TWW'S CRAZY NEWS STORIES

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Nike Kicks Up Fuss in China Again with Cartoon Ad

BEIJING (Reuters) - Infamous for pirating everything from watches to software -- and Nike shoes -- China doesn't usually level copycat charges.
But a Beijing court has ordered Nike Inc. to pay damages to a Chinese cartoonist who said his stick figure was copied in the footwear giant's ads, local media reported on Thursday.

The court said the stickman character 28-year-old Zhu Zhiqiang created was nearly the same as one used in Nike advertisements, and ordered the company to pay 300,000 yuan ($36,000)

"Nike used images similar to the plaintiff's work in its advertisement without receiving authorization from the plaintiff, resulting in copyright infringement," the China Daily quoted the court ruling as saying.

Although the damages are just a fraction of the $242,000 Zhu had requested, Nike representative Zhang Zaiping said the company would likely appeal against the decision and argued that the figure was too generic to deserve a copyright.

"Zhu's stick figure is within the public domain and lacks originality," he was quoted as saying.

The row was the latest run-in for the world's biggest athletic shoe company in China.

Earlier this month, China stopped broadcasts of Nike ads featuring basketball star LeBron James going head to head against a series of animated opponents, including a white-haired kung fu master, saying they violated national dignity.

Nike later apologized for the ad, known as "LeBron James in Chamber of Fear."

China, where pirated DVDs of the latest Hollywood blockbusters can be bought for less than a dollar on street corners, has promised to get tougher on intellectual property piracy.

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Blast the Gov't! Peruvians Snap Up 'Toledo Bombs'

LIMA, Peru (Reuters) - Peruvians can blast away their frustrations with unpopular President Alejandro Toledo this New Year with the best-selling Toledo firework bomb.
"Effigies of Toledo loaded with rockets and other fireworks are selling like hot cakes, especially ones where the body is shaped like a bomb with a fuse," said Luz Aliaga, who sells them for $11.

Letting off fireworks at midnight is a traditional New Year celebration here.

The idea of a "Toledo bomb" was born when a reporter tried to hand the president a fake bomb -- a football painted black with a fuse -- during a public event this month after a survey showed most respondents would give him a bomb for Christmas.

Toledo's approval rating is just 9 percent in polls because of his failure to fulfill big promises of new jobs and more wealth for Peru's poor majority in 3-1/2 years in office marked by unremitting government scandals.

Peru has clamped down on firework sales since more than 300 people died when a firework demonstration in a Lima shopping district shot out of control in 2001. There are now fewer fireworks around than before but unregulated sales continue.

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Italy Judge Tosses Coin for Xmas Tug-Of-Love Child

ROME (Reuters) - When the separated parents of a five-year old Italian boy could not agree whose house he should stay at over Christmas, a judge settled the dispute by tossing a coin, an Italian newspaper reported on Thursday.
The squabbling couple took their argument to a family disputes court a few days before Christmas and were surprised when the judge, who said there was not enough time to convene the tribunal, tossed a two-euro coin for "heads-or-tails."

"I did it in the interest of the child," Judge Carlo Alberto Agnoli was quoted as saying in Italy's leading daily newspaper Corriere della Sera.

"I certainly couldn't do like Solomon and divide the child. So I trusted to luck," said the judge who presides at a court in the northeastern town of Trento.

He was referring to the biblical King Solomom who threatened to cut a boy in half when two women claimed he was theirs, thus learning who was the true mother when she begged him not to.

The mother, who usually has custody of the boy, won the toss and the boy spent Christmas with her, the paper said.

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AS GOOD A SOLUTION AS ANY

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Blast the Gov't! Peruvians Snap Up 'Toledo Bombs'

LIMA, Peru (Reuters) - Peruvians can blast away their frustrations with unpopular President Alejandro Toledo this New Year with the best-selling Toledo firework bomb.
"Effigies of Toledo loaded with rockets and other fireworks are selling like hot cakes, especially ones where the body is shaped like a bomb with a fuse," said Luz Aliaga, who sells them for $11.

