College students who reported they were in love were less likely to take careful notice of other attractive men or women, the team at the University of California Los Angeles and dating Web site eHarmony found.

“Feeling love for your romantic partner appears to make everybody else less attractive, and the emotion appears to work in very specific ways in enabling you to push thoughts of that tempting other out of your mind,” said Gian Gonzaga of eHarmony, whose study is published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

“It’s almost like love puts blinders on people,” added Martie Haselton, an associate professor of psychology and communication studies at UCLA.

Gonzaga and Haselton asked 120 heterosexual undergraduates in committed relationships to examine photographs of attractive members of the opposite sex from an eHarmony Web site.

The volunteers were asked to choose the most attractive photos, and write an essay either about their current romantic partner, or the subject of their choice.

While writing, the students were asked to forget the “hotties” from the Web site, but told to put a check in the margins if they did happen to think of the attractive photos.

The volunteers who wrote about their partners were six times less likely to admit to thinking of the attractive others than volunteers who wrote about random subjects.

And later asked to recall the cuties in the pictures, the students who wrote about their lovers remembered fewer details about the physical appearance of the attractive strangers.

“These people could remember the color of a shirt or whether the photo was taken in New York, but they didn’t remember anything tempting about the person,” Gonzaga said.

“It’s not like their overall memory was impaired; it’s as if they had selectively screened out things that would make them think about the how attractive the alternative was.”

Jacunski got on one knee and popped the question to his girlfriend of six months, Mami Nagase, in a romantic spot at a gazebo in Central Park on Saturday night. She had just agreed to marry him when, they said, a gunman jumped from the bushes and yelled, “Give me your money and get on the ground!”

As Jacunski, 30, and Nagase, 24, got on the ground, he was able to slip the engagement ring off her finger and hide it in his pocket.

The robber took a Rolex watch from Nagase and $125 from Jacunski, who had planned to use it to pay for a romantic dinner at a French restaurant. The robber then ran away.

Nagase, an artist from Japan, and Jacunski, a musician from Cincinnati, spent the next several hours at a police station looking at mug shots and sharing potato chips for dinner. They said they still plan to get married.

“It makes for a pretty good story for our anniversary,” Jacunski said.

He said the night could have been much worse: After he proposed, Nagase could have said no.

The 22-year-old man is being held by police for allegedly causing injury to a 21-year-old woman, said Tan Sophal, a police officer in Battambang province where the attack occurred. It is about 155 miles northwest of the capital, Phnom Penh.

The man allegedly injected a syringe of his blood into the woman’s rib cage and waist as she walked home from school, Tan Sophal said.

The assailant fell in love with the woman when the two were classmates in 2004, Tan Sophal said. After the woman refused his advances, he came up with the scheme to inject her with his blood, he said.

“He thought that if he could not marry her, at least his blood can stay inside her body,” Tan Sophal said. “That’s why he injected her with his blood.”

After the woman reported the assault to police, she was sent to a hospital for an examination to determine among other things whether the blood was tainted, Tan Sophal said.

The man is being held at a police detention center and is expected to be formally charged in the coming days.

The couple paused to embrace while taking a stroll along a river in Jinshi in the central province of Hunan, the Shanghai Daily said.

“As we hugged each other, three policemen came and separated us so they could ask questions. They brought us to the police station and didn’t free us until we paid a 5,000 yuan fine,” the paper quoted female detainee, Xiao Hong, as saying in an Internet posting on a local news portal.

The police were in plain clothes and many other couples were out strolling on the evening of “Qi Xi” — a local festival often dubbed Chinese Valentine’s Day, the Beijing News said in a separate report.

Internet users poured derision on the police, which “forced officials to look into the case,” the paper said.

“The three policemen have been punished. We have never dealt with such a case before,” the paper quoted a clerk at the police station as saying.

Police had refunded the money to Xiao Hong’s boyfriend and apologized, the paper said.

