MELBOURNE (AFP) - Protesting pensioners brought traffic to a stand still in Australia’s second largest city on Friday when some stripped to demand more money from the government.

The scantily-clad seniors braved the autumn weather in a 150-strong protest against this week’s federal budget, which offered them little despite a 21.7 billion dollar (20 billion US) surplus.

Most at the “Fair Go for Pensioners” rally at the intersection of two major streets in downtown Melbourne kept their clothes on, but several threw convention to the wind and stripped to their underwear.

As bemused police looked on, a bespectacled man stripped to his briefs and socks, while a couple of lively ladies whipped off their tops and paraded in their bras.

Other women wore hot pink bras over their clothing.

The leader of the minority Family First party, Senator Steve Fielding, who took off his shirt in solidarity with the seniors, said the country’s 3.5 million pensioners were “overlooked Australians.”

“Pensioners have no voice and are left to survive on a meagre allowance each week that most people would never manage on,” he said. “They are buckling under the pressure of higher petrol and grocery prices.”

Patricia Reeve from the Fair Go for Pensioners Coalition said people wanted to make the point that it was impossible to live well on the pension.

“The country’s doing well, we want a fair share,” she said.

But the antics failed to move Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who said while he understood it was difficult to make ends meet living on a pension, no increases would be considered until a review was completed.

Last month, hundreds of Melbourne cabbies succeeded in winning safety concessions from the state government after a lengthy sit-in at the same intersection during which dozens threw off their shirts.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - Malaysia’s government is worried that high school graduates may not know enough about sex.

Authorities in the conservative, Muslim-majority nation are considering teaching sex education to teenagers when they undergo national service after leaving school, Abdul Hadi Awang Kechil, director general of the National Service Department, said Wednesday.

Ng Yen Yen, the minister who announced the proposal, was quoted by the national news agency, Bernama, as saying that sex education, including lectures about preventing AIDS, could shield youngsters from unhealthy activities. Ng’s aide confirmed the minister made the comments Tuesday.

Tens of thousands of boys and girls who are typically 17 or 18 years old are selected at random each year to participate in the government’s national service training.

The three-month mandatory program aims to instill discipline and patriotism through community service, military-style physical training in jungle camps and other activities.

Sex is often a sensitive subject in Malaysia, where unmarried couples can be fined for kissing and hugging in public.

The Cabinet approved guidelines to teach sex education in schools two years ago, but activists say it has not been implemented. Officials had suggested teaching students how to protect themselves from sexual predators, reckless behavior and sexually transmitted diseases.

Adeeba Kamarulzaman, president of the Malaysian AIDS Council, said Wednesday that students receive inadequate information about sex in public schools, which generally only teach basic facts about reproduction during science courses.

Sex education classes in national service could prove useful because many school teachers are too embarrassed to expound on sex-related topics, she said.

“Better late than never,” Adeeba told The Associated Press. “It’s a good opportunity. They are at the right age to be receiving this kind of education.”

HARRISBURG, Pa. - A pilot’s nighttime romp in the woods with a flight attendant has ended with both suspended and under arrest, police said.

Jeffrey Paul Bradford, 24, and Adrianna Grace Connor, 24, both employees of Pinnacle Airlines Inc., were at a diner on Sunday night before they apparently decided to take a walk, police said.

“They told the officer they wanted to go do it in the woods, essentially,” said Lower Swatara Township Police Sgt. Richard Brandt. “That’s the best answer they had.”

Things went awry when people who live in the neighborhood summoned police around 9:30 p.m., saying they had seen a naked man and an intoxicated woman.

A helicopter with heat-seeking equipment was called in, and Bradford was discovered hiding behind a shed shortly before midnight.

His only attire was a pair of flip-flops and a wristwatch.

Bradford, of Pittsburgh, was charged with indecent exposure, public drunkenness and other offenses. Connor, of Belleville, Mich., was charged with theft, public drunkenness and other offenses; police said she took a flashlight from a neighbor’s vehicle.

The office of District Justice Michael John Smith, where Bradford and Connor were arraigned, said they were not represented by lawyers. Telephone listings for them could not be located by The Associated Press.

A spokesman for Pinnacle Airlines said the two were suspended while the company investigates.

WELLINGTON (Reuters) - Road workers in a small New Zealand town got their wish granted when a woman stripped saying she was fed up with their wolf-whistles.

The Israeli tourist was about to use an ATM in the main street of Kerikeri, in the far north of the country, when the men whistled, the New Zealand Press Association reported.

She calmly stripped off, used the cash machine, before getting dressed and walking away.

The woman told police she didn’t take too kindly to the whistling from the men repairing the road.

“She said she had thought ‘bugger them, I’ll show them what I’ve got’,” Police Sergeant Peter Masters told NZPA.

