■ Hong Kong
Girl orchestrates gang rape
A jealous 16-year-old girl in eastern China orchestrated the gang rape of a pretty classmate, a news report said yesterday. Wang Qian slipped drugs into her classmate's drink before getting four male students to rape her after she passed out, according to the South China Morning Post. Wang, from Zhenjiang in Jiangsu province, was jealous of the girl's popularity, which she believed was partly due to the fact that she was a virgin. The four boys were jailed for between one and four and a half years. Wang was given a one-year suspended prison sentence, the newspaper said.
■ India
Elderly couple murdered
The brutal murder of a retired Indian army doctor and his wife has shocked New Delhi, police officials and residents said yesterday. Retired lieutenant-general Harnam Singh Seth, 84, and his wife, Roop, 78, were bludgeoned to death with ivory tusks in their home of 23 years. The attackers taped their mouths and tied their hands before smashing their heads with the tusks, police said. The murders have raised fears that the Indian capital is growing increasingly unsafe for senior citizens, especially those who live alone. Police said the main motive seemed to be robbery, as the house was ransacked, but the assailants appeared to know the house well.
■ Hong Kong
Pigs massaged, massacred
Pigs are given showers, a sauna and a massage before being killed in a kindly slaughterhouse in western China, a news report said yesterday. Light music is played as the pigs are pampered before being given electric shocks to kill them, according to the Hong Kong edition of the China Daily newspaper. Gua Xianfeng, boss of the slaughterhouse in Mianyang, Sichuan province, said the pigs fell asleep after the sauna and massage and felt no pain when they were killed.
■ Jakarta
Transvestite puzzle solved
Election officials in an Indonesian province have come up with a pragmatic solution to a potentially tricky problem posed by transvestite voters in next month's presidential election. Polling station officials compiling forms will register them as female if they arrive dressed as women and as men if they wear male clothing, an official was quoted by yesterday's Jakarta Post as saying. The chairman of the election commission in Central Kalimantan said the decision was taken to avoid any problems on July 5 when some 150 million Indonesians nationwide are eligible to vote.
■ Vietnam
Toxic octopuses kill two
Two people were killed and more than 80 hospitalized in southern Vietnam after eating poisonous octopus, a local health official said yesterday. A 38-year-old man and a 43-year-old woman from Binh Tuan province died on Saturday afternoon after eating the octopus earlier in the day, said Huynh Thi Ngoc Thuy, a doctor from a health center where the victims were taken. State-run media reported that the octopuses were from Phan Thiet port and that 20kg of the poisonous octopus had been sold by a fisherman on Saturday morning. According to Tuoi tre (Youth) newspaper, the octopuses came from the Hapalochlaena species and contained tetrodotoxin, the same deadly poison found in pufferfish.
■ Iraq
Troops will stay: Koizumi
Japanese troops are staying on in Iraq at the request of the Iraqi people, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said yesterday as he defended himself against critics who said he violated the constitution by pledging soldiers to a multinational force. Japan's opposition loudly protested Koizumi's pledge to join the multinational force after the US-led coalition transfers sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government on June 30, alleging the prime minister was trampling on Japan's pacifist constitution. Opposition leaders have made Japan's troop contribution a central issue as they prepare for national elections.
■ Iraq
Fiji to send bodyguards
A contingent of 51 Fijian soldiers is expected to leave for Iraq soon to work as bodyguards for UN staff, a military official said yesterday. The official said the armed forces were awaiting UN endorsement of 51 candidates for positions as personal protection officers and they could be deployed to Iraq as early as next month. "We have made a selection and the men have undergone training specific for these positions," the officer said. The 51 men will be the only state-funded Fijians in Iraq. Several hundred former Fijian soldiers are working in Iraq for international security firms. After nearly 30 years of peacekeeping in the Middle East, the last of the Fijian soldiers serving in Lebanon returned home last year.
■ United States
`Combatants' of low value
Bush administration and US military officials have repeatedly exaggerated the intelligence value of detainees at Guantanamo Bay as well as the danger they pose, The New York Times reported yesterday. Contrary to the repeated assertions of senior administration officials, none of the detainees at the US naval base in Cuba ranked as leaders or senior operatives of al-Qaeda, the newspaper reported, citing interviews with high-level military, intelligence and law-enforcement officials in the US, Europe and the Middle East. About 595 foreign nationals, designated "enemy combatants," are being held at the base.
■ United States
No choice on Arafat: Clinton
US President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon have no choice but to work with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to achieve peace in the Middle East, former US president Bill Clinton told the Guardian yesterday. "Unless they just want to wait for him to become incapacitated or pass away, or unless they seriously believe they can find a better negotiating partner in Hamas if they destroy the [Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)], which I don't think they do believe, then they need to keep working to make a deal," Clinton said. The Guardian said Clinton's remarks were all the more striking in that he held Arafat responsible for the failure of the 2000 Camp David accords.
■ United States
Mammoth discovery
Woolly mammoths were still living at the time of the birth of human civilization 8,000 years ago, scientists in Alaska have discovered. The prehistoric beasts are generally thought to have vanished thousands of years earlier at the end of the last Ice Age. But new evidence shows that one group of mammoths marooned and cut off on an Alaskan island survived until much later. Radiocarbon dating of fossil remains shows that the animals were living on St. Paul Island as recently as 8,000 years ago.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
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Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese