Mass dating event flooded by men

Thousands of eager men flooded Seoul's Yeouido park for a mass dating event on Christmas Eve, only to meet other guys. Picture: Kim Jae-Hwan Source: AFP

SOUTH Korea's "battle of the singles" - a highly-anticipated mass dating event organised on Facebook - fizzled out Monday, with thousands of lovelorn men at the venue but few women in sight.

The event was triggered last month after two young men jokingly floated the idea on the social networking site and eventually prompted more than 36,000 Facebook users to sign up.

But only about 3500 people - mostly men in their 20s or 30s - turned up. Many of the women who did show up brought male partners just to watch the event.

"Apparently most of the participants were young men ... many left fairly quickly as the place was increasingly filled with guys," a police officer in Seoul told AFP.

Romantics who braved temperatures of around minus 10 degrees Celsius mostly milled aimlessly around the venue in a city park during the two-hour event.

Women had been asked to dress in red and men in white when they gathered at the park in Seoul's Yeouido financial district.

The two groups were asked to stand facing each other a few metres apart until the event started at 3pm, then walk towards a potential date and grab his or her hands.

But the face-to-face fizzled out after it became clear that there were simply not enough women to cater for a horde of men.

"Where the hell are the girls? I can't find any," said Kim Sung-Sik, a 23-year-old college student, describing the event as "utterly disappointing".

"This is awful... I didn't come all this way to get stuck in a bunch of smelly guys," said another male participant who declined to be named.

"It looks like there are more doves flying around here than there are girls ... I feel like I'm in the army again," he said, referring to the two years of military service mandatory for all South Korean men.

Similar male-dominated scenes have been reported in other cities where the same "battle of the singles" events were arranged.

Out of a population of some 50 million, South Korea - one of the world's most-wired nations - has 31 million smartphone users and nearly 20 million users of either Facebook or Twitter.

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NZ's 2012: Eels, bums, Hobbits, maggots

A short-finned eel, similar to the one found in a man's bottom in New Zealand. Picture: Freshwater and Marine Image Bank 

Source: Supplied

LIKE hobbits, New Zealanders are generally conservative types but every now and again have the capacity to surprise, much like the man who walked into an Auckland hospital with an eel up his backside.

This little country at the bottom of the world can always be relied on to produce some of the world's quirkiest, funniest and in some cases, ridiculous, news.

Sheep, possums, hobbits, bras, minds wandering in bed, and even the prime minister led the way for odd news in 2012.

Let's get the eel story out of the way. In September, it was revealed a man turned up to Auckland City Hospital to have an eel removed from his bottom. Hospital staff got into a bit of trouble when the man's X-ray was circulated and the story was leaked to the media.

The eel was described as being "about the size of a decent sprig of asparagus", but there was no explanation of how, or why, the eel was where it was.

Other oddball news included:

Coins bearing images of Bilbo Baggins from the upcoming new Hobbit film trilogy. Picture: AFP

* The emergence in Dunedin of a bizarre new branch of drinking game. Called possum, you sit in a tree and drink until you fall. Like real possums, the students were causing damage to trees in local parks, but also leaving behind food scraps, broken bottles and vomit.

* Taranaki's Uruti School held a best dressed dead possum competition, which saw a skinned possum dressed as a boxer, some in baby clothes and two relaxing on mini beach towels. "When people die, don't we dress them up?" said principal Pauline Sutton. However, the SPCA was less than impressed.

* In January, Federated Farmers suggested sheep shearing could become a demonstration sport at the Olympics. There was no word on whether or not the sheep would be housed at the athletes' village but the idea was quickly crutched.

* In February, Dargaville girl guides set a world record for the longest bra chain - about 170,000 of them stretched around 170km. It took two years to collect the bras.

* A "Mega Kiwi Sex Survey" of 1500 people found New Zealanders, on average, have sex about 130 times a year. Thirteen per cent said they had thought about housework during sex, while 14.5 per cent had thought about unpaid bills and 15 per cent had thought about food or a celebrity.