Letting off fireworks at midnight is a traditional New Year celebration here.

The idea of a "Toledo bomb" was born when a reporter tried to hand the president a fake bomb -- a football painted black with a fuse -- during a public event this month after a survey showed most respondents would give him a bomb for Christmas.

Toledo's approval rating is just 9 percent in polls because of his failure to fulfill big promises of new jobs and more wealth for Peru's poor majority in 3 1/2 years in office marked by unremitting government scandals.

Peru has clamped down on firework sales since more than 300 people died when a firework demonstration in a Lima shopping district shot out of control in 2001. There are now fewer fireworks around than before but unregulated sales continue.

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Nothing But Blue Skies as Beijing Enters New Year

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's capital has special reason to celebrate the New Year -- against all the odds, it managed to reach its goal of 227 days with clear air in 2004, the China Daily said on Friday.
The target had seemed all but unattainable at the end of October, when the city of 14 million needed clear skies for 40 of the last 61 days of the year to hit the mark set by the municipal environmental protection bureau.

But Beijing's typical cover of dust, car exhaust and factory emissions has parted in the past few weeks, bringing blue skies and freezing temperatures.

"The hard-earned reward is owed to intensive inspections on various pollution sources, as well as co-operative weather that blew pollutants out of the city," Zhao Chengyi, an official with the environmental protection bureau, was quoted as saying.

Not everyone, however, is convinced the city is in the clear.

Skeptics argued many air quality monitoring stations were located in remote or forested areas where air was naturally clearer than downtown, the newspaper said.

In early November, Beijing said it was in "a state of emergency" because of air pollution and called on companies and factories to rise to the task of clearing city skies.

Shougang Group, one of China's biggest steel makers and Beijing's biggest polluters, responded by pledging to cut production through the end of the year.

Improving air quality is key to the city's drive to host the 2008 summer Olympics, and the Beijing government plans to relocate 200 polluting factories before the Games begin.

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Briton Surfs Tsunami, Survives

HIKKADUWA, Sri Lanka (Reuters) - British surfer Martin Markwell had always dreamed of catching that perfect wave -- but when it finally came along, it was a nightmare.
Markwell was paddling on his surfboard Sunday off the popular Hikkaduwa beach resort on Sri Lanka's palm-fringed southern coast when he was swept up by a tsunami wave and sent crashing over a white sand beach and into a hotel restaurant.

"It was really terrible because I was surfing, I was really surfing on a wave I wasn't supposed to be on," he told Reuters.

"As an experienced surfer, when I saw the wave come I realized something was wrong, but I couldn't escape because my surfboard was tied to my ankle."

His wife Vicki and son Jake looked on in horror from a hotel balcony as he crashed toward the shore. Miraculously, he stayed atop his board until he reached the hotel, jumped off and waded to safety as the ocean rolled back to feed a much larger tsunami wave on its way.

The family regrouped and ran inland into jungle to safety just minutes before a giant tsunami wave 30 feet high crashed into Sri Lanka's coast, killing more than 28,500 people.

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Briton Surfs Tsunami, Survives

HIKKADUWA, Sri Lanka (Reuters) - British surfer Martin Markwell had always dreamed of catching that perfect wave -- but when it finally came along, it was a nightmare.
Markwell was paddling on his surfboard Sunday off the popular Hikkaduwa beach resort on Sri Lanka's palm-fringed southern coast when he was swept up by a tsunami wave and sent crashing over a white sand beach and into a hotel restaurant.

"It was really terrible because I was surfing, I was really surfing on a wave I wasn't supposed to be on," he told Reuters.

"As an experienced surfer, when I saw the wave come I realized something was wrong, but I couldn't escape because my surfboard was tied to my ankle."

His wife Vicki and son Jake looked on in horror from a hotel balcony as he crashed toward the shore. Miraculously, he stayed atop his board until he reached the hotel, jumped off and waded to safety as the ocean rolled back to feed a much larger tsunami wave on its way.

