed and lying on the bed, was only found after firefighters and police broke into his apartment after a neighbour noticed his letterbox overflowing.

"It's amazing. This guy lives in the suburbs and he dies and no one notices for a year," Detective-Inspector Ian Pryde told local media. "For some reason the guy has been left there undetected for some time which is so sad, terribly sad."