■ Australia
School bans MP3 players
Kids come to school to play together and should not cut themselves off from each other by plugging into personal stereos, the head of Sydney's International Grammar School said yesterday. The school is thought to be the first in Australia to ban iPods and other personal stereos from the playground. "It's important for kids to be talking to one another at school, socializing and being part of a community," school principal Kerry Murphy told The Sydney Morning Herald. She said her ban on MP3 players had the support of parents.
■ China
Man kills wife, in-laws
A man killed nine relatives including his wife and parents-in-law before surrendering to police, state media reported yesterday. He Xiangyue stabbed his wife, her parents, her 88-year-old grandmother, her son from a previous marriage and four other relatives including a seven-year-old granddaughter, in the early hours of Sunday, the Beijing Times said. The only person spared in the killing spree was the couple's four-year-old daughter, it said. After a row, He's wife Chen Gaoying last week took her children from their Jiangsu Province home to stay with her parents in Sichuan Province. He apparently made up with Chen before going on the bloody rampage. He later took his daughter to a police station and gave himself up, the report said.
■ Australia
Guards blend in at festival
Last year's nudist weekend at the Elephant Rock Naturist Retreat near Brisbane was such a success that an even bigger clothes-less festival is planned for later this month at the Pacific coast resort of Cabarita in New South Wales. Troublemakers will be kept out of Raw at Cabarita by security guards who will blend in with the crowd by also being nude. "We call them undercover uncovered security," festival organizer Raice Nicholls said. "You don't know they're security, they're just acting like they are in the crowd, and they'll be keeping an eye on things." The guards will stop anyone taking photographs and dissuade people from what Nicholls called "hanky panky."
■ India
Teen arrested for murder
A teenager robbed a 60-year-old Swedish woman to raise funds for his sister's wedding, then panicked and stabbed the woman to death, police said on Monday. Police arrested 17-year-old Karuppiah Vijayaraj in the southern hill station of Kodaikanal on charges he killed Britt Mari Enquist on March 11 while she was training at a meditation center. "The accused has confessed to the crime," said a police superintendent in southern Tamil Nadu state. Police recovered Enquist's body last Friday. Vijayaraj, son of a farm worker at the meditation center, has been charged with murder. If convicted, he could be hanged.
■ Indonesia
Police boss shot for infidelity
A police chief in Bali has been shot dead by his wife over his alleged affair with another woman, a report said yesterday. Ni Kadek Sunu fired several shots at Ketut Sukrada, the police chief in Sawan, shortly after he arrived home on Monday morning, the Warta Kota daily said. Police refused to say the motive for the murder but neighbors told the daily that the couple often quarrelled over Sukrada's alleged relationship with another woman.
■ United Nations
Soldiers abuse phones
UN peacekeepers enforcing a December 2000 peace accord between Ethiopia and Eritrea defrauded the world body of more than US$500,000 in telephone calls, UN auditors reported on Monday. Word of the abuse surfaces as the UN finds itself under fire for mismanagement of the now-defunct UN oil-for-food program for Iraq and for sexual abuse of minors by peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo. UN soldiers normally have to pay for personal calls while on a mission but the troops serving in Ethiopia and Eritrea used stolen personal identity codes or abused a grace period to place calls without paying for them in 2003 and last year, the UN Board of Auditors said.
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