The family regrouped and ran inland into jungle to safety just minutes before a giant tsunami wave 30 feet high crashed into Sri Lanka's coast, killing more than 28,500 people.

i am glad they were safe

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Sex, Dogs and Chickens -- Weird Headlines of 2004

LONDON (Reuters) - Humming sex toy shuts Australian airport. Taiwanese man tries to convert lions to Jesus, gets bitten.

Talking toilet orders German men to sit down. Chinese get busy signal on Beijing suicide line.

Judging by the bizarre headlines that greeted readers around the world, 2004 was a bumper year for the weird and wacky.

Canadian guide dog barred for only answering its master's commands in French. Japanese boy writes apology in blood for dozing in class.

The list is endless, living proof that truth is all too often stranger than fiction.

A vibrating sex toy chucked into a rubbish bin at an Australian airport sparked a security alert that only ended when an embarrassed passenger came forward to claim what was identified as "an adult novelty device."

A fervent evangelist who leapt into the lions' den at Taipei zoo and shouted "Jesus will save you" was lucky to escape with just a bite in the right leg when he tried to convert the king of beasts to Christianity.

Feeling suicidal in Beijing? Then be patient.

Nine out of 10 Chinese calling into a suicide-prevention hotline were greeted by an engaged signal.

When it comes to quirky ideas, man's ingenuity knows no bounds.

A German inventor came up with a best-selling gadget that berates men if they try to use the toilet standing up, telling them: "Put the seat back down right away, you are definitely not to pee standing up."

The Germans have been accused of being a deadly serious people with a severe sense of humor failure.
But several surreal tales that would not look out of place in a Monty Python sketch prove they can laugh at themselves.

German police arrested a flasher who stumbled over his dropped trousers during an aborted attempt to flee.

A cost-cutting German theater was berated for using just four dwarves instead of seven in their Snow White show.

A survey revealed that most German men wear the wrong size condoms. Germans said they find smelly co-workers to be the most annoying aspect of their jobs.

Britain had its share of oddities too.

UK nursing home staff were so proud of a 105-year-old woman who had smoked since the age of 15 that they cremated her with a packet of her favorite cigarettes in the coffin.

A British train conductor stamped and carefully returned the ticket of a slumbering passenger without realizing the man was dead. A South African radio reporter went a little more live than he anticipated when he was mugged on air for his cellphone while transmitting from a squatter settlement.

Romance certainly had its rough patches in 2004.

A Norwegian court acquitted a man accused of raping a sleeping woman after he said he was also asleep at the time.

All three wives of a 67-year-old Iranian man took overdoses in an unsuccessful triple suicide bid after the youngest wife sparked jealousy by buying an expensive pair of boots.

A Malaysian man shot his wife dead after he mistook her for a monkey picking fruit behind their house.

A Spaniard tried to have his wife charged with domestic abuse because she refused to have sex with him on five consecutive nights.
Two Italians with the nicknames Bull Shark and Nurse Shark donned bubble-helmet immersion suits to get married in a shark tank.

But from Latin America to Africa, tainted love turned twice to tragedy.

A Mexican man killed his lover in a drunken, drugged fight and then cooked the man's body in tomato and onion sauce and ate it over three days.

And a Zambian man hanged himself in shame after his wife rushed into their house to investigate a noise and found him having sex with a chicken. The chicken was slaughtered afterwards.

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Elephants Saved Tourists from Tsunami

KHAO LAK, Thailand (Reuters) - Agitated elephants felt the tsunami coming, and their sensitivity saved about a dozen foreign tourists from the fate of thousands killed by the giant waves.

"I was surprised because the elephants had never cried before," mahout Dang Salangam said on Sunday on Khao Lak beach at the eight-elephant business offering rides to tourists.