Police in China have previously taken a dim view of public displays of affection. Last October, volunteers offering “free hugs” in a shopping street in Beijing were hauled away for questioning.

Under the “Fiscal Love” operation, tax auditors were also stationed inside the lobbies of the motels.

“Love motels” that rent rooms for as little as six hours — local versions of what Americans would call a “no tell motel” — are common throughout Latin America, where many young adults live with their parents.

“We’re not interested in whether customers go into the rooms as a twosome, threesome or foursome,” said Armando Sarmiento, a spokesman for the national tax office. “We’re only counting the cars that arrive, not the people inside them.”

Scores of the hotels are located on the outskirts of the country’s two largest cities, Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, charging between $15 and $45 per room.

Men in Beijing and the financial centre of Shanghai were neck-and-neck on whose residents were most vain.

Those in the capital spent the most money on cosmetics — an average of 119 yuan a month — but those in Shanghai looked in the mirror the longest — about 17 minutes a day.

The survey of men aged 18 to 60 in seven major Chinese cities was conducted jointly by Horizon Research Consultancy Group and a Shanghai fashion and media company, Xinhua said.

Chinese consumers are becoming increasingly image conscious as they grow wealthier, with plastic surgery and sales of beauty products booming.

Al Watan newspaper said the five women underwent sex change surgery abroad over the past 12 months after they developed a “psychological complex” due to male domination.

Women in Saudi Arabia, which adopts an austere interpretation of Islam, are not allowed to drive or even go to public places unaccompanied by a male relative.

The newspaper quoted a senior cleric as saying the authorities have to fill what he described as a legal vacuum by issuing laws against sex change operations.

An interior ministry official told al Watan such cases are examined by religious authorities, and sometimes by psychologists, but those who undergo sex change are never arrested.

The survey, conducted in 16 countries by Canadian romance publisher Harlequin Enterprises, asked men and women on six continents about traits they liked or disliked and how they went about trying to meet Mr. or Ms. Right.

The poll revealed differences between countries in the way people tried to impress the opposite sex.

Australians and British men frequently admitted drinking too much, while about half of German and Italian men said they had lied about their finances. Spaniards were the most likely to use sex to catch someone’s attention.

Eighty percent of Brazilian and Mexican men said they had lied about their marital or relationship status, as did 70 percent of German women, the survey said.

When it came to meeting that special someone, a majority of respondents preferred to rely on friends for introductions. The Internet was not a popular hunting ground except in Portugal, where about half the surveyed men and women opted to find people online.

Both Spain and France suffered a gender gap. Thirty percent of Spanish men, but no Spanish women, looked for love online. In France, 40 percent of men but only 10 percent of women attended parties, bars and clubs to meet someone, but they did have one thing in common: both sexes rated looks as more important than their counterparts in other countries.

When it came to that first meeting, a majority of men polled said beauty was more important than brains, while women put a sense of humor at the top of their list.

Physical attraction was the top priority for men in France, Brazil, Greece, Japan and Britain. And while 40 percent of Portuguese men rated intelligence over looks in a first encounter, no Australian men did so.

In the United States and Canada, humor was considered the most important trait by both men and women, getting 63 and 73 percent of the vote respectively.

A duty police officer in Cubatao, an industrial city next to Sao Paulo, said Carolina Farias Santos, 22, confessed that she had hired friends for about $1,300 to kill Monica Tamer, a full-time employee at an oil processing company where Santos had worked temporarily.

Santos told police she wanted to work next to a man she had fallen in love with during her stint at the company. She had been hired to temporarily replace another woman, Renata Boreli, who was filling in while Tamer was on maternity leave.

In November, Boreli was wounded as two assailants fired shots at her car, and then started to receive telephone threats warning her not return to work. The following month, Tamer, a mother of two, was killed.

Police traced phone calls to Boreli’s house, which led them to Santos and four friends. Two were arrested along with Santos on Wednesday and two remained at large.