“She gave the explanation that she had been … pestered by New Zealand men. She’s not an unattractive looking lady,” Masters said.

“She was taken back to the police station and spoken to and told that was inappropriate in New Zealand.”

BERLIN (AFP) - Despite being fully booked by naturist s wanting to take off and strip off, a German travel company said Thursday it has decided to scrap a special nude flight that had been scheduled for this summer.
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The July 5 flight was due to be the first of many and was aimed at east Germans nostalgic for the naturism that was authorized and extremely popular under communist rule.

But OssiUrlaub.de, the firm organizing the service to a picturesque Baltic Sea island, said it has had second thoughts after “moral objections” in the media and from visitors to its Internet portal, a spokesman said.

The 50 people with tickets would have boarded the flight in the eastern city of Erfurt fully clothed, but once on the plane would have been free to undress and enjoy the rest of the journey as nature intended.

They will now receive a full refund as well as a voucher for other products offered by the company, whose core business caters to holidaymakers who keep their clothes on, it stressed.

WELLINGTON (Reuters) - A New Zealand man had a novel idea when he found himself in a queue at a service station counter with no money, could he pay with marijuana instead?

Unfortunately he didn’t get a chance to discover whether the attendant would accept his offer, as the person behind him in the queue was a police officer, the Dominion Post newspaper reported.

The man’s attempt to buy two packets of M&Ms and a packet of potato chips to satisfy his “munchies” was caught short when he was arrested.

He must have been hungry, as he failed to notice the police patrol car sitting on the station forecourt being filled with petrol, the paper reported.

The 28-year old mechanic from the small North Island town of Carterton pleaded guilty to possessing cannabis in the Masterton District Court and was remanded for sentencing.

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Clients of prostitutes in the Netherlands may soon need to check for a sex license.

The Dutch cabinet said on Friday it wanted to crack down harder on the country’s sex industry, in particular unlicensed sex operators, as part of efforts to combat human trafficking.

“That is why the cabinet wants to make it an offense to use the services of a sex operator without a license or a non-registered independent prostitute,” the government said in a statement .

Prostitutes have plied their trade in the narrow alleys of the old centre of Amsterdam for centuries. While they used to attract sailors and merchants in the city’s heyday as the heart of a global trading empire, they are now a huge tourist draw.

The Dutch cabinet officially legalized prostitution in 2000.

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - A Malaysian woman woke up to a real-life nightmare, discovering that the naked man who had slipped into her bed in the middle of the night was a thief, not her husband, a newspaper said on Tuesday.

The 36-year-old housewife was asleep when the thief, noticing that her husband was fast asleep on the couch, quietly stripped off and lay down beside her, the Star newspaper said, quoting a police report filed in the eastern state of Terengganu.

The dozing woman’s suspicions were raised when she spoke to him and his voice sounded strange, the paper said.

“She then went to another room and found her husband fast asleep on the couch. That’s when she screamed, causing the thief to flee by leaping out the window together with the stolen items,” it added.

DARWIN, Australia - An Australian man has been fined after buckling in a case of beer with a seat belt but leaving a 5-year-old child to sit on the car’s floor, police said Tuesday.

Constable Wayne Burnett said he was “shocked and appalled” when he pulled over the unregistered car Friday in the central Australian town of Alice Springs.

The 30-can beer case was strapped in between two adults sitting in the back seat of the car. The child was also in back, but on the car’s floor.

“The child was sitting in the lump in the center, unrestrained,” Burnett told reporters Tuesday.

“I haven’t ever seen something like this before,” he said. “This is the first time that the beer has taken priority over a child.”

The driver was fined 750 Australian dollars — about $710 — for driving an unregistered and uninsured vehicle and for failing to ensure a child was wearing a safety belt.

HONG KONG (Reuters) - A 45-year-old Indonesian maid admitted having sex with her Hong Kong employer’s 14-year-old son after watching Internet porn together, a newspaper reported on Tuesday.

A court heard how the maid, a divorcee and mother of two, had sex with the boy in a relationship that lasted five months, the South China Morning Post reported.

The boy tried to end the affair, but she refused, the paper reported. The teenager eventually confessed to the relationship to the leader of a Christian group he belonged to and the maid was arrested.

The maid, Suwartin, had worked with the boy’s extended family for 11 years and pleaded guilty to five charges of committing an indecent act with an under-age partner, the Post reported.

She later apologized and said she “would live with the shame of what she had done for the rest of her life”, the paper reported.

“She had acted out of loneliness,” the paper quoted the maid’s lawyer as saying.

She will be sentenced in two weeks’ time.

Maids from the Philippines, Indonesia and Sri Lanka are often the subject of court cases in richer neighbors such as Hong Kong and Singapore, but usually as victims of abuse rather than offenders.