The elephants started trumpeting -- in a way Dang, 36, and his wife Kulada, 24, said could only be described as crying -- at first light, about the time an earthquake measured at a magnitude of 9.0 cracked open the sea bed off Indonesia's Sumatra island.

The elephants soon calmed down. But they started wailing again about an hour later and this time they could not be comforted despite their mahouts' attempts at reassurance.

"The elephants didn't believe the mahouts. They just kept running for the hill," said Wit Aniwat, 24, who takes the money from tourists and helps them on to the back of elephants from a sturdy wooden platform.

Those with tourists aboard headed for the jungle-clad hill behind the resort beach where at least 3,800 people, more than half of them foreigners, would soon be killed. The elephants that were not working broke their hefty chains.

"Then we saw the big wave coming and we started running," Wit said.

Around a dozen tourists were also running toward the hill from the Khao Lak Merlin Resort, one of a line of hotels strung along the 10 km (6-mile) beach especially popular with Scandinavians and Germans.

"The mahouts managed to turn the elephants to lift the tourists onto their backs," Kulada said.

She used her hands to describe how the huge beasts used their trunks to pluck the foreigners from the ground and deposit them on their backs.

The elephants charged up the hill through the jungle, then stopped.

The tsunami drove up to 1 km (1,000 yards) inshore from the gently sloping beach which had been so safe for children it made Khao Lak an ideal place for a family holiday. But it stopped short of where the elephants stood.
On Sunday, the elephants were back at work giving rides to the tourists on whom the area depends.

German Ewald Heeg, who said he came from a small town near Frankfurt, said his charter company had offered his family -- wife, two daughters and one of their boyfriends -- the chance to go straight home, but he had turned it down.

"Our family is OK so we stay here to make our holiday," he said.

"Today, we make a safari. We go by elephants at first, then we make a boat trip.

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Fighting Words: Decoding Iraq War Lingo

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - "Hi Sergeant, we hear there are clashes in Baquba. Do you have any information on that?" screams the journalist down a bad mobile phone line from Baghdad.

"Well Ma'am, MNF and ISF engaged with AIF, who were planting IEDs, after coming under small arms fire," came the reply.

Confused? So was she.

The history of warfare is written in acronyms that cleanse the blood from gory wounds and strip the horror from bombs.

The Iraq war has spawned its very own alphabet soup of abbreviations and battlefield buzzwords intelligible only to the military and war correspondents trying to make sense of it all.

Many, like MNF, just make the longwinded multinational forces less of a mouthful.

Some, like IED, take the bang out of an improvised explosive device -- a makeshift bomb.

Others, like AIF, or anti-Iraqi forces, are part of the information war -- the U.S. military uses the phrase to describe insurgents.

Ready for a translation? "U.S. and Iraqi forces fought with insurgents who planted roadside bombs and fired guns."

Long the exclusive lingo of soldiers on battlefields and generals in command centers, the era of satellite television and instant Internet has brought the bewildering jumble of military jargon into living rooms the world over.

From the hunt for WMDs to the search for HVTs, high value targets such as Saddam Hussein, reporters "embedded" with U.S. military units since the 2003 invasion of Iraq have brought the language of war and occupation into the public consciousness.

The IED long predated the Iraq war, but as rebels get more creative, so tongue-twisting variations on classics are born.

VBIEDs, or vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices, often spell death for Iraq's fledgling forces, who have borne the brunt of such rebel attacks. They are better known as car bombs.

If the bomber is still in the vehicle when it explodes, it is an SVBIED -- S for suicide. When the bomber straps the explosives to his person, he becomes a PBIED.

Since roadside bombs have emerged as the weapon of choice for insurgents attacking U.S. patrols, the military has begun to "up-armor" its "soft" vehicles. Sometimes soldiers harden their vehicles using odds and ends. This is "hillbilly armor."

When American soldiers are hit, they are often "medivaced" to the CASH, or combat support hospital. If they recover, they will end up RTDed, or returned to duty.

