■ Thailand
Trio convicted for murder
A court sentenced two men to death and another to life in prison yesterday for the 1999 murder of an Australian accountant while he was restructuring the debt of a sugar mill. Mill director Pradit Siriwiriyakul was acquitted of hiring gunmen to kill Michael Wansley, 58, who had discovered that large sums of money supposed to have been paid to cane farmers had disappeared. The court sentenced Pradit's aide Boonpan Suthiwiriwan to life in jail for hiring Somchoke Suthiwiriwan and Sompong Buasakul as part of the hit squad. They were condemned to death for conspiring to kill Wansley. The actual gunman is being tried separately.
■ Malaysia
Traffic fines reduced
Authorities have lowered fines for traffic offenses by up to 70 percent in hopes that motorists will actually pay them instead of bribing traffic police to avoid tickets, a police spokesman said yesterday. Tickets for minor offenses such as speeding, beating the red light and using a cellphone while driving will now have reduced fines, Police Internal Security and Public Order Director Mustafa Abdullah told the New Straits Times. Fines were also being cut because the cost of living has ballooned with escalating gas prices, he said. However, there will be no reduction for offenses such as drunk or reckless driving or fatal accidents, he said.
■ China
Dengue cases on the rise
The number of dengue fever cases in Guangdong Province has more than doubled to 219 in the past week, half of whom are still in hospital, Xinhua news agency said late on Monday. Of the 219 people infected, mostly since June, 192 were in Guangzhou, Xinhua said.
■ Austria
Irving's appeal rejected
Austria's Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by right-wing British historian David Irving and upheld the conviction in his Holocaust denial case, the Austria Press Agency reported on Monday. In February, a Vienna state court convicted Irving of denying the Holocaust and sentenced him to three years in prison. The Alpine country's highest court rejected the appeal during a closed session last week, APA said, citing a preliminary communication from the court. A court spokesman did not return repeated calls for confirmation on Monday, and Irving's lawyer was not immediately available for comment.
■ Vietnam
Heroin ring smashed
Police said yesterday they had arrested 18 members of a heroin trafficking ring, following a two-year investigation. Alleged ringleader Can Viet Phuong and 17 accomplices had been detained in the northeastern province of Quang Ninh between early May and last week. They are accused of smuggling a total of about 37kg of the drug from northwestern mountainous provinces to Quang Ninh for onward shipment to China and other countries. The network hid the heroin "in motorcycle helmets, shoes and the window frames of buses," said the party-run Nhan Dan newspaper. Police had been investigating the ring for more than two years, the report said.
■ South Korea
Japan talks inconclusive
Seoul and Tokyo ended two days of talks yesterday with no agreement on redrawing a sea border and resolving a simmering maritime dispute centred on desolate islands claimed by both countries, an official said. Tensions have flared in the past year and a half over the islands -- called Tokto in South Korea and Takeshima in Japan -- which lie about the same distance from the mainlands of the two Asian neighbors. "Both countries shared the view that drawing up the exclusive economic zone limits was important for building a stable maritime order in Northeast Asia and for the development of the two countries' relationship," Seoul said in a statement.
■ Indonesia
Terror trial concludes
Prosecutors said they were confident judges would find a suspected Islamic militant guilty late yesterday of harboring the alleged mastermind of last year's suicide bombings on Indonesia's resort island of Bali. The verdict will be the first in the Oct. 1, 2005, strikes on three crowded restaurants that left 20 people dead, with several other rulings expected later this week. Abdul Aziz, 30, arrived at Denpasar District Court in an armored vehicle and wearing a green Islamic tunic. "This man's actions resulted in a gross terrorist attack," said prosecutor Olopan Nainggolan.
■ Australia
More troops urged for Dili
The nation wants to keep around 650 troops in troubled East Timor even though the UN envisages a much smaller international force, the foreign minister said yesterday. Alexander Downer told national broadcaster ABC that while the UN had provided for just 350 troops to back up 1,600 international police, Canberra wanted to keep around 650 Australian soldiers in the troubled state. Some 3,200 Australian-led peacekeepers have been deployed in Dili since May, when the city was plagued by deadly clashes following the dismissal of 600 deserting soldiers. Sporadic violence has continued since.
■ Austria
Former hostage to go on TV
The teenager who made a dramatic escape after eight years of captivity in a windowless cell has agreed to a televised interview this week -- giving Austrians their first glimpse of the young woman whose nightmare has fascinated the nation. Public broadcaster ORF will air its interview with 18-year-old Natascha Kampusch tonight, although she will be "shielded" in some way to ensure she is not recognizable on the street, media representative Dieter Ecker said. Kampusch has been besieged by hundreds of requests for interviews since she bolted to freedom on Aug. 23, but so far she has agreed to grant only three.
■ Jordan
Gunman acted alone: official
An investigation into a deadly gun attack on Western holidaymakers in Amman has found that the assailant acted alone and had no support from "terrorist" groups, Jordanian officials said yesterday. "The result of the primary investigation is that this was a lone act. He does not have any connections with terrorist organizations," government spokesman Nasser Jawdeh told reporters. He said the "criminal act" was carried out by Nabil Ahmad Issa Jaaoura, 38, a Jordanian of Palestinian origin who was arrested after Monday's shooting that left a British tourist dead and five Western holidaymakers wounded.
■ Russia
Joint exercises nixed
A Russian news agency reported yesterday that Russia's Defense Ministry announced the cancelation of joint military exercises with US forces set for later this month because of unspecified problems with US personnel. Russian Defense Ministry officials said they could not confirm the report. The US Embassy in Moscow had no immediate comment. Interfax quoted what it said was a high-ranking Defense Ministry official as saying, "The reason is the unresolved question on the status of US personnel commanding the exercises."
■ Poland
Priests asked to shame
Prosecutors in overwhelmingly Catholic Poland have asked priests to read out the names of drunk drivers from the pulpit as part of efforts to reduce the country's high road death rate. Church leaders have not said yet whether they will support the scheme, aimed to shame drivers into sobriety. "We post the names of convicted drunk drivers at town halls," said Rafal Grabia, a prosecutor in the mountain town of Zywiec in southern Poland. "But who reads that? The information is not reaching family, friends and neighbors." More than 98,000 have died on Polish roads since 1991, making Poles 2.5 times more likely to die in road accidents than Swedes or UK citizens, EU figures show.
■ Israel
Paraglider hits minefield
An Israeli man was stuck in the middle of a minefield near the Syrian border on Saturday after crashing his paraglider and severely injuring himself. The unidentified man took off from a peak in the Golan Heights and drifted east toward the Syrian and Jordanian borders before crashing in the minefield, injuring his legs and breaking several bones, rescue services said. "He's in the process of being rescued," an army spokesman said. Paragliding, in which participants jump off tall peaks or cliffs with a parachute strapped to their back, is a popular sport in the Golan.
■ Argentina
Tourists killed in bus crash
A bus carrying US, South African and Spanish tourists collided with a truck in the northeast on Monday in an accident that left 10 people dead and another 10 injured, police said. Eight tourists, the bus driver and the trucker died in the crash in the town of Garuape, local police said. The dead were not immediately identified. The bus hit the truck as the driver tried to overtake two other buses. The bus was traveling from the central city of Cordoba to the huge Iguazu Falls on the Argentina-Brazil border.
■ Egypt
Train crash toll rises to five
An Egyptian passenger train and a freight train collided head-on on Monday, killing up to five people and injuring 28 others in the second fatal rail crash in Egypt in two weeks, security sources said. The sources said rescue workers had recovered two bodies from the wreckage including the driver of one of the trains, and were working to free three more bodies believed trapped under two overturned carriages. About 60 ambulances raced to the scene of the crash in farmland in Shibin al-Qanater, 30km north of Cairo, witnesses said. The official state news agency MENA reported earlier that two people had been confirmed dead. There was no immediate word on the cause of Monday's crash.
■ United States
Hefty kids don't slim down
Pudgy toddlers face a good chance of becoming overweight 12-year-olds, according to government research that shoots down the notion that kids naturally outgrow early chubbiness. Children who were overweight at age 2 or later during their preschool years faced a risk five-times greater risk of being overweight at age 12 than youngsters who were not overweight early on, the study found. Sixty percent of the children who were overweight during the preschool period were overweight at age 12. Children were considered overweight if their body-mass index was in the 85th percentile or higher for their gender and age.
■ Israel
Police chase their own car
A police pursuit of suspected car thieves through the streets of an Israeli city ended with officers reporting another stolen vehicle -- their own. After crashing their own car into an electricity pole during the chase in the Tel Aviv suburb of Bnei Brak, the three suspects abandoned it and tried to escape on foot, a police spokesman said on Sunday. Two policemen bolted from their police cruiser to try to catch them. One of the suspected thieves was arrested, another got away and the third man doubled back, jumped into the police car and sped off, the spokesman said. It was later found abandoned, its radio and computer screen smashed.
■ Brazil
Tunneling thieves arrested
Police on Friday arrested 28 members of a major criminal gang that has terrorized Sao Paulo in recent months. The gangsters were preparing to rob two banks by digging a tunnel. The suspects were all members of the gang called First Command of the Capital, or PCC in its Portuguese acronym, police said. Almost 200 people have died in Sao Paulo since May in three separate waves of attacks by the PCC on police stations, banks and government buildings. The gang is also tied to the country's biggest-ever bank robbery, which happened last year. At the time of the arrests in downtown Porto Alegre, 22 people were digging an 80m-long tunnel into the safes of two banks.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of