■ ChinaJudges make house calls
Shanghai judges have been making pre-dawn house calls -- and detaining some people for up to two weeks -- in a crackdown aimed at beefing up lax enforcement of orders to pay debts and other court decisions, an official said yesterday. All courts in Shanghai have been "mobilized" in the campaign aimed at clearing up cases that have been pending for more than half a year, said an official at the Shanghai High Court's propaganda department. He gave only his surname, Chen. If debtors refuse to pay, officials seize their assets, Chen said. "In the worst-case scenario, we can detain them for up to 15 days," he said.
■ South Korea
Five die in Web suicide pact
Five South Koreans who apparently forged a suicide pact over the Internet were found dead in a hotel room yesterday, police said. An empty bottle of cyanide was found alongside the bodies of three men and two women, aged 19 to 29, in the hotel in Suwon, 30km south of Seoul. "We strongly suspect that they had met through the Internet and agreed to commit suicide together," said detective Yeom Gyu-Ho. Empty bottles of liquor and soft drinks were also found in the room. Suicide notes from the five have been found on the Internet, police said.
■ Hong Kong
SARS survivors shunned
Recovered SARS patients in Hong Kong are being shunned by friends and colleagues one year after the outbreak, according to a study released yesterday. More than one in five people say they avoid close contact and will not let their children near former patients, fearing they may still be contagious. Thirty per cent of respondents said they believed former patients should be barred from working in the catering industry and 27 per cent said they should not be allowed to work with children, according to the survey by Hong Kong's Chinese University.
■ India
Mom kills herself over cricket
An Indian woman committed suicide after her husband did not allow her to watch a cricket match between India and Pakistan, it was reported yesterday. Police said Ansuia, 35, a resident of the Delhi satellite town Noida, used kerosene oil to set herself on fire after a fight with her husband on Sunday, the day India and Pakistan played their fourth match in Lahore. Her husband did not want her to watch the match as it was distracting their children from studying for their school examinations, the Hindustan Times newspaper reported. The cricket series was leveled 2-2 after vice-captain Rahul Dravid and Mohammad Kaif led India to a five-wicket victory.
■ Australia
Singing Dingo honored
He started life like any other native Australian dingo pup, but now Dinky -- the singing, piano-playing toast of an outback roadhouse -- has been voted the country's most trivial icon. Dinky outclassed 300 other budding trivia trophy winners through his talent for singing along while his owner's daughters played the family piano and even tinkling the ivories a little himself. To clinch the title, Dinky beat a West Australian man who can stationary jump on his unicycle 232 times per minute and another man who boasts that he can clip nine out of 10 toenail cuttings into a paper basket from more than 1m away.
■ United StatesO'Neill off the hook
No crime was committed in the release of thousands of documents to former US treasury secretary Paul O'Neill but 140 of the documents should have been marked "classified," officials said Monday. A review by the Treasury Department and the Department of Justice found "no criminal statutes were violated" in the release of the documents for a book and shown on TV, according to an investigation summary. The investigation showed that among the items released to O'Neill were 140 documents not marked classified even though they contained national security or sensitive information.
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