If not they become Angels, a euphemism U.S. military doctors use for troops killed in battle, and contender for Word of the Year 2004, the American Dialect Society's annual competition for the best new word.

Despite persistent bloodshed in Iraq, not all are fighting words. The new U.S.-backed bureaucracy has its own lingo.

When journalists in Iraq want information about the U.S.-led military, we call CPIC, the Combined Press Information Center.

They sometimes refer us to the IIG, or Iraqi Interim Government, which took over from the defunct occupation authority, the Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA, in June.

In a month, Iraqis will elect a TNA, or Transitional National Assembly, which will appoint a new government and make a permanent constitution out of the TAL, or Transitional Administrative Law. Iraqis call the TAL the interim constitution.

The Iraqi government, as well as the U.S. and British embassies, are based in the Green Zone, a fortified compound considered safer than the rest of Baghdad, which is a Red Zone.

Six months ago, the Green Zone was officially renamed the International Zone. That name never stuck.

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Two Dolphins Trapped by Tsunami in Thai Lake

KHAO LAK, Thailand (Reuters) - Rescuers failed on Monday to catch two rare dolphins trapped for eight days in a small lake in southern Thailand after they were swept more than a kilometer inland by giant tsunami waves.

The exhausted dolphins, one of which appeared to be injured, were dumped in a 600-by-900-foot lake left by the wall of water that struck Thailand's Andaman Sea coastline on Dec. 26.

"I'm pretty sure there are two dolphins. We see one frequently, but the other one is more shy," said Edwin Wiek of the Wildlife Rescue Unit of Thailand.

He believed they were swept ashore in the first or second waves and were stuck behind a 12- to 15-foot embankment about 1,500 yards from the sea.

"When the water retreated, the dolphins probably could not follow and swim out," said Wiek, adding they appeared to be Indo-Pacific Humpback Dolphins, also known as speckled dolphins, found mainly in the Indian Ocean or western Pacific.

About 50 rescuers -- including a team of Greek divers in Thailand to search for corpses hidden in similar lakes -- tried to corner one of the dolphins with a net, but failed.

"He slipped away twice and we gave up. We need a bigger net to lock him in," said Wiek.

He said the dolphins had probably been without food since they were trapped. Rescuers, who will return Tuesday, tossed fish into the murky water to try and keep the animals alive.

The Indo-Pacific Humpback has a long, slender beak and gets its name from the fatty hump under its dorsal fin. Adults grow to about 6 to 9 feet and weigh about 330 to 440 pounds, according to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society.

Scientists view the dolphins as broadly threatened by habitat loss, pollution and hunting.

"They are very rare and that is a second reason to get them out and back into the sea," Wiek said.

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Italy May Dust Off Tourists to Protect David

MILAN, Italy (Reuters) - Custodians of Michelangelo's David are thinking of blasting air at dusty, sweaty tourists to stop them sullying the Renaissance sex symbol.
Months after a painstaking and costly clean-up of the 500-year-old nude statue, experts at Florence's Galleria dell'Accademia found dust and humidity brought in by streams of tourists had begun to tarnish their top crowd-puller again.

"The tourists carry in heaps of dust from outside. Dust may sound innocent, but the city grime contains lots of chemicals. They also bring in humidity when it's raining," museum director Franca Falletti told Reuters.

Falletti said one possible solution was to have air blowing out from behind the five-meter (15 foot) marble statue, reversing an existing draught in the museum that lets dust settle on the famous boy with the slingshot.

Other options include another wash for David -- controversial because of potential damage to his delicate features -- or asking tourists to rigorously brush off before entering the museum.

"We will monitor the situation over the next two years, and are looking at all the options to find a good system of defense for David," Falletti said.

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Man Pleads Guilty in Tsunami Death E-Mail Case

LONDON (Reuters) - A British man admitted Monday to sending hoax emails to friends and relatives of people missing since the Asian tsunami.
Christopher Pierson pleaded guilty to sending more than 30 emails to worried relatives, saying their loved ones had been confirmed dead, after they posted their details on the Web Site of TV station Sky News.

