■ India
Police aide kills for blood
A police assistant in the central state of Chhattisgarh killed a fellow villager by slitting his throat with a sword and drank his blood, hoping to cure his own depression, police said yesterday. Amit Soni, 28, was unhappy with his low-paying home guard job, police said. Home guards support policemen in law enforcement tasks such as traffic management. "The man was a believer in witchcraft and he thought killing a human and drinking his blood would cure him of his mental agony and depression," police officer Dipanshu Karba said. He was struggling to look after his wife and children on a monthly salary of 1,600 rupees (US$35).
■ Hong Kong
Protesters denounce Yahoo
Protesters rallied outside the Hong Kong office of Yahoo on yesterday demonstrating against the US Internet giant for passing on information that led to the jailing of a journalist in China. The chanting protesters denounced Yahoo for providing Chinese authorities with the contact details of writer Shi Tao (師濤) who was jailed in April for 10 years for revealing state secrets. The demonstrators, members of the Democratic Party, unfurled a large banner and urged the company to review its privacy policy so that client information was protected in future.
■ Hong Kong
China's film limits to change
A senior Chinese film official said on Monday that the country's censorship system will change as China opens up more and cultural exchange increases. "Depending on the progress of opening up, as international exchanges increase in frequency, China's movie censorship system must change and adjust," Zhang Pimin, deputy director-general at the State Administration of Radio, Film and TV's Film Bureau told reporters in Hong Kong. Zhang said China only wants to uphold moral standards. He said films screened in China must extol the qualities of "truth, kindness, beauty," "true feelings and caring love," as well as "hard work leads to wealth."
■ China
Workers discover tombs
Archaeologists have unearthed a 1,700-year-old complex of tombs in eastern China that contain bronze mirrors, porcelains and ancient money, a news report said yesterday. The tombs near the port city of Ningbo south of Shanghai were uncovered by a forklift operator working at a construction site, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Inscriptions in the tombs indicate they were built in 256AD, the report said, citing Ding Youfu, a member of the archaeological team. He said they were the region's best-preserved tombs. "Figures embodying fish, beasts, dragons, phoenixes and money can be seen in the wall of the grave," Ding said. "They are incredibly refined and clearcut."
■ India
54-year detention an error
More than half-a-century ago, Machal Lalung was thought to be insane and sent to a mental asylum in India's remote northeast. A few months ago, he was set free after the National Human Rights Commission found that healthcare authorities had made a mistake and Lalung suffered only from epilepsy. Lalung's confinement for 54 years has shocked rights activists and mental health experts in a country where it is not uncommon for people to be branded insane and locked up in homes or asylums.
■ Bulgaria
Policemen steal cellphone
Two border policemen caught red-handed after stealing a mobile telephone belonging to US ambassador John Beyrle could face up to 10 years in prison, officials said on Monday. The two took the expensive telephone after Beyrle left it by an X-ray machine at Varna airport, where they worked. They denied having seen the phone when Beyrle called to enquire about it, but the high-tech gadget's inbuilt tracking system led to its eventual location in one of the men's pockets. The Interior Ministry said the policemen would be fired and their superiors disciplined following the incident.
■ Russia
Solzhenitsyn archive lost
A fire has destroyed the country cottage where former Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote some of his most famous works and stored part of his family's archive. The dacha near the village of Rodzhestvo, outside Moscow, was acquired by Solzhenitsyn in 1965. He retreated there after his expulsion from the Soviet Union Of Writers and wrote the seminal account of his time in Soviet prison camps system, The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel prize for literature in 1970 and returned to post-Soviet Russia in 1994 after 20 years' exile.
■ Russia
Vandals attack cemetery
Vandals attacked a Jewish cemetery in St Petersburg last Sunday, damaging at least 50 graves and bolstering fears about rising anti-Semitism. Police launched a criminal investigation after gravestones were knocked over and smashed in the 300-year-old Preobrazhenskoe cemetery, which had also been the target of an attack by vandals 10 days earlier. Racist attacks are not uncommon in Russia. Earlier this month a Peruvian student was beaten to death in Voronezh, to the south of Moscow, in an attack many fellow students blamed on racist gangs.
