■ China
Wife reports bigamist
A husband in southern China is being sued for bigamy after keeping a wife and mistress under the same roof and dividing his time between them, a news report said yesterday. The Guangzhou man reached an agreement with the two women to spend three nights a week with his wife and one night a week with his mistress. However, the arrangement turned sour when he tired of his wife's rudeness and announced that he wanted to divorce her, the South China Morning Post reported. His wife is now suing him for bigamy for keeping a wife and common-law wife under one roof, the newspaper said. Each woman has one child by the man.
■ South Korea
Defectors due next week
South Korea will accept a group of up to 400 North Korean defectors next week, the Unification Ministry confirmed yesterday. After escaping their homeland,
the North Koreans have
been in a "third country" in
Southeast Asia, a ministry spokeswoman said, without naming the country. "We try
to get them to South Korea
next week," she said. The Kyunghyang Shinmun newspaper reported that
the presence of the North Koreans was posing problems for the third country and had threatened to send them to China if South Korea did not accept them.
■ Japan
Girls stab stranger
Police yesterday said they had arrested two schoolgirls, both aged 15, over the stabbing of a stranger with a kitchen knife in the street which left him seriously injured. One of
the girls who confessed to stabbing the 21-year-old man late on Thursday at a summer festival in Toyama, 250km northwest of Tokyo, was quoted by a police spokesman as saying: "I was feeling very irritated. The victim could have been anybody." He declined to comment on how the girl came to be carrying a kitchen knife, which had a 15cm blade. The second girl conspired with the attacker, police said, but did not take part in the stabbing. The man was seriously injured.
■ Vietnam
Man kills `devilish' relative
A Central Highlands man has been sentenced to 11 years
in prison for killing his father-in-law, a court official said yesterday. Y Pol Kso, 35, suspected his father-in-law,
Y Duk Kso, to be a devil, which the local Ede people call ma lai. A ma lai is said
to be human during the day,
but a devil at night, said court official Tran Ngoc Mai. Pol Kso blamed Duk Kso for causing him to be ill, so
he borrowed his brother's shotgun and shot Duk Kso
in the head one night in December last year, the court official said. Pol Kso was convicted of murder, the court official said.
■ New Zealand
Woman starves over phobia
An elderly agoraphobic woman starved to death in her home because she was too afraid to go outside, the Christchurch Press newspaper reported yesterday. Joyce Irene Riley, 75, had been looked after by her son Tim in their home in the South Island city of Christchurch, but when he died she did not tell anyone and shunned offers of help. An inquiry into Joyce Irene Riley's death was told that for two months she lived with the decomposing body of her 43-year-old son in her bedroom. Police and housing New Zealand staff had called at her home but she repeatedly turned them away at the door. Riley was emaciated and just 41kg when police found her body on September 16 last year with a half-eaten biscuit stuck in her teeth. Her son, Tim, had been dead for almost two months, suffering broncho-pneumonia and heart failure in late July.
■ United Kingdom
Bono gives Blair guitar
A guitar from the rock star Bono was among the gifts Tony Blair received last year, the prime minister's office said Thursday. The U2 lead singer gave Blair the present in May 2003, the same month the musician attended a meeting Blair held on AIDS in Africa. Among the other gifts Blair received in 2003 were several bottles of wine from French President Jacques Chirac, rugs from Afghan President Hamid Karzai and a ``selection of merchandise'' from the Simpsons Production Company. Blair's voice appeared in an episode of the American cartoon series.
■ Iraq
Bomb injures eight
Eight Iraqis were wounded, including a little girl who lost a leg, when a bus they were travelling in hit a roadside bomb yesterday, in the northern part of the capital, police and hospital sources said. "We have received eight injured, including an eight-year-old girl, whom we had to amputate her leg below the knee," said Doctor Ilham Ilah at a hospital in Khadimiya, north of the city. A bus carrying 20 passengers ignored orders from police not to enter an area that was being cordoned off for a suspected roadside bomb, according to police and witnesses.
■ United Kingdom
Diana fountain injures three
Officials switched off the memorial fountain honoring Princess Diana Thursday because three people were hurt when they slipped and fell in it. The three slipped on a set of stone steps that are part of the granite structure in Hyde Park, said a Royal Parks spokesman. One was a child who suffered a bump on the head and some bleeding, the agency said. The two others were adults but the Royal Parks did not know how seriously they were hurt. The official said the water was turned off at 3 pm and would not be switched back on until an investigation is finished and any needed safety measures are added.
■ Italy
Berlusconi wins vote
Premier Silvio Berlusconi's government Thursday won a confidence vote it tied to budget cuts in what proved a successful strategy to push the measure through Parliament and contain Italy's deficit within limits set by the EU. Lawmakers in Italy's Chamber of Deputies approved the budget-trimming measure by a vote of 317 to 194. If the government had lost the vote, it would have been forced to resign. The government called the confidence vote to ensure lawmakers in squabbling coalition parties closed ranks.
■ United States
Mafioso called peace-loving
The lawyer for Joseph Massino conceded on Thursday that his client led the Bonanno crime family, arguing that Massino was a peace-loving boss who opposed the killings cited in the racketeering case against him. "He showed a love of life, not a love of death, because the murders ceased" when he became the top leader in 1992, said lawyer David Breitbart in closing arguments in the US District Court in New York. Eight former Bonanno insiders broke a mob's code of silence to testify against Massino, 61, a Queens restaurant owner sometimes called "the last don." The charges he faces include loan sharking and arson, but the case is based on allegations that he ordered seven killings in the 1980s.
■ Colombia
Rebels repelled from bridge
Dozens of leftist rebels attacked a heavily guarded bridge in southeast Colombia, killing 13 soldiers but failing to capture the bridge, the deputy army chief said. Fierce clashes at the bridge linking the departments of Huila and Putumayo, one of Colombia's main cocaine-producing regions, forced the army to call in reinforcements and air support before pushing back the guerrillas, said General Eduardo Morales. Morales blamed Thursday's attack on the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. He said it wasn't immediately clear how many rebels died in the fighting at the bridge in the municipality of Santa Rosa, 430km southeast of Bogota.
■ United States
Skipper makes bomb threat
The captain of a Turkish merchant ship headed into Philadelphia harbor falsely told a coast guard inspector the vessel had a bomb on board, forcing officials to order the ship to turn around, an FBI spokesman said. Yildirim Bayazer Tumer, 46, became agitated when the Philadelphia coast guard boarded the ship for a routine inspection on Thursday morning, the spokesman said. Tumer told an officer that there was a bomb on board that was set to blow up when the ship docked at the port of Philadelphia. The ship was held at a safe anchorage point while authorities performed a search. No evidence of a bomb was found.
■ United States
House votes on gay marriage
The Republican-led US House of Representatives approved a bill to curb same-sex marriage on Thursday after rejecting concerns the measure may be uncon-stitutional. On a vote of 233-194, the House sent the proposal to the Senate, where members of both parties said it will likely die. But it could help rev up an election-year issue. The House measure would forbid federal judges from requiring one state to recognize a same-sex marriage licensed in another. Democrats accused US President George W. Bush and fellow Republicans of pushing the proposals merely to rally their conservative base for the November polls.
■ United States
Lab suspends 19 workers
Decrying a "culture of arrogance," the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory on Thursday suspended 19 employees and said they could be fired if two computer disks of classified data missing since July 7 were not recovered. Director George Nanos addressed lab workers in some of his harshest words yet about security and safety violations in recent years. The laboratory was shut down last Friday. Nanos noted that some employees had written to their congressman to complain that he called them insulting terms. "You're right," he said. "I should have used the word `renegade.'"
As the sun sets on another scorching Yangon day, the hot and bothered descend on the Myanmar city’s parks, the coolest place to spend an evening during yet another power blackout. A wave of exceptionally hot weather has blasted Southeast Asia this week, sending the mercury to 45°C and prompting thousands of schools to suspend in-person classes. Even before the chaos and conflict unleashed by the military’s 2021 coup, Myanmar’s creaky and outdated electricity grid struggled to keep fans whirling and air conditioners humming during the hot season. Now, infrastructure attacks and dwindling offshore gas reserves mean those who cannot afford expensive diesel
Does Argentine President Javier Milei communicate with a ghost dog whose death he refuses to accept? Forced to respond to questions about his mental health, the president’s office has lashed out at “disrespectful” speculation. Twice this week, presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni was asked about Milei’s English Mastiff, Conan, said to have died seven years ago. Milei, 53, had Conan cloned, and today is believed to own four copies he refers to as “four-legged children.” Or is it five? In an interview with CNN this month, Milei referred to his five dogs, whose faces and names he had engraved on the presidential baton. Conan,
French singer Kendji Girac, who was seriously injured by a gunshot this week, wanted to “fake” his suicide to scare his partner who was threatening to leave him, prosecutors said on Thursday. The 27-year-old former winner of France’s version of The Voice was found wounded after police were called to a traveler camp in Biscarrosse on France’s southwestern coast. Girac told first responders he had accidentally shot himself while tinkering with a Colt .45 automatic pistol he had bought at a junk shop, a source said. On Thursday, regional prosecutor Olivier Janson said, citing the singer, that he wanted to “fake” his suicide
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other