Pierson, 37, from Ruskington in Lincolnshire, eastern England, was to be detained until January 24, an official at London's Horseferry Road Magistrates Court said.

Pierson pleaded guilty to charges of malicious communication and causing a public nuisance after police seized computer equipment at the weekend.

Pierson is accused of posing as a British official from the "Foreign Office Bureau" in Thailand in his emails. All the messages came from one bogus email address, ukgovfoffice@aol.com.

Sky News said it was "disgusted" that its Web site had been abused and contacted police as soon as it found out.

The death toll from the tsunami, triggered by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off western Indonesia a week ago, stood at almost 144,000 Monday, including at least 40 Britons.

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Cambodia Saved from Tsunami by Astrologer?

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (Reuters) - Former Cambodian king Norodom Sihanouk says an astrologer warned him that an "ultra-catastrophic cataclysm" would strike, but that his country would be spared if proper rituals were conducted.
"My wife and I decided to spend several thousand dollars to organize these ceremonies so our country and our people could be spared such a catastrophe," Sihanouk, who abdicated last year, wrote on his Web site at http://www.norodomsihanouk.info.

Cambodia was unscathed by the 30-foot tsunami waves generated by a magnitude-9.0 earthquake under the sea off Indonesia's Sumatra island on Dec.26. The waves rolled through the Indian Ocean, devastating coastal communities and killing more than 126,000 people.

Sihanouk offered his deepest condolences to the families of the dead and said he would give "a very humble and extremely modest" contribution of $15,000 to international relief efforts for each of the stricken countries.

Indonesia was the worst hit along with Sri Lanka, India and Thailand.

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Mexico 'Dirty War' Tale Ends Happily, Victim Found

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Aleida Gallangos met her brother in Washington last week for the first time since he was kidnapped by Mexican police 30 years ago, closing one chapter in the annals of Mexico's "dirty war" on a rare joyous note.

Lucio Antonio Gallangos is the first of 532 victims of forced disappearance documented by Mexico's rights watchdog to be found alive, thanks mainly to his sister, who had searched for him since learning her own identity a few years ago.

"He's the image of my uncles, my uncle Manuel and my uncle Fernando," Aleida Gallangos, 31, said after meeting the stranger who is her closest link to parents she cannot remember.

She is among dirty war survivors in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America piecing together personal histories and broken families as new governments shed light on decades-old atrocities.

Gallangos traced her brother with the help of adoption records, the Yellow Pages, a network of Latino immigrants in Washington, D.C. and a kind-hearted doorman there.

When she found her brother she told him his own story: Lucio Antonio was almost 4 in 1975 when federal agents took him, his parents and uncle -- suspected leftists guerrillas -- after a shootout between rebels and police in Mexico City.

Shot in the leg, Lucio Antonio was placed in an orphanage and adopted by a Mexican couple. His parents were never found. Gallangos wanted him to know they had not abandoned him.

It was a shock to the 33-year-old man known as Juan Carlos Hernandez, who went to the United States 10 years ago. Now he struggles to reconcile two separate personal histories.

"I must assimilate this, that I come from other parents," he said in a telephone interview. "I spent a lifetime with one family. I am part of (Gallangos') story but my life is different.

"When I was three they turned my life upside down, and now it's happened again," he said. But the revelations of his past make him more grateful for the sacrifices of his adoptive parents.

"I want them to know, the people who took the life of a 3-year-old boy, that something good came out of it," he said.

He and his sister Gallangos said they sure of their blood tie, although he said he would take a DNA test to confirm it.
REVELATIONS

Gallangos, a soft-spoken and determined factory worker studying industrial engineering in Ciudad Juarez, was 2 when her family fell apart at the height of a Cold-War-era clampdown on leftists. Hundreds of Mexicans died or disappeared from the 1960s to the 1980s at the hands of state security forces.