New Zealand PM John Key got in trouble a couple of times when he opened his mouth. Picture: Ray Strange.

* In August, it was revealed that Gisborne was split over the issue of people wearing their pyjamas in public - to the supermarket or the cash machine. "Pyjamas have become a fashionable thing ... I can remember when mini-skirts came in and there was a huge furore because people could see their legs... They're probably more covered up in pyjamas," said deputy mayor Nola Aston.

* In May, it was revealed West Coast residents were receiving anonymous gift parcels from Paris. A hairdryer or hair clippers, and 100 euros ($125) in cash were in packages delivered to a handful of people in Greymouth and Hokitika. Months later the origin of the packages is still a mystery.

Every year New Zealanders think of items they can flog off in online auctions and the wackier ones generally attract attention. This year it was skin space for tattoos.

* Lower Hutt's Tina Beznec put part of her backside up for sale, and it was snapped up by a strip club chain, which paid more than $NZ12,000 ($9500) to decorate her rump with its logo.

* Kane Kenzie, 28, put his skin up for auction to raise money to bring his brother home following a scooter crash in Thailand, but a Whangarei childcare centre, possibly tired of it all, won the auction and asked that he not get tattooed.

If there was confirmation the country had gone bat crazy over The Hobbit movies, was the fact "hobbit coins" are actually legal tender.

NZ Post released a series of Bilbo and Gandalf coins to cash in on the hobbit frenzy, but it's unlikely they will be found in many wallets and purses. The most expensive, a $10 coin made from 28 grams of pure gold, will set Tolkien enthusiasts back $NZ3695.

Hobbits also infested most parts of the country. An aircraft was draped with them, they're on postage stamps and Wellington was festooned with hobbit banners.

If The Hobbit didn't put the country on the map, it was Prime Minister John Key with another of his malapropisms in calling famed footballer David Beckham "thick as bats**t".

He then displayed his bumbling grasp of where the kids are at by explaining his on-air "gay red shirt" comments that young people take it to mean "weird".

He didn't want to swallow the political dead rat, but not long afterwards ate, live and wriggling, a cricket, huhu grub and maggots on stage with television survival star Bear Grylls.

The cricket was "fine" but, Mr Key said, "Eating the huhu grub, he puts a pinch of maggots in there, little maggots, so you couldn't bite them fast enough to kill them.

"So they're wriggling down the back of your throat, then they're wriggling back up, and I had to pull them out from between my teeth."
 

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Syria 'using killer gas bombs'

This image taken from video obtained from the Shaam News Network. shows Syrians helping a wounded man after a government airstrike hit the Hama Suburb of Halfaya on Sunday. Picture: AP Source: AP

SYRIAN troops have deployed bombs containing a killer gas while fighting rebels in the central city of Homs, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and activists say.

"Activists in Homs say that six rebels died on Sunday night on the Khaldiyeh-Bayada frontline because they inhaled odourless gas and white smoke," said the Britain-based Observatory, which relies on a network of activists, lawyers and doctors to document Syria's raging conflict.

"Gas spread in the area after regime troops threw bombs that gave off white smoke as soon as they hit the walls," said the Observatory, which added the bombs were deployed during street clashes with the rebels.

"Those who inhaled the gas felt nauseous and suffered severe headaches. Some suffered fits," it added.

"These are not chemical weapons, but we do not know whether they are internationally prohibited," Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said.

"Activists say it is the first time they have recorded these effects," he added. "They are not conventional weapons."

This image taken from video obtained from the Shaam News Network, shows Free Syrian Army fighters running towards the scene after a government airstrike hit Hama suburb of Halfaya. Picture: AP

The Observatory called on the International Committee of the Red Cross to urgently send a specialised medical team to Homs, several of whose districts have been besieged by army forces for more than six months.

The Local Co-ordination Committees also reported the use of "bombs containing gases" in Homs.

