BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thai officials urged Buddhist monks on Tuesday to avoid using social networking Web sites to woo women after an advocacy group found some monks were doing just that.

The request came as police in the northeast detained a monk accused of using a Web site to lure a woman to his temple and raping her.

“I call on Hi5 users to tell the monks to leave the site if they are found using it,” junior minister Jakrapob Penkair told reporters after a Buddhist monitoring group said some monks were flirting on the Web site popular with Thai users.

Reports of monks caught using or selling drugs or having consensual sex with women are not uncommon in the Thai media, which reported on Tuesday a 23-year-old monk was caught raping a teenager he lured to his room through the Web site.

A senior Culture Ministry official said monks should not be banned from the cyberspace, but should turn this “crisis” into “opportunity” by bringing Buddha’s teaching to the young.

“Instead of using the Net to flirt with young girls, monks should find ways to preach Dharma and lead them in the right direction,” said Ladda Thangsupachai, head of the Cultural Surveillance Center.

TOKYO (AFP) - A Japanese pin-up model says that her big breasts have not only boosted her career — they also helped her overturn a court verdict.

The bikini model, who goes by her professional name Serena Kozakura, was cleared after a court decided she was too well-endowed to squeeze into a room through a hole, as she had been found guilty of earlier.

“I used to hate my body so much,” Kozakura, who has appeared in product commercials on television, told the private Asahi network in an interview aired Tuesday.

“But it was my breasts” that won in court, she said.

The case was splashed through the Japanese media on Tuesday, with the Asahi network even inviting her to demonstrate how she could not fit through the opening.

Kozakura, 38, was convicted last year of property destruction after a man said she kicked in the wooden door of his room and crawled inside, apparently because he was with another woman.

Kozakura had said the man made the hole himself.

In her appeal, the defense counsel held up a plate showing the size of the hole and said that she could not squeeze through with her 110-centimeter (44-inch) bust.

“The judges were very good-mannered as they showed no expressions on their faces. I guess they’re well-trained,” Kozakura said.

Tokyo High Court presiding judge Kunio Harada agreed and threw out the guilty verdict on Monday, saying there was reasonable doubt over the man’s account.

JERUSALEM (AFP) - High on Mount Sinai, Moses was on psychedelic drugs when he heard God deliver the Ten Commandments, an Israeli researcher claimed in a study published this week.

Such mind-altering substances formed an integral part of the religious rites of Israelites in biblical times, Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem wrote in the Time and Mind journal of philosophy.

“As far Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a supernatural cosmic event, which I don’t believe, or a legend, which I don’t believe either, or finally, and this is very probable, an event that joined Moses and the people of Israel under the effect of narcotics,” Shanon told Israeli public radio on Tuesday.

Moses was probably also on drugs when he saw the “burning bush,” suggested Shanon, who said he himself has dabbled with such substances.

“The Bible says people see sounds, and that is a clasic phenomenon,” he said citing the example of religious ceremonies in the Amazon in which drugs are used that induce people to “see music.”

He mentioned his own experience when he used ayahuasca, a powerful psychotropic plant, during a religious ceremony in Brazil’s Amazon forest in 1991. “I experienced visions that had spiritual-religious connotations,” Shanon said.

He said the psychedelic effects of ayahuasca were comparable to those produced by concoctions based on bark of the acacia tree, that is frequently mentioned in the Bible.

LAGOS, Nigeria (AFP) - A Nigerian man has been sentenced to 18 months in jail for dressing up as a woman and loitering around Lagos international airport, court officials said Tuesday.

“He pleaded guilty to the charges and was given 18 months without the option of a fine during his trial on Monday,” an official at the court in the Lagos suburb of Ikeja told AFP.

It was not clear what Uche Ndubuisi was hoping to achieve with his transvestite antics, but 22 pairs of women’s pants, four bras as well as several make-up kits were used as evidence to convict him.

TEHRAN (AFP) - An Iranian court has ordered a man to buy his wife 124,000 roses after she filed a complaint against her “stingy” husband to claim her dowry, a press report said on Monday.

“After 10 years of marriage Hengameh had decided to claim her dowry of 124,000 red roses to punish her very stingy husband,” the Etemad newspaper said.