A family friend rescued her from the gun battle and took her to a relative, who raised her under a new name. Meanwhile, Gallangos' paternal grandmother searched for the two sons, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren who vanished in 1975.

President Vicente Fox took office in 2000 and ended seven decades of single-party rule, opening long-secret documents about the dirty war to public scrutiny. Gallangos and her grandmother met through a magazine article on the "disappeared," the missing victims of dirty wars.

Since then, Gallangos' life has been an emotional see-saw.

In February she found the file of a boy who came to an orphanage in June 1975, who called himself Tony and whose photo showed a strong resemblance to her father.

But when she contacted the family who adopted him they balked, fearing the truth would hurt or estrange him. Through phone directories Gallangos found his adoptive sisters in Washington.

She went there on a hunch and a sympathetic apartment house doorman tipped her off to the workplace of one sister, while area press publicized her story.

On Christmas Eve her brother called her and heard her revelations.

"He told me: 'You were looking for someone. I was waiting for no one. Twelve hours ago I was someone else,'" Gallangos said, swallowing tears.

"I found the person I was seeking, someone hard-working, sensitive, open," she said. "I see the pain in his face. Now we have some healing to do."

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Wisconsin Girl Survives Rabies with New Treatment

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A 15-year-old Wisconsin girl who received an experimental treatment to become the first person known to survive rabies without a vaccination has been released from hospital, a spokeswoman for the hospital said on Sunday.
Jeanna Giese of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, was released on Saturday from Children's Hospital of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, where she had been treated for the disease since mid-October.

The deadly virus, which attacks the nervous system and is usually transmitted through an animal bite, can be prevented with a vaccine if treated immediately.

But the teenager, who contracted the virus from an infected bat on Sept. 12, did not seek medical care until symptoms appeared and it was too late for the vaccine.

Doctors at Children's Hospital devised a new treatment that involved inducing a coma to allow Giese's body to better fight the infection, and administering a cocktail of drugs, Children's Hospital spokeswoman Jackie Gauger said.

The hospital said in a statement on its Web site (http://www.chw.org) that Giese was "...the first person in the world to survive the disease without receiving a vaccination after infection."

The girl, who regained weight, strength and coordination in recent weeks and will continue to receive therapy at home, is expected to make a near-full recovery, the statement said.

"She is progressing very well, better than they had even expected," Gauger said.

The new treatment shows promise for use in developing nations where rabies infection is more common than in the United States, and could be used for other illnesses that affect the nervous system, the Web site statement said.

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A Boy Named Tsunami

PORT BLAIR, India (Reuters) - Six-day-old Tsunami Roy doesn't know what all the fuss about him is, as he hungrily suckles at his mother's breast before dropping off for a contented nap.

Sitting in a classroom in the capital of India's tsunami-ravaged Andaman and Nicobar islands, his 34-year-old father, Lakshmi Narain Roy, recounted Saturday the dramatic events leading to Tsunami's birth, three weeks ahead of time.

"It was early morning Sunday, when I made my pregnant wife a cup of tea and woke her up. She was just about to take a sip when we felt the first jolt of the quake. She immediately screamed for me to pick up our sleeping son and rush out."

Roy grabbed his 6-year-old older son and ran out of their home near the coastal settlement of Hut Bay on the Little Andaman island before turning back to see if his wife was following.

"She had fallen down and briefly lost consciousness. But then she heard people screaming 'the water is coming' and managed to crawl out to the street and asked me to put our son on my cycle-rickshaw."

After hoisting his injured wife and son on to the rickshaw Roy pedaled and pushed the rickshaw as fast as he could up and away from the shore toward a nearby rocky slope. There he half-carried and half-pushed his pregnant wife up the last 150 feet or so to a wooded area where many others had fled.

The Roys are among the fortunate few who survived Sunday's devastating tsunami that has killed more than 126,000 people in Asia, including more than 8,900 in India.

