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World News Quick Take

■ INDIA
Man waiting to die
Hundreds of people are flocking to a remote village to catch a glimpse of an old man who has spent six years lying inside his own grave waiting to die as he mourns for his wife, officials said. Basanta Roy claims he is 103 and spends his day clearing weeds from the grave and lying in it. Belonging to a Hindu caste who bury their dead, Roy dug his grave close to his wife's after she died in the late 1990s. "He cleans his grave every day and waits for his death, which seems to be eluding him," said Shyam Narayan Ram, a senior government official from Jharkhand state.

■ CHINA
Two killed in bomb blast
A bomb exploded in a hotel room in Yunnan Province on Thursday, killing a man and a woman and injuring two people, police and media said. The bomb went off early in the evening at the Jindi Hotel in Jinggu, a county dominated by Dai and Yi minorities, littering the streets outside with shards of broken glass, the Chuncheng Evening News reported. An official with the local police department said there was a bomb, but he declined to provide his name or further details of the incident. Despite the authorities' tight grip in areas which are potential sources of unrest, personal grievances sometimes explode into violence. In 2005 a farmer with terminal lung cancer set off a home-made bomb on a bus, killing one and wounding 31.

■ INDONESIA
Airline to pay compensation
A court has ordered the national airline to compensate the widow of a prominent human rights campaigner poisoned on a flight from Jakarta to Amsterdam nearly three years ago. Garuda Airlines was instructed to pay 660 million rupiah (US$73,000) in damages for negligence in the death of Munir Said Thalib, Presiding Judge Andriani Nurdin said on Thursday. But Munir's wife, Suciwati, was disappointed by the decision at the Central Jakarta District Court. "We wanted them to apologize and be audited for the sake of other passengers," she said.

■ MALAYSIA
Clerics hire `ghostbusters'
Religious authorities plan to hire "ghostbusters" to drive out evil spirits believed to have caused Muslims to follow deviant groups, a report said yesterday. The move came after some enforcement officers with the Islamic Affairs Department in northeast Kelantan state were sent out to investigate cult groups but ended up becoming their followers instead, the Star newspaper said. "Perhaps meals or drinks served to the officers were spiked," the state's Islamic department director Abdul Aziz Abdul Rahman was quoted as saying. "Otherwise, it does not make sense how a person with strong faith can easily be overcome by deviant teachings.

■ UNITED STATES
Arnie's hopes terminated
Republican presidential candidates terminated any presidential aspirations the Terminator may have had. The 10 candidates were asked in their Thursday night debate if they would support amending the Constitution to allow fellow Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger to run for US president. "Intimidating as he might be, I'm saying `no,'" US Republican Tom Tancredo of Colorado said. The US Constitution allows only natural-born citizens to seek the highest office in the country. But some supporters of California's Austrian-born governor have been pushing to change that so he could possibly join next year's race.

■ SAUDI ARABIA
Sudan, Chad ink deal
Sudan and Chad signed a reconciliation deal in Saudi Arabia on Thursday, pledging to cooperate with the UN to stabilize Sudan's Darfur region and the neighboring areas of Chad. "The two sides will adhere to working with the African Union and the United Nations to end the conflict in Darfur and east Chad to realize stability and peace for all," said a Saudi official, reading from the agreement. The accord, signed by Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir and his Chadian counterpart, Idriss Deby, stipulated "respect for each other's territorial integrity, not to interfere in each others affairs or shelter opposition forces of each party ... and eject them immediately," he said.

■ MALI
President wins second term
President Amadou Toumani Toure has won a second five-year term as leader of the West African country, according to provisional results released by the Interior Ministry. Toure received 68 percent of the vote, far more than the 51 percent he needed to avoid a runoff election, according to Interior Ministry spokesman Boubacar Sow on Thursday. The second-place finisher, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita Keita, received 19 percent. Impoverished Mali has been widely held up as a model of democracy in a turbulent region, with Sunday's vote its fourth consecutive multiparty election.

