Indonesia police arrest dozens in raid on Jakarta gay sauna
Jakarta: Indonesian police say they detained dozens of men in a raid on a gay sauna in the capital Jakarta. Jakarta police spokesman Argo Yuwono said 141 men were detained for questioning in the raid Sunday evening on the gym and sauna in north Jakarta.
Homosexuality is not illegal in Indonesia but police said Monday that those detained had violated Indonesia’s pornography laws. Indonesia’s low-profile LGBT community has been increasingly under siege in the past year, with prejudice fanned by stridently anti-gay comments from cabinet ministers and other high-profile Indonesians. Last week, a Shariah court in the conservative province of Aceh sentenced two men to public caning for gay sex. (AP)
Dragon’s Breath: world’s hottest chili pepper grown!
London: Scientists have accidentally grown the world’s hottest chili pepper which is so spicy that eating even one may be fatal. Named the Dragon’s Breath, the chili was grown by Mike Smith, a farmer from Wales in collaboration with scientists from Nottingham Trent University in the UK.
Researchers believe that the oil from the chili is so potent that it could act as an alternative anaesthetic for those allergic to conventional drugs. The peppers measure a formidable 2.48 million on the Scoville heat scale, which is a measurement of the pungency (spicy heat) of chili peppers or other spicy foods.
“I have tried it (the chili) on the tip of my tongue and it just burned and burned. I spat it out in about 10 seconds,” said Smith. Experts believe that anyone who attempted to swallow one of the chili peppers would be at risk of death from anaphylactic shock, ‘The Telegraph’ reported.
The Dragon’s Breath is so powerful that one drop of its capsaicin oil would be detectable in 2.48 million drops of water. Smith has applied to Guinness World Records and is currently awaiting confirmation that the chili is the world’s hottest. (PTI)
More Pakistani students learning Chinese
Islamabad: Enrolment in the Chinese language department at the National University of Modern Languages (NUML) in Pakistan has risen exponentially, a media report said on Monday.
When it was first formed in September 1970, there were about 13 students who took the course. However, this year the programme has about 460 students eager to learn the Chinese language.
Rasheeda Mustafa, who has been teaching Mandarin at NUML for the past 19 years, was quoted by Dawn news as saying: “Thousands of students have learnt Mandarin [at NUML] and have gone on to pursue professional roles in different fields.”To match this increasing demand, the Chinese government had also given grants for the expansion of the Confucius Institute at NUML back in 2015, Dawn News reported. The China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is a big factor for the increase in the number of students, Rasheeda said.
According to her, the students can see the tides changing and expect that knowing Chinese would mean more job opportunities, in Pakistan and in China.
There are at least four operational institutes teaching the language — one each in Islamabad (NUML), Faisalabad (Agriculture University), Lahore (Punjab University) and Karachi (University of Karachi). (IANS)