“Shortly after marriage I realized that Shahin was very cheap. He even refused to pay for my coffee if we went to a cafe or restaurant,” said the woman, identified only by her first name Hengameh.

But Shahin told the court he could only afford five roses a day and complained that it was “her billionaire friends who had put such ideas in her head.”

The court has seized his apartment worth 600 million rials (64,000 dollars) until he has bought her the entire 124,000 roses. A long stemmed red rose costs 20,000 rials (about two dollars) in Tehran.

Under Iranian law, a woman can claim her dowry or mahr, which is a gift pledged by the man at the time of marriage, at any time during married life or when getting a divorce.

It is common in Iran to offer gold coins, or property as mahr and the number of gold coins (worth about 260 dollars) could vary from 14 to even hundreds or thousands.

An Iranian man can end up in jail over dowry debts and there has been a judicial debate whether it should be adjusted according to the man’s financial status.

NATICK, Mass. - A child’s birthday party at a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant was cut short after a fight broke out between two mothers. Natick police said the mom of the birthday boy apparently became enraged because the other woman’s son was “hogging” an arcade game.

Sgt. Paul Thompson said Catherine Aliaga, 38, and Tarsha Williams, 33, both of Boston, would be summoned into court to answer charges of simple assault and battery stemming from the scuffle.

Thompson told the MetroWest Daily News that police received a number of 911 calls about the fight Saturday night.

He said what started as a birthday celebration turned into a “birthday melee.”

CHICAGO (AFP) - Officers trying to track down a drug dealer in Ohio stumbled across two alligators guarding his back door instead.

The snipping and snapping gators were far from full-sized — one was about two feet long and the other was about four feet long — but were scary enough to make a team of tough federal marshals and Dayton, Ohio police officers call for help.

“Nobody wanted to play catch a gator,” William Taylor, supervisory deputy US Marshal, told AFP.

“We haven’t got any Crocodile Dundees on the task force,” he joked, adding that the marshals are having fun putting on fake Australian accents as he made reference to the adventurous croc hunter from the Hollywood movie.

Luckily for them, a suburban police officer moonlights as an exotic animal wrangler.

“I get called out on these all the time,” said Tim Harrison, who runs Outreach for Animals.

“Not six months ago they had a 12 foot Burmese python loose in (a drug dealer’s) house.”

When he first started collecting exotic animals in the Dayton area some 34 years ago, Harrison would probably get about six calls a year.

Now he gets 175 a year — everything from an elephant in a living room to panthers and lions roaming through the suburbs — including about a dozen alligators a year.

And he’s begun giving seminars to law enforcement officers warning them of the booby traps that await them in drug dens like venomous snakes in bags of dope.

Taylor says his officers are prepared for finding pit bulls or other aggressive dogs when they bust drug dealers but the gators were a shock.

“A lot of these guys think it’s cool to keep a tough pet,” he said. “Not a lot of drug dealers of the thug variety are going to keep a poodle.”

The gators are being cared for at a local animal shelter until a suitable home can be found for them.

Taylor’s team also seized guns, drugs and two pit bull puppies in the Monday morning raid but are still on the lookout for the drug dealer who is wanted for violating his parole.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Victoria’s Secret, the lingerie company that introduced the Very Sexy bra, the Fantasy Bra, and the Internet server-crashing fashion show, has become “too sexy” for its own good, its top executive said.

“We’ve so much gotten off our heritage … too sexy, and we use the word sexy a lot and really have forgotten the ultra feminine,” said Sharen Turney, Victoria’s Secret’s chief executive, in a call with industry analysts.

Victoria’s Secret was launched with the idea that Victoria was manor-born and lived in London, Turney said.

“I feel so strongly about us getting back to our heritage and really thinking in terms of ultra feminine and not just the word sexy and becoming much more relevant to our customer,” Turney said Thursday.

Turney said Victoria’s Secret has gotten younger with a strong focus on its successful Pink line of lingerie and loungewear created for college-age women, and has tried to chase those customers

Turney said Victoria’s Secret wants to increase its level of sophistication.

“We will also reinvent the sleepwear business and focus on product quality,” she said. “Our assortment will return to an ultra feminine lingerie brand to meet her needs and expectation.”

