TOKYO: One out of every three women in Tokyo has been beaten by her husband or lover and 80 per cent have been molested on trains, according to a government survey on abuse against women published in major Japanese newspapers today.

The Tokyo metropolitan government interviewed more than 2,800 women this week in the first such survey in Japan. It said 33 per cent of the women reported being kicked, bitten and punched, while others said their partners subjected them to psychologial abuse such as destroying prized possessions.

``Because it is difficult to get recourse, this domestic cruelty is all the more tragic,'' the Mainichi newspaper said.

Abuse by strangers was all too common, according to the survey. Twenty-five percent of respondents said they had been stalked or harassed on the telephone, and 80 per cent had been molested as they rode on the train.One such molester recently achieved fame when he published best-selling book giving luriddetails of his daily rounds on public transport.

Comets rain

WASHINGTON: The earth was bombarded with comets that came from the direction of Pluto 36 million years ago, US and Italian scientists said in the journal Science in its latest issue.

One of the enormous meteors created Chesapeake bay near Washington while another made the Popgai crater in Siberia, and bits of comets rained down on earth for the next million or 1.5 million years, the study said.

In fact, during that time earth was struck with more comets than at any other time in its existence, according to the study's authors. The researchers included US astronomer Eugene Shoemaker, who died in a 1997 car accident, and his wife Carolyn.