■ 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
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