Sales at Victoria’s Secret, like many clothing retailers, have been slipping.

Victoria Secret’s parent, Limited Brands, said Wednesday that its fourth quarter profits fell 12 percent and that its first quarter earnings would come in below Wall Street expectations.

Same-store sales at Victoria’s Secret fell 2 percent in 2007, with sales in the fourth quarter dropping 8 percent.

The chain was started in San Francisco in 1977 by Roy Raymond, who said he was embarrassed trying to buy lingerie for his wife and hoped to provide a comfortable place for men to shop.

PASCO, Wash. - What happened to faking a cough?

Sheriff’s detectives in Franklin County, Washington, say a man had his friend shoot him in the shoulder so he wouldn’t have to go to work.

When he first spoke with deputies, Daniel Kuch (kooch) told them he’d been the victim of a drive-by shooting while he was jogging Thursday. But detectives say Kuch later acknowledged that he asked a friend to shoot him so he could get some time off work and avoid a drug test.

The friend has been arrested for investigation of reckless endangerment. Kuch is expected to be charged with false reporting.

Detectives aren’t saying where Kuch works or whether he still has a job.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexican brides and grooms who get cold feet before walking down the aisle will have to pay their significant other for the inconvenience, if a proposal by a local congressman is adopted.

In Mexico, weddings are big social events where large amounts of money are spent before the big day on gowns, tuxedos, catering and music bands and churches are even reserved years in advance.

Weddings of over 500, or even 1,000 guests, are frequently splashed across newspapers’ social pages. According to Mexican tradition, the bride’s family absorbs most of the expenses.

Jose Antonio Zepeda, a city deputy for President Felipe Calderon conservative National Action Party, wants to introduce the idea of compensation for backing out of a wedding as part of changes to the capital’s civil code.

“He or she who refuses to live up to a marriage commitment will pay for the expenses that the other party made in connection with the planned matrimony,” Zepeda’s proposal says.

Zepeda also wants lawmakers to give legal status to prenuptial agreements for those on their way to the altar in hopes it will make divorce settlements easier if the couple splits later on.

“We are looking to avoid emotional distress, cut divorce expenses and shorten the time that courts spend solving them,” Zepeda told Reuters on Friday. The prenuptial agreement will be optional.

Divorce rates are on the rise in Mexico which has a predominantly Catholic population of over 107 million. Currently, three out of 10 couples in Mexico City divorce, compared with just one in 10 in the 1970s, the congressman said.

Zepeda’s proposal is expected to be voted by Mexico City’s congress in March or April. If passed, it will only apply to heterosexual couples in the capital, which legalized gay unions in 2006.

BERLIN (Reuters) - An elderly German who hid a stolen suit under his clothes was caught because he forgot to take it off the hanger, police said Wednesday.

A sales assistant at a men’s outfitter in the western city of Aachen noticed the hanger bulging out when the man told her he had decided against buying anything.

“Only a sign saying ’stop me, I’m a thief!’ would have made the thief look more unprofessional,” police said in a statement.

PLAISTOW, N.H. - Police said the same man tried to rob the same bank, wearing the same clothes and telling employees the same thing on Tuesday as he did two weeks ago. The outcome was not the same.

Two weeks ago, the robber got away with cash from the Sovereign Bank branch. On his second attempt, tellers refused to give him money and he took off empty-handed.

Police and bank employees said it was the same guy. The robber said he had a gun and demanded money both times.

Witnesses told police the man got away in a black Chevrolet Avalanche with New Hampshire license plates that contained the numbers 223.

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - A Singaporean professor who nicked bras and panties has pleaded guilty to stealing women’s underwear from a university dormitory, a local newspaper reported on Saturday.

The 39-year old man — an associate professor in a Chinese university — was charged for taking women’s underwear from a university hostel’s clothes-line last December, the Straits Times reported.

The Singaporean professor, who teaches in China, was in the city-state for his leave when he committed the crime. He was caught by a dormitory security guard who found female undergarments in his haversack.

“I have heard stories before about underwear being stolen, but I never thought it would happen to me,” a victim, who was not named, was quoted as saying.

A lawyer for the professor was reported as saying his client suffers from a psychiatric disorder and has been taking women’s underwear since he was 14.

The lawyer also said that his client was an honorable and kind person who had no intention of causing annoyance to the underwear owners.

SYDNEY, Australia - An armed robber picked the wrong target when he raided an Australian bar where a biker gang was holding a meeting. He ended up hog-tied and in a hospital.

The man and an accomplice, wearing ski masks and waving machetes, stormed into a club in a western Sydney suburb shortly before 9 p.m. Wednesday and yelled at patrons to lie down as they tried to rob the cash register, police said Thursday.

About 50 members of the Southern Cross Cruiser Club had just started a club meeting in another room, and the bikers jumped up to intervene.

One robber escaped by leaping over a balcony, while the other tried to flee through a service entrance, the club’s president, who identified himself only as “Jester,” told Australian Broadcasting Corp.

“We caught him at the fence and crash-tackled him and hog-tied him to the ground and waited for the police to get there,” Jester said.

Police confirmed that club patrons had subdued one of the robbers, who was taken to a hospital with minor injuries, but did not give further details. Police captured the other suspect nearby.

Jester said the robbers had walked past the bikers as they entered the bar but apparently failed to notice them, perhaps because the ski masks obscured their vision.

“I don’t think he did his homework very well,” Jester said of the ringleader. “He picked the wrong night.”

PARIS (AFP) - Advice on how to score with the ladies would probably never include the strategy that works best for at least one species of male spider: playing dead.

Not all male nursery web spiders looking for a little arachnid sex adopt this technique, but those that do more than double their chances of hitting the jackpot, according to new study in Behavioral Ecology, reported Wednesday in the British magazine New Scientist.

In experiments designed by Trine Bilde of the University of Aaarhus in Denmark, researchers set up date-and-mate opportunities for Pisaura mirabilis, a species native to Europe.

All the males sought to attract partners by offering a gift of food, held in the mouth.

But the ones that lay flat and motionless — even if meant getting dragged about by a female that had latched onto the victuals — wound up in a much better position, as it were, to engage in sexual activity.

The hapless males that tried the direct approach wound up keeping the free meal but not getting what they were really after.

Males that played dead were also allowed to copulate longer than males that did not, ensuring more eggs could fertilized, the researchers reported.

Playing dead is a well-known defense mechanism in nature, but this is apparently the first time such behavior has been observed as a strategy for obtaining sexual favors.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Ten U.N. agencies launched a new campaign on Wednesday to end female genital mutilation, urging governments to help abolish a practice they said remained widespread in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

“If we can come together for a sustained push, female genital mutilation can vanish within a generation,” U.N. Deputy Secretary General told an annual meeting of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women.

“We call on (U.N.) member states to join us as full partners in this fight, to promote the end of this terrible practice, to respond to its consequences, and to hold those who perpetrate it criminally responsible for inflicting harm.”

An estimated 100 million to 140 million women and girls worldwide are estimated to have undergone genital mutilation, also called female circumcision, with U.N. agencies estimating that another 3 million a year are subjected to it.

The practice usually involves cutting off the clitoris and other parts of the female genitalia. Many of the practitioners are untrained and use crude instruments.

Proponents of the ancient custom say it reduces female sexual desire, maintaining chastity before marriage and fidelity afterward. It can cause health complications and psychological damage and is sometimes fatal.

In a statement condemning the procedure, the U.N. agencies expressed concern that it has been in effect legitimized in some countries where is often done by medical professionals.

“The rate of decline in this practice leaves much to be desired,” the statement said. “If we are to eliminate it, we must redouble our efforts.” The campaign aims to eradicate the practice by 2015.

Last year the United Nations called for a worldwide ban on genital mutilation. The east African country of Eritrea, where the practice has been widespread, banned it in April 2007.

Egypt, where UNICEF estimates that some 97 percent of women between the ages of 15 and 49 have suffered the procedure, strengthened its ban last year by eliminating a legal loophole allowing girls to undergo the procedure for health reasons.

Genital mutilation predominantly occurs in 28 African countries, including Sudan, Chad, Sierra Leone and Djibouti, as well as in some Middle Eastern nations, parts of Asia, including Indonesia, and among immigrant communities in Europe and North America.