Sploogee!

WELLINGTON — New Zealand’s most celebrated centenarian, a rare reptile known as Henry, has discovered his mojo and become a father for the first time at the age of 111.

Henry the tuatara, a lizard-like creature of prehistoric origin, has become the father of 11 offspring over the past four days, staff at the Southland Museum in the southern city of Invercargill said Tuesday.

Henry once had a reputation for aggression and was not interested in sex, but he turned his life around after a cancerous growth was removed from his bottom.

He mated last March with Mildred, 31 years his junior, who laid 12 eggs in June with 11 surviving.

“It’s the completion of a love story,” museum tuatara curator Lindsay Hazley said.

The 1.2 kilogram (2.6 pound), 60 centimeters (23 inch) long Henry, who had been known to attack female tuatara before his operation, was now living with three females “in great harmony” and was expected to mate again this year, Hazley said.

“He’s had a major personality transplant.”

Henry, however, is unlikely to play an active role in parenting as tuatara are known to eat anything that is small and moves.

Tuatara, found only in New Zealand, are the sole surviving members of the order Sphenodontia, which was represented by many species during the age of the dinosaurs 200 million years ago, according to a government website.

Its relatives became extinct about 60 million years ago.

Agence France-Presse

Porn Crackdown

SHANGHAI — China shut down 50 additional websites over the weekend as authorities crack down on online porn, ordering Internet giants such as Google to cut links with such material, state-run media said Sunday.

A total of 91 sites have been shut down or blocked since Thursday as part of a month-long campaign that the government says is aimed at stamping out online pornography, the Xinhua news agency said.

Distributing pornography is illegal in China and authorities urged law-breakers to turn themselves in to police, warning that tougher measures would come in the following days, the report said.

The report gave few details on which sites were shut down.

China’s Ministry of Public Security and six other government agencies launched the drive against sites that post or link to content that “harms public morality” and corrupts the nation’s youth, Xinhua said.

They have included Google, MSN and Baidu, the most popular Chinese search engine.

Companies that ignore government warnings to remove obscene content or links to such material have been threatened with closure.
Google, Baidu and other Internet portals have since issued apologies and moved against online porn.

Google said Wednesday it had deleted all links to vulgar material from its search indexes and would go all-out to prevent such material re-appearing.

“Google is willing to be a law-abiding citizen in China,” it said in a statement.

China has launched Internet crackdowns on pornography, con artists and political activists in the past but officials have warned the latest campaign would include tougher measures, without giving specifics.
China has the world’s largest online population at more that 250 million, according to official figures, and it is growing rapidly as computer use rises along with income levels.

China’s communist rulers generally exercise strict control over the Internet, blocking sites linked to many politically sensitive subjects.

Agence France-Presse

Cartoon birthday boy dogged by rumors

LONDON — As Belgian comic-book icon Tintin celebrates his 80th birthday, an age-old question has resurfaced: is the boy reporter gay? One British commentator says the signs are unmistakable.

“Billions of blue blistering barnacles, isn’t it staring us in the face?” wrote The Times journalist Matthew Parris under the headline “Of course Tintin’s gay. Ask Snowy,” ahead of Saturday’s anniversary.

“What debate can there be when the evidence is so overwhelmingly one-way? A callow, androgynous blonde-quiffed youth in funny trousers and a scarf moving into the country mansion of his best friend, a middle-aged sailor?” he wrote.

Tintin, the creation of Belgian Georges Remi - whose pen name Herge comes from his initials, inverted and pronounced in French - first appeared in 1929 along with his faithful companions Captain Haddock and trusty dog Snowy.

Translated into 60 languages, the cartoon books still sell upwards of two million copies per year.

Parris, a former British lawmaker who is openly gay, said Tintin’s sexuality was obvious to anyone who reads the cartoon books closely.

His family background gives a first clue.

“Tintin never talks about his parents or family, as though trying to block out the very existence of a father or mother. As psychologists will confirm, this is common among young gay men,” says Parris.

The fact that, while being nominally a journalist, he almost never files any stories, is also fishy — fuelling speculation that he is a spy.

“As the remotest acquaintance with (for instance) British espionage will confirm, secret intelligence has always attracted gay men. I myself applied for and was offered a post in MI6.”

The lack of women in his adventures is also suspicious — only eight out of some 350 characters are identifiable as female.

While Tintin never shows any interest in girls of women, his canine sidekick is “unambiguously heterosexual,” having a “tendency to be distracted by lady dogs: a tendency in which he is consistently foiled by his master.”

“Pity this dog, wretchedly straight and trapped in a ghastly web of gay human males,” says Parris.

Agence France-Presse

Actor says Scientology helped him

MADRID — US actor Tom Cruise, one of Scientology’s best-known adherents, overcame the effects of his dyslexia thanks to the church’s teachings, he said in an interview published on Sunday.

He told “XL Semanal,” the weekly magazine supplement of daily Spanish newspaper ABC, that at the age of seven he was diagnosed as having the language-based learning disability that can include problems in reading, spelling, writing and pronouncing words.

“I asked myself if I was normal or an idiot. I would try to concentrate but I felt anxiety, frustration, boredom. When I graduated from high school in 1980 I was functionally illiterate,” he said.

“Nobody gave me a solution and I wanted to know why the system had failed. Finally, as an adult I learned to read perfectly through the method of (Scientology’s late founder) L. Ron Hubbard,” the 46-year-old added.

The Church of Scientology, founded in 1954 in the United States by Hubbard, a science-fiction writer, teaches that technology can expand the mind and help solve problems.

Cruise’s advocacy of Scientology, which has some 10 million members around the world, has sometimes landed him in hot water in the past.

German authorities were initially reluctant to allow the makers of Cruise’s latest movie “Valkyrie” - about a plot to kill Adolf Hitler - at German military sites because the actor is a Scientologist.

The German government does not recognize Scientology as a church. It argues the organization masquerades as a religion to make money, a charge Scientology leaders reject.

Agence France-Presse