■ Hong Kong
Monks slain in monastery
A Taiwanese and a Hong Kong monk were stabbed to death at the Tung Lum Monastery, police said yesterday. The motives for the killings were unclear. The body of the 84-year-old Hong Kong monk was found lying in a pool of blood beside two knives on Satur-day near a dormitory, a police spokeswoman said. Yau said the monk suffered a fractured skull, eye injuries and knife wounds to both hands. The 53-year-old Taiwanese monk, Hsu Chian-wei, was found lying next to a pickax, had a stab wound to his chest and knife wounds to his left hand. No arrests had been made.
■ Indonesia
Militant guilty of bombings
A Muslim militant was jailed for 20 years by an Indonesian court yesterday for a 2000 car bomb attack on the Philippine ambassador's residence in Jakarta which killed two people, badly wounded the envoy and injured 17 others. Abdul Jabar was also convicted of involvement in a series of Christmas 2000 church bombings. Police have said they believe the car bombing was funded by Hambali, the top al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiah militant captured in Thailand in August and now in US custody.
■ Australia
Gel could replace glasses
A revolutionary gel that can be implanted into the eye could enable millions of people to throw away their glasses, scientists at the government's Vision Co-operative Research Center believe. They claim a simple injection of the gel into the lens of middle-aged people could prevent the otherwise inevitable onset of sight deterioration. The technique, which is expected to unde-rgo human trials by the end of next year, could herald a revolution in ophthalmic surgery, according to experts. The scientists have been working on the gel technique to combat cataract surgery. But the technique could also be used for the ageing eye, which loses its ability to change shape and focus due to an inevitable hardening of the lens.
■ Australia
Lunar land for sale
Lunar Realty opens its doors in Melbourne today selling .40 hectare blocks on the moon for A$59 (US$40) and 4-hectare "lifestyle" blocks for A$298. Paul Jackson, 33, announced yesterday that he had bought the Australian rights to sell the land from Nevada-based entrepreneur Dennis Hope. Since 1980 Hope has been exploiting what he said is a loophole in the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty that barred nations from laying claim to the moon but said nothing about individuals. Hope registered a claim for the moon and planets with the US, the USSR and the UN and has been selling plots of the moon's real estate ever since. Jackson said 2 million people from 180 countries have bought a slice of the moon since 1980.
■ Japan
Arrests over export scam
Police arrested several used car dealers yesterday over the export to North Korea of a large trailer that could be used for launching missiles, Kyodo news agency said. A police spokesman said that he could not confirm the arrests, but that officers had searched premises and homes linked with a used-car dealership in the town of Onojo on suspicion of fraud. The company is suspected of falsifying documents to show the price of the trailer as less than ?300,000 (US$2,770), so that it would be exempt from strict export controls, Kyodo said. The real price was more than ?3.4 million, the agency said.
■ United States
100 injured in derailment
A commuter train derailed on Chicago's South Side, injuring as many as 100 people, officials said. At least 45 people were taken to nearby hospitals, Chicago Fire Department spokesman Patrick Howe said. Most of the injuries were minor, he said. Three people were taken to the trauma unit at John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County, where a 22-year-old man was in serious condition Sunday night, hospital spokesman Don Rashid said. The two others from the train were in fair condition.
■ Italy
Man kills two burglars
A Chinese martial arts expert was in custody yesterday after turning the tables on four burglars armed with knives, killing two of them and seriously wounding a third. The 28-year-old man, known as "the doctor" for his practice of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, managed to seize one of the two knives carried by his assailants and saw off the entire group with the ferocity of his reaction. Magistrates in the central Italian town of Empoli are now seeking to establish whether his self-defense constituted an excessive use of force. Investigators found the body of one man, who had been stabbed in the heart, sprawled on the staircase and another man bleeding to death in the street from a wound to his leg. A third man is recovering in hospital from a punctured lung.
■ Russia
Fire kills 30 patients
At least 30 psychiatric patients, some of whom were sedated, were burnt alive at a hospital in western Belarus on Sunday after a patient set fire to the building, the Emergencies Ministry said. Interfax news agency said staff at the hospital had attempted to fight the blaze on their own, delaying the deployment of emergency services. "The medical personnel tried to fight the fire and to save the patients on their own, and therefore the emergency services only heard about it half an hour after it started," Emergencies Minister Valery Astapov was quoted as saying. "By initial indications, one of the patients started the fire," an Emergencies Ministry spokesman said.