VIENNA, Austria - The man behind the camera had three requests for his subjects: no sunglasses, no smiling, and no underwear.

The latest work by New York photographer Spencer Tunick gathered 1,840 people, baring it all in Austria’s Happel Stadium on Sunday.

“Stay very still. Don’t move,” the Austria Press Agency quoted Tunick as telling the crowd as he went to work.

Much of the hours-long photo shoot had little to do with soccer, with naked volunteers assuming different poses at the behest of the artist. But at least one of the photos had them with the ball, men first and then the women.

The stadium will host seven of the Euro 2008 soccer championship matches being staged by Austria and Switzerland, including the June 29 final.

Tunick has made a name for himself with his works featuring hundreds of naked people at unusual venues. He described Sunday’s shooting on his Web site as combining “the spirit of sports, the grand sweeping waves of stadium architecture and the abstract relation of the human form to modern structures.”

VILNIUS (Reuters) - The Austrian national rugby team tried to get over their 48-0 defeat by Lithuania by staging a mass striptease in the capital Vilnius late on Saturday, only to find they had been caught on video and put on the Internet.

The video, put out by a blogger on social community website and then taken up by the Lithuanian news portal Delfi, showed a group of 20 men singing and stripping off their clothes on a street in central Vilnius, while people in a nearby bar clapped and cheered.

“Yes, these were the men we played against on Saturday … I guess the defeat could have prompted them to do that,” Lithuanian rugby federation President Aleksandras Makarenka told Reuters.

Delfi quoted the Vilnius police chief as saying stripping in public could be considered an act of hooliganism — but by then the Austrian team had gone home.

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Authorities in Texas have filed corpse-abuse charges against two men who allegedly removed a skull from a grave and used it as a bong.

The Harris County District Attorney’s Office confirmed on Thursday that misdemeanor abuse of corpse charges have been filed in the case.

One of the men allegedly told police they dug up a grave in an abandoned cemetery in the woods, removed a head from a body and smoked marijuana using the skull as a bong.

Police found the cemetery and a grave that had been disturbed but are still investigating the rest of the story, officials said.

TORONTO (Reuters) - An attendant at a Canadian restaurant who was sacked for giving a bite-sized doughnut, worth 16 cents, to an agitated toddler was given her job back on Thursday after the case received wide media attention.

Nicole Lilliman, a single mother, said she was dismissed from a London, Ontario, outlet of the Tim Hortons coffee and dough nut chain after video cameras captured the 27-year-old giving a Timbit to a toddler.

“It was just out of my heart, she (the toddler) was pointing and going ‘ah, ah…’ I should have gone to my purse and got the change, but it was busy,” Lilliman told the Toronto Star newspaper.

Tim Hortons said on Thursday that the firing was a mistake.

“It was the unfortunate action of one manager who unfortunately made an overzealous decision, and thankfully we were able to rectify the situation,” said company spokeswoman Rachel Douglas.

Douglas said the company, a Canadian icon with stores on virtually every high street across the country, told Lilliman that she could have her job back, and Lilliman had accepted.

A single Timbit sells for 16 Canadian cents (16 U.S. cents), but most shoppers buy boxes of 10, 20 or 40 of the deep-fried goodies, which come in a variety of flavors.

Douglas said Tim Hortons had received a number of complaints. “Thankfully we’re able to go back to them and say we were able to fix the situation,” she said.

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Cheerleaders are taking Indian cricket by storm, but some are wondering if this conservative South Asian nation is ready for dancers with bulging breasts and gyrating bellies parading in packed stadia.

Many foreign cheerleaders have been imported to India with this month’s inauguration of the India Premier League (IPL), a shortened form of traditional cricket that transforms the game into a more glitzy U.S.-style sponsored sport event.

But some outraged politicians say it is an affront to Indian culture while a few of the cheerleaders themselves complain lewd comment and insults from spectators is making their job a misery.

“It’s been horrendous,” Tabitha, a cheerleader from Uzbekistan, told the Hindustan Times. ”

“Wherever we go we do expect people to pass lewd, snide remarks but I’m shocked by the nature and magnitude of the comments people pass here.”

The IPL has caught the imagination of India, a nation of 1.1 billion and the world’s biggest cricket audience. TV rights sold for more than $900 million and players for eight teams, many imported from abroad, were auctioned for millions.

In contrast to the clinched cricket image of genteel spectators sipping tea while politely applauding their team, now scantily-clad dancers gyrate to Bollywood or Western-style dance music blaring out from loudspeakers in stadia.

Even well-known cheerleaders from the Washington Redskins flew to India to perform for the Bangalore Royal Challengers. Photos of the dancers graced the front pages of most newspapers.

MORE VULGAR

“What the cheerleaders are doing during cricket matches is ten times more vulgar than what used to happen in dance bars of Mumbai,” Nitin Gadkari, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Maharashtra state, home to the Mumbai Indians.