"These gases lead to muscle relaxation, severe difficulty in breathing and the narrowing of the iris," said the LCC, a grassroots network of peaceful activists.

Amateur video filmed by activists and distributed online by the LCC showed a man laid out on a stretcher struggling to breathe as an unidentified doctor held an oxygen mask over his face.

"It's definitely a poisonous gas, but we don't know what type it is," said a field doctor.

"This man has been injured by the gas. We do not know what type of gas it is. It is definitely not sarin," he added.

US President Barack Obama led international warnings to President Bashar al-Assad over Syria's chemical weapons arsenal but Damascus has repeatedly insisted it would not use the arms against its own people.

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Smartphones the new murder weapon?

Manipulation of medical devices will soon be routinely done via smartphone, putting an individual's health in the hands of every hacker. Source: AP

THE everyday smartphone could become the assassin's weapon of choice in years to come; from interfering with medical devices to sabotaging cars and homes.

Vanity Fair reports that tech-security experts are investigating the various ways phones might be used to wirelessly take over electrical systems, including hospital equipment, car computers and all manner of domestic and medical devices, such as air conditioners, security systems and pacemakers.

In a presentation delivered in Melbourne in August, security expert Barnaby Jack described how pacemakers and implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) could be controlled from as far as nine metres away by a counterfeit signal. In an experiment, he was able to instruct an ICD to deliver 830 volts - an instantly lethal zap. More sinister still, he speculated that such a death would likely be benignly blamed on malfunction.

While there are obvious advantages to a doctor being able to regulate a patient's condition swiftly and remotely, Barnaby suspects the desire to interfere with these systems will prove irresistible to hackers. "Has there ever been a box connected to the Internet that people haven't tried to break into?," he says.

Medical devices are not the only vulnerable targets. Home electric meters, alarm clocks, refrigerators, heating and cooling systems and security cameras can be all accessed remotely. The same is true of built-in computers in cars.

There are numerous ways in which cars tap into cyberspace, including GPS systems, locking devices and tyre-pressure monitoring systems. The latter typically send out minute-by-minute reports to an Electronic Control Unit (ECU) relying on an ID specific to each tyre.

In 2010, researchers from Rutgers and the University of South Carolina discovered they could read a tyre ID from 40 metres away, meaning people 40 metres from a car can "talk to it" through its tyres.

Researchers from the University of Washington and the University of California–San Diego were able fake the signals from a tyre-pressure ECU and, emboldened, went on to take control of a vehicle by contacting the hands-free system through the built-in mobile phone and playing a special audio file; and used Bluetooth signals to start cars that were parked, locked, and alarmed - all with instructions sent from a smartphone.

Concerningly, none of this is regulated, according to Stuart McClure, chief technical officer of the anti-virus company McAfee. Medical devices alone are monitored, but not for security, just for safety. "Maybe 90 per cent" of vendors don't see security as critical, he told Vanity Fair.

Ditto computer-software companies, until credit-card numbers began to be stolen by the millions. "We live in a reactive society," McClure went on, "and something bad has to happen before we take problems seriously. Only when these embedded computers start to kill a few people - one death won't do it - will we take it seriously."
 

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Firefighters shot dead trying to save lives

A screen grab from WHAM-TV's live coverage of the scene in Webster, New York. Source: Supplied

FOUR volunteer firefighters responding to a pre-dawn house fire have been shot, two fatally, in suburban Webster, New York, according to police.

"One or more shooters" fired at the firefighters after they arrived shortly after 5.30am at the blaze near the Lake Ontario shore, just east of Rochester, police chief Gerald Pickering said.

There was no active shooter at the scene later on Monday morning, where three houses continue to burn. Monroe county sheriff, Patrick O'Flynn, said the first Webster police officer who arrived on the scene exchanged gunfire with the shooter.

Local newspaper, the Democrat and Chronicle, reports the fire broke out at 5.45am at 191 Lake Road. Officials say they arrived at the scene of the blaze near the Lake Ontario shore to find a fire had started in one home and spread to two others and a car.

