WELLINGTON (Reuters) – One of the last shipments to a U.S. research base in Antarctica before the onset of winter darkness was a year’s supply of condoms, a New Zealand newspaper reported on Monday.

Bill Henriksen, the manager of the McMurdo base station, said nearly 16,500 condoms were delivered last month and would be made available, free of charge, to staff throughout the year to avoid the potential embarrassment of having to buy them.

The base only has a skeleton staff through the long winter.

“Since everybody knows everyone, it becomes a little bit uncomfortable,” Henriksen told the Southland Times newspaper.

About 125 scientists and staff are stationed at McMurdo base, the largest community in Antarctica, during the winter months when there is constant darkness.

The first sunrise will occur on August 20 and McMurdo’s population will start to increase again in September when supply flights resume, peaking at more than 1,000 during the summer period.

ARVADA, Colo. – Police in a Colorado town say they’ve caught two “thong bandits” who used women’s underwear to disguise themselves during a convenience store robbery.

Nineteen-year-old Joaquin Rico turned himself in Friday, two days after 24-year-old alleged accomplice Joseph R. Espinoza turned himself in.

A surveillance video released last week by police in Arvada, Colo., shows two unarmed men inside the convenience store. They stole an undisclosed amount of cash and cigarettes in the May 16 robbery.

One man wore a green thong and the other wore blue. Each thong barely covered the man’s nose, mouth and chin and left the rest of his face exposed. One also wore a pink backpack in which he stuffed the stolen items.

Not quite my idea of sexy thongs.

HAVANA – Cuba has authorized sex-change operations and will offer them free for qualifying citizens, an official said Friday. The move is the latest in a series of changes implemented by President Raul Castro since he succeeded his elder brother, Fidel, in February. Raul Castro’s daughter, Mariela, heads Cuba’s National Center for Sex Education, which strongly backs the new policy.

Health Minister Jose Ramon Balaguer signed a resolution approving sex-change surgery, said an official at the center who spoke on condition of anonymity because the measure has not been formally published. The resolution will be posted on the Internet on Saturday, the official said.

The procedure would be available to Cubans for free as part of their country’s health-care system.

The sex education center has said previously that 28 transsexual Cubans have asked to undergo the surgery and that Cuban doctors have trained with physicians from Belgium to prepare for the procedures.

According to the center, a clinic for transsexual health will be created to perform the procedures, but it was not clear when it will start operating.

Cuba carried out a successful sex-change operation in 1988, but future surgeries were canceled because it sparked a negative public outcry.

Since becoming Cuba’s first new president in 49 years, the younger Castro has done away with bans that kept most Cubans from owning cell phones in their own names and renting hotel rooms and cars. His government also has decentralized the floundering state agricultural sector, raised pensions for retirees and hiked salaries for some state employees, among other changes.

TOKYO (Reuters) – A Japanese man was arrested for calling a food company’s toll-free number 500 times in 16 months because he wanted to hear the woman’s voice on the automated tape, police said on Monday.

The 38-year-old plumber, who was arrested on Sunday, made 3,100 hours worth of free calls to the company, costing it almost 4 million yen ($38,730) in phone bills, a police spokesman in Takasaki, northwest of Tokyo, said.

“He gets excited by the woman’s voice on the guidance tape,” the spokesman said, adding that the voice sounded normal to the detective who was involved in the investigation.

The food company asked for its name to be withheld. The spokesman said police are investigating if the man placed an excessive number of calls to any other firms.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, India (Reuters) – Employees counting donations at a popular Hindu shrine in southern India will no longer have to take off their underpants at work after the local human rights commission intervened.

Police and temple authorities imposed the dress code at the Sabarimala hill shrine in Kerala five years ago after thefts were reported from the shrine’s strongroom.

Employees in the vault, all of whom were men, were made to work topless wearing only a dhoti — a cotton wrap worn around the waist — with nothing underneath.

But they found it degrading, and their union complained to the Kerala State Human Rights Commission.

“The employees on duty are made to strip before an officer before leaving the office to ensure that they do not carry anything in their underwear,” said Chavara Gopakumar, the union leader. “It is humiliating and an insult to human dignity.”

The state’s human rights commission agreed.

Authorities at the shrine, which is dedicated to Ayyappa, a south Indian deity, said on Friday they would end the practice and have begun looking into electronic surveillance systems.

Thousands of pilgrims flock to the shrine between November and January, bringing cash, precious metals and jewels in offerings. They are expected to fore go meat, alcohol and sex for 41 days before arriving. Women of child-bearing age are forbidden.