The contraception reception

Condoms of all shapes and sizes were on display at a Beijing fashion show on Wednesday featuring dresses, hats and even lollipops made of the said item.

Models fought through extravagant soap bubble special effects to show off tight-fitting wedding gowns, scaly-looking evening dresses, outrageous bikinis and other garments made entirely of condoms, inflated or otherwise.

The show was held at the Fourth China Reproductive Health New Technologies and Products Expo and organized by China's largest condom manufacturer, Guilin Latex Factory, to promote the use of condoms in the fight against HIV/AIDS.

It also marked World Population Day, organized annually by the U.N. Population Fund.

China, with a population now of 1.3 billion, introduced a strict one-child policy in the late 1970s under which many residents are restricted to one child.

"One (child) is not enough -- two are better," said visitor Song Weiliang.

But the main aim of the condom show was to promote AIDS awareness

China originally stigmatized AIDS as a disease of the decadent, capitalist West -- a problem of gays, sex workers and drug users. Traditionally, none of these officially existed in communist China.

It has belatedly awakened to the problem, and health experts have warned the virus is now moving into the general population. But a lack of sex education and unwillingness to talk about sex still hampers the fight, health experts say.

Prickly pests pierce security at Nuclear Power Plant

A new type of intruder has been needling authorities at Israel's top secret nuclear research center -- one of the four-legged variety.

 

Israeli Parks Authority spokeswoman Osnat Eitan confirmed a newspaper report that park rangers had been sent to the facility at Dimona, believed by experts to be used to produce atomic weapons, to catch dozens of porcupines that have been chewing through saplings and garden hoses.

 

Using potatoes and chocolate milk as bait, the prickly animals were being trapped and moved elsewhere, Eitan said.

 

The Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper quoted the site's gardener, David Golan, as saying a porcupine population explosion posed a security threat.

 

Israel says its conducts nuclear research in Dimona in the Negev desert and refuses to comment on reports that the reactor has produced plutonium for atomic bombs.

 

Nation bans karaoke bars, Internet cafes?

North Korea's security agency has ordered the shutdown of karaoke bars and Internet cafes, saying they are a threat to society, a South Korean newspaper reported Wednesday.

 

Refugees from the reclusive state say such outlets are largely located in the northern region that borders China and are frequented by merchants involved in cross-border business rather than ordinary citizens.

 

The North's Ministry of People's Security said in a directive that all karaoke bars, video-screening rooms and Internet cafes operating without state authorization must shut immediately, the Dong-A Ilbo newspaper said.

The paper did not say how it obtained a copy of the directive.

 

"It is so promulgated under the mandate of the Republic in order to crush enemy scheming and to squarely confront those who threaten the maintenance of the socialist system," the daily quoted the ministry directive as saying.

"Most of the people who would go to these places are people who made quite a bit of money, normally not officials or the average person," said Park Sang-hak, an activist for human rights in the North based in South Korea.

 

Kids at graveyard school face nightmares

Scores of Indian children attending a school located in a graveyard were having recurring nightmares about ghosts and have appealed to authorities to shift them from the site, officials and residents said.

 

"I have stopped going to school after many dead people walked out of their graves and came into my dreams, ordering me to reach school on time," said six-year-old Raqib Ansari.

 

This week, hundreds of children at the school in the eastern state of Bihar, accompanied by their parents, marched to the office of a senior district official, asking for the school to be shifted away from the Muslim graveyard.

 

About 200 children study in the makeshift school set up several years ago after authorities refused to donate land for a school in Kohari village, 125 miles southwest of the state capital, Patna.

 

Some parents say their children's sleep and health is being affected by dreams of ghosts.

"They used to play and study together and finish their lunch boxes while sitting on top of concrete graves but now the ghosts have come to haunt them at night and they are falling ill," said one father, Riyazuddin Ansari.

 

"We have no choice as the nearest other school is at least four hours away," he said by phone from Kohari.

 

There are more than 100 tombs in the graveyard but dozens of fresh graves -- most of them shallow -- have been dug in recent months, further crowding the burial ground.

Authorities in densely populated Bihar said they were trying to provide new land for the school.

 

"Maybe the dead are not enjoying the noise inside the graveyard any more, but we are looking into the matter," said Ram Yash Singh, a village council official.