The paper reports one firefighter who was shot managed to get away from the scene to the safety of his car.

The fires have destroyed three homes and firefighters are waiting for the scene to be cleared so they can resume their work. There is no information on whether the homes on fire were occupied.

The Democrat and Chronicle reports that the flag outside the West Webster Fire Department was lowered to half-staff at 10.45am. Fire district commissioners, Pat Morris and Billy Gross, described a sombre scene inside. 

One of the firefighters shot, but not killed, was a Rochester firefighter who volunteers in Webster, the commissioners said. The department has about 125 volunteers.

"Each one of the firefighters is comforting each other," Mr Morris said. The Monroe County stress management team is working with the firefighters, the commissioners said, and local businesses are donating food.

"These firemen are part of our family. You go into a fire with these guys. To see them go down with something like this is totally unexpected. We are in shock," Mr Gross said, adding help was coming from all sides.

"Because of the shock and stress inside, you can't expect us to go and fight (another) fire," he added.

FBI spokeswoman Maureen Dempsey said the FBI was assisting law enforcement with whatever needs they had. "We have people on the scene. Members of our joint terrorism task force."

Webster is a middle-class, lakeside suburb. "I'm not aware of anything like this happening in Webster, obviously not a firefighter being fired upon," Webster fire marshal Rob Boutillier said.

Authorities remain on the scene evacuating residents. They are being searched by New York state police and other authorities before being taken to a bus.

Resident Michael Damico, whose son woke him up at 8am to tell him about the fire, was among those evacuated. He told the Democrat and Chronicle that "The whole strip's been evacuated. They're evacuating all of the houses and going through them," he said.

"We looked out the window and we saw the SWAT team and everyone around. Some people on this bus already watched their houses burn. They're not happy," Mr Damico said.

The debate about gun laws in America continues, in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings on December 14, which killed 26 people including 20 children.

Webster has now been linked to house fires two Decembers in a row. Last December 7, authorities say, a 15-year-old boy doused his home with gasoline and set it ablaze, killing his father and two brothers, 16 and 12. His mother and 13-year-old sister escaped with injuries. He is being prosecuted as an adult.

With AP

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'Jesus would be on Facebook': Bishop

Jesus would be your Facebook friend if he lived today, according to German Archbishop Robert Zollitsch. "He was always looking for people, and took unusual routes to do this," he says. Source: Supplied

THE head of Germany's Catholic Church believes Jesus would be a keen user of social media, were he alive today.

In an interview with the Ruhr Nachrichten newspaper, he asserted his theory that Jesus would certainly these days be on Facebook and Twitter.

"He was always looking for people, and took unusual routes to do this," said Freiburg Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, who is chairman of the German Bishops' Conference.

"Fundamentally all media are suited to bring the word of God to the people," he said, adding that social media represented a new way for the Church to reach people.

Meanwhile Steve Jenkins, a spokesman for the Church of England, urged people to enjoy themselves on Christmas Day, including indulging in online shopping.

"Everybody has spare time on Christmas Day," the London Daily Telegraph quotes him as saying. "In the old days they would sit around the radio, today they've sitting around the tablet, smartphone and computer … It doesn't detract hugely from the day."

The statement was at odds with concerns voiced by Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, who worries that Christmas Day is "in danger" of being taken over by gadgets.

The Right Reverend Stephen Cottrell, Bishop of Chelmsford, advises acting in moderation. "Shopping online on Christmas Day can be a bit like eating too much Christmas pudding," he said. "You will enjoy it for a while. But when you get on the scales in the New Year you may regret what you did."

Amazon.co.uk told the Telegraph its Christmas Day sales from its website have more than doubled over the last five years. "Our biggest day of the year for MP3 and Kindle Book downloads as many people are buying content for their new devices that they have just received," a spokesperson said.

Although forgiving of people spending a little time online in a largely quiet day, Mr Jenkins concluded it was important "that people remember what Christmas is about.

