A Bangladeshi man, dissatisfied with his salary in Malaysia, stole two padlocks from a supermarket so he would be deported, a local daily said over the weekend.
The man, a contract cleaner, told a court magistrate that he had been working in Malaysia for 17 months, but was unable to save much money due to his low salary. The cleaner approached his agent to help him go back to Bangladesh, but the agent refused to let him go before his three-year contract expires. It was not immediately clear whether the worker was an illegal immigrant.
"I decided to steal the padlocks so I could come to court and then be sent back to Bangladesh," he told the court, according to the Star newspaper. The court punished the cleaner with one day in jail and a fine of 1,200 ringgit (€260), and asked him to report to the Malaysian immigration department after serving his sentence.
Jews leave genetic legacy in Spain
From the 15th century on, Spain's Jews were mostly expelled or forced to convert, but today some 20 per cent of Spanish men tested have Sephardic Jewish ancestry, and 11 per cent can be traced to North Africa, a study has found.
"These values are surprisingly high," the researchers wrote in their report, published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
They checked the Y chromosome, a stretch of DNA carried only by men and passed down with little change from father to son. Mutations in this gene can be used to trace ancestry, and some have been clearly linked to Sephardic Jewish and northern African populations.
Skiers want UN to save the snow
Skiers, including Olympic gold medallists, have appealed to UN climate talks in Poland to do more to slow global warming to help keep snow racers in business.
Several Polish skiers and snowboarders slid down a ramp covered by snow trucked in by the WWF environmental group and handed a petition to Polish Environment Minister Macjiec Nowicki in Poznan, hosting the Decemebr 1-12 UN talks on a new climate treaty.
"Ice and snow are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of global warming, and as avid skiers and snowboarders we see our beloved sports endangered," about two dozen skiers said in the petition.
The skiers, whose sport is often criticised for damaging the environment in mountainous regions, said climate change meant milder winters and less snowfall from the Alps to the Andes, and from the Rocky Mountains to the Himalayas.
Signatories included US Olympic and world Alpine ski champions Ted Ligety and Julia Mancuso along with Toni Innauer, an Austrian ski jumper who won Olympic gold in 1980, and Swiss Olympic gold medal snowboarder Tanja Frieden.
Car dealer offers second car for free
Buy one, get one free: it's a familiar sales pitch for happy-hour cocktails or last season's fashions, but now a Belgian car dealer is luring customers with just that line.
Antwerp-based Cardoen, which sells about 10,000 new and nearly new cars per year, started the promotion at the end of November and said it would run until today week.
During that period, customers can choose from a range of new, full-price cars - the cheapest being a €22,800 Hyundai van - and then pick a second free vehicle from a selection that goes up to €14,000.
"People have been coming in from all over Belgium and abroad," Cardoen's commercial director Ivo Willems said, adding that Cardoen's eight showrooms had seen more than 10 times their usual number of visitors since the promotion began.
'Ant-like' Italians will beat crisis
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has likened Italians to industrious "ants" whose high savings level would help Italy survive the economic crisis better than its peers, in an interview published on Saturday.
"The Italians are a people of savers, of virtuous ants and not locusts, and this virtue will help a lot in coming months, especially if we can direct these savings into productive investments," he told Rome newspaper Il Messaggero.
For example, Mr Berlusconi said, Italian government debt such as Treasury bills (BOTs) and floating rate notes (CCTs) "are today among the safest forms of investment in the world."
In recent days, the Italian government has been underlining that its public debt is secure, with Economy Minister Giulio Tremonti saying last week it was "absolutely safe" and was guaranteed by the Italian state.
Charged with hiring illegal immigrant
A senior US border patrol official has been charged with hiring illegal immigrants to clean her home and advising one of them on how to avoid detection by the authorities.
The US Department of Homeland Security charged Lorraine Henderson, port director for southern New England, with employing an illegal immigrant from Brazil in her Salem, Massachusetts home, following a sting operation.
Ms Henderson, who worked for the department's Customs and Border Protection arm, continued to pay the woman for more than two years, even after a colleague warned her not to, according to court documents.
When the unidentified Brazilian woman asked Ms Henderson for advice on her immigration status, Ms Henderson told her, "You have to be careful, cause they will deport you." She also advised the woman, "don't leave (the country)... cause once you leave, you will never be back."
If convicted of the charge of harbouring an illegal alien, Ms Henderson faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 (€196,675) fine.