■ United Kingdom
Boy gets new arms
An Iraqi boy who lost both arms and most of his family during the US-led war on Iraq has been successfully fitted with artificial limbs, a newspaper reported yesterday. Ali Ismaeel Abbas, whose armless torso, horrific burns and haunted eyes symbolized civilian suffering in the conflict, was pictured wearing the prosthetic arms in the Daily Mirror newspaper. "I'm all here now. My arms feel good," 13-year-old Abbas told the paper. "I didn't think they'd look this good. Now I want to hug my sisters and the rest of my family. I also want to brush my teeth by myself and wash my face.
■ United States
McDonald's widow dies
Joan Kroc, the billionaire widow of McDonald's Corp founder Ray Kroc who became known for her philanthropic donations to groups promoting world peace, died Sunday of brain cancer. She was 75. Kroc died at her home in the San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe, several months after being diagnosed with glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer, said Dick Starmann, her spokesman. With an estimated net worth of US$1.7 billion, Kroc ranked No. 121 on Forbes magazine's latest list of the nation's wealthiest people.
■ France
Deal with Libya in the works
Libya and families of the victims of a French airliner bombing could strike a compensation deal this week, a victims' group said on Sunday after Tripoli missed a deadline to settle the case. "I think it's quite possible that there will be a definitive accord before the end of the week," Guillaume Denoix de Saint Marc, a spokesman for some of the families of the 170 people killed in the 1989 bombing, said. "It all depends on the willingness of the parties," said Denoix de Saint Marc, whose father died when the French UTA airliner exploded over Africa. Tripoli has never acknowledged responsibility for the bombing, although a French court convicted six Libyans in absentia. As a result, Libya paid out some US$34 million.
■ United Kingdom
Reporter tackles Tory leader
A journalist presented a file to Britain's parliamentary watchdog yesterday suggesting that the leader of the opposition Conservative Party wrongly employed his wife. Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith said in a statement that he had done nothing wrong. Michael Crick, an investigative journalist for the BBC, presented his file to the commissioner for parliamentary standards, Sir Philip Mawer. Crick says he has assembled documentation questioning whether Betsy Duncan Smith did the work for which she was paid from her husband's Parliamentary allowance. She was on his payroll for 15 months. "I have also instructed my lawyers to review the press reports with a view to taking legal action," Duncan Smith said in a statement.
■ Serbia
Wedding guests down plane
A two-seater sports plane on an unauthorized joyride was apparently shot down by mistake when it flew over a Serbian wedding party where guests were firing guns into the air, local media reported. Two men were reported to have been seriously hurt when their aircraft burst into flames and crashed near Kraljevo, central Serbia. "I heard shots from a wedding party which was very close to the crash site. Then I saw the plane in flames. It was shot in the left wing. A few moments later, while attempting a crash landing, it was caught in overhead power cables," witness Zoran Vukadinovic said. Local media said neither of the men held a pilot's licence.
■ Italy
Snake terrorizes airliner
A runaway snake which worked its way loose from cabin luggage terrorized passengers aboard a Qatar Airways flight as it was about to land at Rome's Fiumicino airport, passengers said on Sunday. Witnesses said the metre-long reptile escaped from a passenger's hand luggage and slithered its way along the overhead luggage bins towards the front of the plane. The owner of the snake tried to assure his fellow passengers that the pet was harmless, but rose from his seat to capture it when other passengers became alarmed, they said.
■ Cyprus
Briton tries to swim 320km
A Briton who tried to swim almost 320km from Cyprus to Israel ended up in hospital with hypothermia, Cypriot police said. The 39-year-old was rescued by yachtsmen off the southeast of the Mediterranean island. "He told police he was trying to swim to Jerusalem from Protaras," a police spokeswoman said, referring to a popular tourist resort on the southeastern coast. The unidentified man had set off travelling light with a just a passport, but he said he lost that at sea. He did not say why he wanted to go to Jerusalem.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema