■ Pakistan
Shiite family massacred
Six members of a Shiite Muslim family, including two women and two children, were found shot dead in their house in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore yesterday, police said. The hands and feet of the victims, including a seven-month-old girl, were bound. All had been shot in the head. The words "Shiites are infidels" were spray painted on the walls of the house, on the outskirts of the city. "It is not yet clear whether it was a sectarian attack or related to some enmity," senior superintendent of police Aftab Cheema told reporters.
■ Australia
E-stalker jailed
An Australian man found guilty of stalking his US ex-girlfriend by bombarding her friends and relatives with e-mails showing her performing sex acts was jailed for 12 months yesterday. Geelong Magistrates Court in Victoria state was told Nicholas Stacey, 35, had been living in the US until late last year when his girlfriend dumped him while he was visiting his homeland. In response, Stacey sent offensive e-mails to the woman and made up to 40 threatening phone calls a day. He also e-mailed 60 explicit pictures of the woman and himself engaged in sex acts to the woman's family, friends, university and workplace.
■ China
Tainted liquor kills eight
Liquor diluted with formaldehyde killed eight people and landed another eight in hospital in southern China this week, the Beijing News said yesterday. The moonshine baijiu, a high-proof spirit made from sorghum, was made in Guangzhou, capital of southern China's Guangdong Province, the newspaper said. Billions of dollars worth of counterfeit and substandard goods are produced every year in China.
■ Vietnam
Duty-free smugglers nabbed
Vietnamese police have busted a smuggling ring operating through a chain of duty-free stores in southern Vietnam, a police officer said on Friday. The Saigon Port Duty Free Shop, which was under the management of the former state-run Import and Export Services, was caught overstating the amount of duty-free goods it had sold and then selling the goods on the open market, the police officer said. The investigation showed that, since 1999, the company had been selling 70 per cent of its tax-free goods to restaurants and nightclubs. Police confiscated 22,400 bottles of wine and more than 2,000 packets of cigarettes after raiding three of the company's shops, the police official said. Seventeen people involved in the ring were summoned by the police for questioning.
■ Holy See
Gays threaten all Europe
Same-sex unions are destroying the concept of marriage and of humanity itself, the powerful guardian of Roman Catholic doctrine said on Thursday. "If the union of homosexuals is increasingly seen on the same level as marriage, we are facing the dissolution of the image of man," Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said during a televised conference on
the spiritual roots of Europe. Ratzinger, prefect of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said, "Europe wouldn't
be Europe anymore if
this fundamental nucleus
of its social structure disappeared."
■ United States
Doggie DNA snares thief
A dead poodle's DNA led Louisiana police to arrest a man suspected in the thefts of five pedigreed puppies from a pet store in January. Police in Chalmette, a suburb north of New Orleans, charged Edwin Gallo with felony possession of stolen property, namely the body
RSS