The BJP is India’s main opposition party, which was part of a coalition which banned popular bars in Mumbai where girls would dance on stage to Bollywood tunes.

“If we could ban dance bars, how can we allow such vulgar dance in a cricket field. I am getting huge complaints and cheerleaders must be banned immediately from entering a cricket field,” Gadkari said.

In the IT hub of Bangalore, Parvathi, a housewife, said U.S. cheerleaders were an affront to India.

“What is the purpose of this display? It is embarrassing,” said Parvathi.

But Charu Sharma, chief executive of Bangalore Royal Challengers defended the cheerleaders.

“Let us not play this high handed moral belief game. It is only small maverick groups that are making a noise,” Sharma told Reuters.

He told the Hindustan Times that security would be tightened for the dancers.

“We are aware of the concerns and can take nothing for granted. A security ring will be provided to them and everything that can be done will be done,” Sharma said.

Some Indians said critics were hypocritical in a nation well known for its sensual Bollywood musicals.

“Our stars wear skimpy dresses in movies but nobody seems to protest. Why this double standards?” said Mohan, a marketing executive from Bangalore.

PARIS (AFP) - A speech-writer for France’s foreign minister has penned a literary, lustful and possibly lecherous “Guide to the Pretty Women of Paris” which blows a loud raspberry at political correctness.

“Just as every region has its gastronomy, every quartier has its feminine specialty,” writes Pierre-Louis Colin, a dapper 34-year-old who co-authored Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner’s most recent book.

“You do not find in Menilmontant the sublime legs you see at the Madeleine. But you do find perfectly shameless cleavages, radiant breasts often uncluttered by a bra,” he said in his own book, which was published last month.

Paris is the most visited capital in the world and people come here to see city’s magnificent women as much as they come to admire the Mona Lisa and the Eiffel Tower, Colin told AFP.

He could find no guidebooks to the human wonders of Paris so he decided to produce his own. The result is the 190-page “Guide des jolies femmes de Paris,” which is more of a literary essay than a fact-packed guidebook.

Area by area, Colin notes the best observation posts — bars, supermarkets, parks, museums, metro trains — and the best times of day for the connoisseur to contemplate various Parisienne archetypes.

“Trendy youth,” characterized by the “generalization of the G-string and the near disappearance of the bra” is to be seen on rue Montorgueil, a pedestrian strip of cafes and upmarket food shops which the author hails as the “epicenter of the city’s erotic radiations.”

Luxury boutiques and elegant cafes terraces are the natural habitat of the leisured bourgeois, who is described as “the mother of all fantasies since the origins of literature”.

Women in the “saucy maturity” category, those aged between 40 and 60 whose appearance “bears witness to the meanders of an agitated or ambitious sex life which refuses to lay down its weapons,” are best observed in lingerie stores.

The author, a graduate of the elite Ecole Normale Superieure which has honed writers like Jean-Paul Sartre, sees his work as a “high mission” to counter the mood of a righteous America, but some extracts may raise eyebrows.

Colin regrets, for instance, it is no longer possible to loiter contemplatively outside high schools because “current legislation and a certain form of collective psychosis have created a climate of suspicion that makes every admirer of young girls a rapist of children”.

He also gives many tips such as where to position oneself so as to get an “unbeatable view” up women’s skirts as they climb a spiral staircase — singling out the Cafes Louis-Philippe in the fourth arrondissement, or district.

But it’s all in the best possible taste, insists Colin.

He rejected suggestions that an alternative title for his oeuvre might have been the “Voyeur’s Guide to the Pretty Women of Paris” — though concedes his girlfriend was at first perturbed by the idea of his book, but later came to like it.

The author points out that he has not included any suggestions on how to pick up women, nor provided the addresses of any of Paris’ numerous dens of iniquity.

“To contemplate is not to encounter,” he writes in his introduction. “Therein lies without doubt, the profound originality of the contemplator in these consumerist times: his aim is not possession.

“He is similar to those rare lovers of art who visit museums without feeling obliged to walk out loaded down with guidebooks or postcards,” wrote Colin.

During an interview in the Cafes de L’Esplanade — which the author said was of note more for its busty waitresses than for its sober clientele — Colin insisted his book was a celebration of women’s freedom.

“I oppose all those who want to restrict women — the priest, the man who pesters women, the censor,” he said.

He dismisses Anglo-Saxon political correctness and boldly states that the freedom to contemplate the beauty of women is a key part of French culture.

“In this troubled century, while from America come the echoes of another moral order, the responsibility of the contemplator is immense: in his respectful courtesy depends a part of the survival of our civilization of liberty, of gentleness, and of grace.

“May this guide contribute to the success of this high mission,” Colin wrote.