■ UNITED KINGDOM
Sex abuse vicar jailed
A vicar was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in jail on on Thursday after being found guilty of sexually abusing boys over a 30-year period. Reverend David Smith, 52, was convicted at Bristol Crown Court of 10 counts of indecent assault, one of sexual assault and one of sexual activity with a child. Some of the incidents took place during sleep-overs at St John the Evangelist vicarage in Clevedon, Somerset, where Smith was vicar.

■ SPAIN
Hungry vultures kill cow
A flock of some 100 vultures killed a cow and her newborn calf, the latest in a series of attacks in which carrion-eaters get so hungry they set upon on live animals, a Spanish farmer's union said on Thursday. The attack occurred last weekend in the Mena Valley, an area in northern Burgos province, the Spanish Interior Ministry office said. Traditionally, farmers and rural officials designate areas to dump the carcasses of farm animals like mules so vultures could feed on them. But there are fewer and fewer of these places, in part because of mad cow disease: it is now illegal to dump cow or any other ruminant remains at such feeding troughs. The result is that vultures are so hungry they swoop down near farms and feast on live animals.

■ PERU
Frog juice a cure-all
Carmen Gonzalez plucks one of the 50 frogs from the aquarium at her bus stop restaurant, bangs it against tiles to kill it and then makes two incisions along its belly and peels off the skin as if husking corn. She's preparing frog juice, a beverage revered by some Andean cultures for having the power to cure sluggishness, bronchitis, asthma and a low sex drive. A drink of so-called "Peruvian Viagra" sells for US$0.90. Gonzalez adds three ladles of hot, white bean broth, two generous spoonfuls of honey, raw aloe vera plant and several tablespoons of maca into a household blender. Then she drops the frog in. Once strained, the result is a starchy, milkshake-like liquid that stings the throat. Gonzales serves the steaming beer mugs of frog juice to at least 50 customers a day.

■ UNITED STATES
Boiling skulls not a crime
A Chicago man could not understand why anyone would call the police to report he was boiling a human skull in a pot of water on the stove. And now, after checking out what sure seemed like a promising lead -- a human head in bubbling water -- police say what Brian Sloan was doing was about as illegal as boiling hot dogs. "As weird as it is, it doesn't seem like anything is wrong," police Lieutenant Perry Nigro said. It turns out, Sloan, who had not one but four human skulls in his apartment, buys and sells human bones for medical research on eBay. The skulls were bought overseas, police said, but they may not be sold. They were still at the medical examiner's office on Thursday.

■ UNITED STATES
Tough to be a governor
A high school student got an idea of what it is like to be the governor of a US state -- and did not find it appealing. A cellphone number Katie Kamar received about five months ago once belonged to Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm. The 18-year-old said she started getting about six calls a day for Granholm. She told the Detroit Free Press newspaper her phone would ring at all hours. "It would be an honor to be governor, but people want to talk to you 24-7," she said. "This experience hasn't given me any political aspirations." Kamar now gets just one or two calls for the governor and says she will likely keep the number.

■ UNITED STATES
Ring found in ocean
When Jessica Spinks last saw her Alton High School class ring, she had been swimming off the South Pacific island of Saipan. The 2000 graduate figured when she lost the ring in the ocean that it was lost forever. Until Thursday, when Spinks, who now lives in England, got a long-distance call from her mother, Helen. Greg Moretti found the ring, engraved with Spinks' name, while scuba diving a month ago off the coast of the northern Mariana Islands. Moretti struck out trying to find Spinks over the Internet and contacted the Alton School District by e-mail and sent it the ring, which ended up in the possession of Chris Norman, the school district's financial services director. Norman contacted the media for help and Helen Spinks saw the story on the Telegraph.

■ UNITED STATES
Convict executed
A man convicted of killing a 77-year-old man during a 1984 burglary was executed by lethal injection early yesterday. David Leon Woods, 42, was pronounced dead at 12:35am, officials at the Indiana State Prison said. The US Supreme Court rejected requests that Woods' execution be stayed on Thursday, as did the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels also denied clemency for Woods on Thursday.


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