■ China
Gang 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.
■ Iraq
Saddam 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."
■ Iran
Wanted: suicide attackers
An Iranian group calling itself the Committee for Suicide Operations of Iran said Monday it would be registering new volunteers for suicide attacks at a special ceremony later this week. In a statement, the group said the ceremony would be held tomorrow in Bushehr, where the county's first nuclear reactor is being built. Last month, the group claimed more than 15,000 Iranians had registered for suicide missions to Iraq's holy Shiite cities of Najaf and Karbala, where the shrines of the two Shiite Immams Ali and Hussein are located. The Teheran government has distanced itself from the Iranian volunteers.
■ United States
Missouri killings linked
Kansas City police said Monday they believe a single killer was responsible for the slayings of six people whose bodies were found within a blighted 18-block area frequented by drug addicts and prostitutes. Police were working with the FBI to develop a profile of the killer. One of those slain was found in July, but five others have been discovered since Thursday -- including those found after someone calling 911 told police where to look. All the bodies were discovered on vacant lots or near vacant houses or apartments in an area east of downtown where drug dealers and prostitutes were known to congregate.
■ United States
California fire blazes on
Firefighters were hampered by erratic wind and low humidity Monday as they made slow progress against a fire that had burned nearly 4,800 hectares and four homes in the Northern California wine country. The fire, which started Friday northeast of Geyserville in Sonoma County, had been 20 percent contained and full containment was not expected until today, said Janet Marshall, spokeswoman for the state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The unpredictable wind and dry vegetation, compounded by often steep terrain, made the situation extremely dangerous for the 1,875 firefighters, Marshall said.
■ United States
TV leads to more teen sex
Teenagers who watch a lot of television with sexual content are twice as likely to engage in intercourse than those who watch few such programs, according to a study published yesterday. ?is is the strongest evidence yet that the sexual content of television programs encourages adolescents to initiate sexual intercourse?aid Rebecca Collins, a psychologist at the RAND Corp. who headed the study. The study found that youths who watched large amounts of programming with sexual content were also more likely to initiate sexual activities short of intercourse, such as oral sex.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema