■ ChinaGang sentenced to death
A Chinese court has sentenced two drug dealers to death after they dismembered the body of a gang member who died when transporting heroin in his stomach, state press reported yesterday. Wu Xiaohui was given the death penalty by the Shanghai Railway Transportation Intermediate Court while Liu Yujun was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve, the Shanghai Morning Post said. Fellow gang member Gan Fuji met his grisly end in August after he overdosed when the heroin packages he was carrying inside his stomach burst open. The gang was attempting to transport about 1.9kg of the drug.
■ Thailand
Dinosaur prints threatened
A rare find of dinosaur footprints are going the way of their prehistoric owners in northeast Thailand, where quarry blasting and souvenir sales are destroying the fossilized footsteps, a newspaper reported yesterday. The Geological Survey Bureau on Monday called on the government to slap a ban on the ongoing destruction of more than 1,000 specimens of dinosaur footprints found three years ago in Nakon Phanom province's Tha Uthen district, 590km northeast of Bangkok.
■ Hong Kong
Two killed by child driver
An 11-year-old girl killed two elderly women and injured two others in northern China when her father let her drive because he was too drunk, a news report said yesterday. Liu Yan allowed his daughter to drive him and his wife home in his jeep because he had drunk several beers and was unfit to take the wheel, according to the Hong Kong edition of the China Daily. The girl mowed down four women walking along the street in Heilongjiang province, northeast China, killing two of them and seriously injuring the other two. Liu was detained and faces prosecution for causing the accident as his daughter is too young to be held responsible for any wrongdoing, the newspaper said.
■ Thailand
Bangkok expels elephants
They are big, slow, block traffic and the authorities have had enough. After complaints, deaths and traffic jams, patrols have been stepped up to try to banish from Bangkok the original oversize people carrier -- the Asian elephant. Some 200 beasts and their handlers roam the busy streets of the Thai capital of 10 million people to try to persuade tourists to part with their money to feed the animals, according to officials. Seven elephants and their handlers, called mahouts, have already been expelled from the capital to a wildlife sanctuary in eastern Thailand after being seized.
■ China
Sex education introduced
Chinese schools are taking steps to break taboos on sex education with a new textbook for teenagers dealing with issues like masturbation, homosexuality and contraception, state press reported yesterday. The book, Thoughts for Teenagers, will be introduced this year in high schools in Ningbo, the capital of eastern Zhejiang province, the China Daily reported. It is designed to help teenagers openly discuss sexual issues in the classroom. Sex-related education has been taboo in China for decades with students learning about sex mainly from friends, magazines, books, news-papers and more recently the Internet. But with an explosion in AIDS cases linked to unprotected sex, efforts are being taken to bring the subject more into the open.
■ IraqSaddam trial organizer fired
Salem Chalabi, the man organizing the trial of Saddam Hussein, has been sacked from his job after allegedly failing to return from Britain to face a murder charge in Iraq. Chalabi, whose uncle Ahmad Chalabi is the controversial founder of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), has been removed as the head of the Iraqi special tribunal responsible for Saddam's case, INC officials said Monday night. The move comes almost a month after an Iraqi judge issued a warrant for his arrest on suspicion of murdering a senior official in the finance ministry. Another was issued for Ahmad Chalabi, accusing him of money laundering. Both men have denied the accusations, calling them "ridiculous."
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