World briefs

A Chinese investor distraught at losing his shirt on the stock market turned for help to an unusual source - the police.

The man started to call the cops after losing more than 30,000 yuan (€2,800) to demand that they "rush to the scene and stop it immediately", Xinhua news agency reported yesterday.

"I didn't know whether to laugh or get angry," an officer told a local newspaper in central Hubei province.

The police finally got fed up and traced the line. Summoned to the station, the man's elder brother said the unlucky investor had started behaving strangely after going on a three-day drinking binge. He promised there'd be no more calls to the hot line.

Shamans give carnival blessing

Aymara Indian shamans set fire to a pyre covered with flowers and coca leaves inside Bolivia's presidential palace over the weekend, in a blessing tied to Carnival festivities.

The elderly male priests tossed alcohol on the flames and rubbed bits of confetti into leftist President Evo Morales's hair in a good luck gesture. They also wrapped hundreds of brightly coloured streamers around his neck.

Mr Morales is the first indigenous President to govern Bolivia, and this ch'alla blessing to Pachamama, or Mother Earth, transfused the government palace with folklore.

A brass band from Oruro, a Bolivian city famed for its Carnival celebrations, played their instruments jubilantly while Mr Morales and his Vice President tossed a bit of alcohol onto the fire to keep it burning.

Fumes may make weekends drier

Air pollution may have a silver lining in some parts of the US - it might help make summer weekends less rainy, according to a new study.

Scientists have long questioned whether particulate pollution from vehicles and factories, which is higher during the workweek, changes weather patterns.

The study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres, found that tiny particulate matter from workweek pollution may "seed" summer clouds in the US southeast, where plentiful hot, moist air tends to form more rain.

"There is a kind of a feedback loop," where pollution causes heavier storms during the workweek that flush smog from the atmosphere and tend to leave summer weekend weather clearer and less rainy, said Thomas Bell, a scientist at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre.

'BlackBerry blackouts' sought

It may be wishful thinking, but a Canadian government ministry has sent out a directive to its employees urging them to relax and not to use their BlackBerry smart-phones at night or on weekends and holidays.

Trying to re-establish a proper balance between work and life, Citizenship and Immigration Canada is starting by trying to cut the chains to what some have called CrackBerries.

The department's deputy minister, Richard Fadden, sent out a memo asking employees to implement a BlackBerry "blackout" between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. and on weekends and holidays.

BlackBerries, made by Canadian-based Research In Motionare are handheld communication devices that can be used to send e-mails and make phone calls - thus allowing people to bring the office to their homes, vehicles or even the ski slopes. They have become an essential workplace tool in politics, business and the professions.

Liberia investigates adoptions

Liberia's government is investigating what it believes were irregularities in the way seven Liberian children were flown to the US for adoption, a senior official said over the weekend.

Deputy Minister for Social Welfare Joseph W. Geebro said the two private groups involved in organising the adoption, the Texas-based Addy's Hope Adoption Agency and the Greater Love Children's Home in Liberia, were not formally accredited or licensed in the West African country. Concern over irregular adoptions of African children has risen following a high-profile case in Chad late last year in which six French aid workers were sentenced to eight years hard labour for trying to illegally fly 103 infants to Europe.

Mr Geebro said in the Liberian case seven children aged from 11 months to five years were flown to the US to their adoption families even though a 30-day period requested for checks by his Social Welfare Bureau had not been completed.

300-year-old shopping list

A shopping list written around 300 years ago has been discovered in an 18th-century Chinese vase in Britain, the cleaner who found it said over the weekend.

The Chinese list was discovered inside a vase at Fairfax House in York, northern England. The house, which claims to be the finest Georgian townhouse in England and boasts a wealth of 18th-century furniture, is closed to the public every January for cleaning.

The vase has been in Fairfax House since it first opened nearly 25 years ago. Fairfax House director Peter showed the fragments to a Chinese student from the University of York, who said it was the remains of a decorator's shopping list, containing the costs of pigments needed to decorate the vase. The paper, which is very delicate, will be sent out for further analysis.