■ Australia
Cop-killer found dead
A motorist who shot dead an Australian policeman with the officer's gun and escaped in a police car early yesterday was himself later found dead some 20km away, police said. Senior Constable Tony Clarke was alone in his car at Launching Place, east of the city of Melbourne, when he was shot dead. Police believe he became involved in an argument with a motorist he tried to give a breath-test. The driver grabbed the officer's service revolver and shot him dead before escaping in the police car. The body of the suspected killer was found 20km away at Mount Evelyn with the abandoned car and gun. Clarke, 37, who was married with a two-year-old son, is the third police officer to be murdered in Victoria state in seven years.
■ Afghanistan
Woman stoned to death
A woman has been stoned to death for adultery, police said yesterday, the first such incident in Afghanistan since the Taliban's ouster from power. Amina, a 29 year-old married woman, was publicly stoned to death on the basis of a district court's decision on Thursday in Argo district to the west of Faizabad, the provincial capital of Badakhshan, they said. "She has been stoned to death," provincial police chief, General Shah Jahan Noori, confirmed to Reuters, adding a team has been sent to the area to investigate the incident further. Adultery is forbidden in the Muslim country and under Islamic sharia law the penalty can range from flogging to stoning.
■ China
Flood traps 60 coal miners
A coal mine flood in northeastern China early yesterday trapped more than 60 miners, the government said. The flooded mine is in Jiaohe, a city in Jilin Province, the official Xinhua News Agency said in a brief dispatch. There was no word on the cause. Rescue work was under way, said a city worker who gave only her surname, Wang. Accidents in China's coal mines kill thousands each year. The government has repeatedly vowed to do more to crack down on safety violations, but explosions, floods, gas leaks, cave-ins and other disasters are reported every week.
■ India
American `buys' PM's house
The intelligence department is investigating reports that a fraudster sold an American businessman the prime minister's residence in the heart of New Delhi recently, a leading daily reported yesterday. The businessman forked out 35 million rupees (US$802,600) for the house that was up for sale on a Web site as a "huge sprawling mansion in the heart of Lutyen's Delhi with 24-7 running water and electricity," the Hindustan Times said. He soon received the title deed for the house and arrived in the Indian capital late in March to take possession of the house for an office he planned to set up only to discover he had been cheated.
■ Philippines
Senior diplomat murdered
A senior diplomat was murdered yesterday by three men who broke into her home in Manila in an apparent botched burglary, police said. Alicia Ramos, 64, was strangled to death while her sister, Leticia, suffered lacerations on her arms before escaping, Jovito Gutierrez, chief of police in the capital's Makati district, told reporters. Ramos, a former ambassador to Singapore and New Zealand, was an assistant secretary for Asia Pacific affairs at the foreign ministry. Her sister, Leticia, also worked at the foreign ministry. An initial investigation suggested the motive was robbery, Gutierrez said.
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