They spent the next few hours watching the angry water foam over their submerged homes and waiting for a mahout to come and lead away a restless elephant, that was used for logging work and had been tethered to a nearby tree.

"Soon she was complaining of pain in her abdomen and at first I told her it must be due to the fall as the baby was not due till January 15. But as the pain got worse by nightfall, I became frantic and started looking for help, and luckily found a nurse."

DELIVERED BY MOONLIGHT

The nurse, with the help of other women who had fled the waves, rigged up a makeshift curtain, laid the 26-year-old Namita down on a bed of dried leaves and grass and ordered the men to get some clean cloth, thread and a bowl of hot water.

"A few hours later the child was born. But the nurse had no instruments, she was unable to remove the placenta from inside my wife's womb and within hours she was again in pain."
Unable to find any help locally, Roy trekked nearly a mile down to the police outpost at Hut Bay Tuesday and located a doctor, who examined his wife and advised that she be taken to hospital as soon as possible.

"On Wednesday, we learned a Navy ship had come into the bay but the jetty was damaged and so with help from other locals I carried her and the baby on to a dinghy and took her out to the big ship at sea."

Reaching Port Blair after a 7-hour journey Roy's wife was rushed to the local hospital where doctors immediately cleaned up her uterus and gave her some medicines.

"It was the doctors who suggested we name the boy Tsunami and we also liked the name and decided to call him that. After all it is a name everyone will instantly notice and remember."

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Young S.African Men Kill Circumcision Nurse

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - A group of young South African men taking part in coming of age rituals due to include circumcision turned on their male nurse and killed him, an official said Monday.
Sizwe Kupelo of the Eastern Cape provincial health department said the men aged 18 to 25 beat the man to death with sticks at the site of their initiation ceremonies in Port Elizabeth Friday.

"He was attacked by about 20 initiates who assaulted him, and he later died," Kupelo said.

He said the attack followed complaints by the men that they were not being properly looked after during their initiation ceremonies, but did not elaborate.

The nurse had been in charge of caring for the men ahead of their circumcision.

No arrests have been made yet, Kupelo said.

A number of South African tribes including the Ndebele, Sotho and Xhosa send teenage boys and young men into the bush for up to eight weeks to learn their tribe's cultural and moral values and undergo coming of age ceremonies including circumcision.

In recent years the practice of circumcision has come under scrutiny as dozens of boys have been accidentally killed or mutilated by amateur elders who have seized on the tradition as a way to make money.

Kupelo said in the Eastern Cape at least 10 young men had died during the current initiation period, which began in December.

Chairman of the Eastern Cape House of Traditional Leaders, Chief Ngangomhlaba Matanzima, condemned the attack, which he said showed there were "serious problems" around initiations.

[AussieMark]

Death Sentence for Iranian Who Beheaded Sons

TEHRAN (Reuters) - An Iranian who beheaded his two sons after they witnessed him murder a woman was sentenced to hang Tuesday by a Tehran court, in a case that has hit Iran's front pages.
The man, known only as Ismail, pleaded guilty to beheading and dicing up the bodies of two adults and severing the heads of his sons, aged 7 and 11, newspapers and the ISNA students news agency reported.

"Ismail suspected his wife Masoumeh of having an affair with a man called Ebrahim. He then forced her to marry him in a lavish ceremony attended by some 700 guests," Naser Seraj, the head of penal courts in Tehran province, told ISNA.

Ismail then killed Ebrahim and his sister Fatemeh.

"I had beheaded sheep before and I felt Fatemeh was a sheep so I cut her head off and chopped her body to small pieces. I placed her head in a tray which scared the life out of my children," he was quoted as saying by Etemad newspaper.

After learning that his sons had witnessed Fatemeh's murder, Ismail beheaded them.

Seraj said Ismail received two death sentences for killing the adults. Under Iran's Islamic law a father need only pay blood money for killing his children.

Masoumeh was sentenced to death for her affair with Ebrahim. Adultery is punishable by death in Iran.