"It's about marking that by going to church, it's also about spending time with your family. It is important to be with your family, [to] enjoy a Christmas meal."
 

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Mandela confined to hospital

Doctors have confirmed former president Nelson Mandela will spend Christmas Day in hospital, undergoing treatment for a lung condition.   Source: AFP

AILING icon Nelson Mandela is spending Christmas Day in hospital, the South African government says, dashing hopes for a festive end to his longest stay in care since being released from prison in 1990.

"Former president Nelson Mandela will spend Christmas Day in hospital, his doctors have confirmed today, on 24 December 2012," the presidency said in a statement.

The 94-year-old Nobel Peace laureate and South Africa's first black post-apartheid president, was admitted to a Pretoria hospital on December 8. He has been treated there for a recurrent lung infection and had surgery to remove gallstones.

In a statement President Jacob Zuma said his predecessor "continues to respond to treatment".

"Knowledge of the love and support of his people keeps him strong," Zuma said.

"We urge all South Africans to keep Tata (father) uppermost in their thoughts at every place of worship or entertainment tomorrow on Christmas Day, and throughout the festive season.

"We also humbly invite all freedom loving people around the world to pray for him. He is an ardent fighter and will recover from this episode with all our support," Zuma said.

There was no indication of when he might be discharged.

"He remains in hospital, recovering," presidential spokesman Mac Maharaj told AFP on Monday. "I can't say when he will be discharged, doctors will make that decision."

Mandela, who became South Africa's first black president after the country's first all-race elections in 1994, has a long history of lung problems.

He contracted tuberculosis - a disease which killed his father - while in jail as a political prisoner.

He was later hospitalised for an acute respiratory infection in January 2011, when he was held for two nights.

Mandela was last seen in public in 2010, clad in a scarf during the closing ceremony of the FIFA World Cup, when he was wheeled into the stadium in a golf cart.

In May, footage of a smiling, grey-haired Madiba seated on a couch, was shown on television when he was visited by ruling ANC leaders to present him with a symbolic flame to mark the party's 100 years.

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Jobs' superyacht free to sail

The superyacht Venus was impounded after designer Philippe Starck said Jobs' estate still owed him three million euros ($3.8 million).
  Source: AFP

STEVE Jobs' superyacht Venus is free to leave Amsterdam port after the late Apple co-founder's estate paid a deposit to resolve a dispute with designer Philippe Starck, who had the yacht impounded.

"The Venus is no longer impounded, we have found a solution," Gerard Moussault, a Hague-based lawyer for the Jobs estate, told AFP on Monday.

"A security deposit was paid into a bank account, but I cannot say for how much," Moussault said after French designer Starck last week asked Amsterdam bailiffs to seize the sleek 70-metre yacht.

The vessel, which reportedly cost over 100 million euros ($127 million) to build, was impounded after Starck said Jobs' estate still owed him three million euros for his contribution to its design.

Starck said he was to be paid a fixed sum of nine million euros, while lawyers for Jobs' estate said he was to be paid a percentage of the project's cost equal to six million euros.

The Dutch-built yacht, which was only unveiled in October - just over a year after Jobs died - is in Amsterdam harbour because of bad weather.

"The captain is waiting for better weather to set sail," Moussault said.

Starck's lawyer in the Netherlands, Roelant Klaassen, said on Friday that Jobs and Starck were "very close in the period that the design was made and the building proceeded.

"That's one of the reasons there was no formal agreement on the job," he said.

The yacht will reportedly be shipped by another ship to the United States, where Jobs' family, including widow Laurene Powell Jobs and their three children Reed, Erin and Eve, are to take charge of her.

The aluminium-hulled yacht was built by Royal De Vries shipbuilders in Aalsmeer, just south of Amsterdam, with interiors designed by Starck.

The bridge features a control panel made up of an array of seven iMac computers.

Starck said last year he was working on the yacht, which was mentioned in Walter Isaacson's biography of Jobs, who died on October 5, 2011. He said it was "sleek and minimalist", with teak decks.

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