■ France
Debt drives couple to kill
A desperate couple tried to kill their five children and themselves by injecting them with insulin after running up 250,000 euros (US$300,725) of debt with 20 different credit firms, a French court heard on Monday. Emmanuel Cartier, 37, a machine operator, and his wife, Patricia, 44, a carer for the elderly, appeared at Beauvais court, north of Paris, charged with murder and attempted murder after falling into what their lawyer, Hubert Delarue, called an "infernal spiral" of consumer spending and easily obtained credit. One of the couple's daughters, Alicia, died in hospital after the injection. The others survived and now live with relatives.
■ Morocco
Dumped migrants rescued
More than 100 African migrants detained by Moroccan police as they tried to get into Spanish territory have been rescued after being dumped in the middle of the Sahara desert, according to Spanish media reports. The migrants said they had been robbed by Moroccan police, driven south into the desert and then abandoned. They were rescued by the Polisario Front movement, which seeks independence for Western Sahara. Spain has argued that the EU should tackle illegal immigration at its origins by aiding poor African countries. Morrocan Foreign Minister Mohammed Benaissa denied the claims, claiming that the Polisario Front and its allies were making the story up.
■ United Kingdom
Hopeless police dog retired
Buster the German Shepherd dog's career as a police dog has finished due to a complete lack of interest in fighting crime. The canine cop took early retirement after bosses at South Yorkshire Police noted his poor motivation -- his former handler said on Monday. Buster, who spent six months on the beat, is now living with a family in Sheffield. Police Constable David Stephenson said. "He a lacked motivation when asked to do operational work," Stephenson said. On one occasion, Buster walked straight past a suspected criminal hiding in the garden of a house and went off to cock his leg.
■ United states
Actor praised by judge
A judge reinstated actor Tom Sizemore's probation, praising him for making "remarkable" progress in his battle with drugs, but warning that if he slips again he could face 16 months in prison. "I have seen remarkable improvement. ... I believe that you know what you need to do to stay out of prison," Judge Paula Adele Mabrey told Sizemore on Monday. The actor's probation, stemming from an October conviction for methamphetamine possession, was revoked after he admitted using a prosthetic device to fake a drug test. Sizemore has been living at a Pasadena drug treatment facility since July.
■ United States
Anti-war grannies arrested
Eighteen antiwar grandmothers were arrested and face disorderly conduct charges after they tried to enlist at a military recruiting center in Times Square. When the women, including Marie Runyon, who is 90 and blind, tried to enter the station, they found it locked, said Joan Wile, director of Grandmothers against the War. "I saw a head poke up from behind the counter every once in a while. I don't know what they were afraid of," Wile said. Grandmothers against the War joined the New York City Raging Grannies and the Gray Panthers to form the Anti-War Grandmothers coalition.
■ United States
UK aid meals rejected
The US on Friday offered 330,000 packaged meals donated by Britain to feed Hurricane Katrina victims but rejected due to a US ban on British beef to needy countries. State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said the "Meals Ready to Eat," (MREs), had been held in a warehouse for more than a month after Agriculture officials said they contained British beef products. "We are certainly looking to dispose of them in the spirit of friendship and charity," Ereli told a briefing. The US bans the import of British beef products because of fears of mad cow disease.
■ United States
Video groups sue governor
Two trade groups sued California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday, challenging a law he passed banning the sale of violent video games to children under 18. The Video Software Dealers Association (VSDA) and the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), which represent the US$10 billion a year industry, filed their lawsuit in San Francisco. They claim that the law passed on Oct. 7 violated the US Constitution's First Amendment right of free expression. But Schwarzenegger, himself the star of several violent video games based on his Terminator character, vowed to fight the suit: "I will do everything in my power to preserve this new law and prevent the sale of these games to children."
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.