■ China
Roof collapse kills 16
Sixteen people were killed and 14 injured when the roof of a new house in western China collapsed as the owner staged a banquet for neighbors who helped him build it, state media reported yesterday. Yang Hongyi was treating about 50 fellow villagers to a lavish meal in his new home when the accident occurred on Tuesday near Tongliao city in the Inner Mongolia region, Xinhua news agency said. More than 40 people were trapped under the collapsed beams of the house, built in a communal effort by the residents of Yang's Wulanji village, it quoted local government sources as saying.
■ Indonesia
Nine sentenced to death
Nine men, including Chinese, French and Dutch nationals, have been sentenced to death by the nation's Supreme Court for producing millions of pills of the illegal recreational drug Ecstasy. The punishment handed down on Tuesday was harsher than that rendered last year by a lower court, which ordered the execution of two alleged Indonesian ringleaders while handing down lesser sentences to the others. A factory in Banten province, 100km west of Jakarta, could produce 300,000 Ecstasy tablets a week, prosecutors said. Some US$142 million in Ecstasy, methamphetamines, ketamine and chemical ingredients were seized at the plan.
■ Thailand
Web site pulls G-strings
A US Web site offering G-string underwear and T-shirts for dogs emblazoned with a picture of Buddha dropped them from its sales list on Wednesday after protests from Thailand. "It is a good thing they understand our sensitivity," Foreign Ministry spokesman Piriya Khempon said a day after saying the products sold on a California-based online store had offended Thais and Buddhists elsewhere. The site sells items ranging from teddy bears to beer pitchers bearing pictures of religious figures and philosophers from the Hindu god Shiva to Jesus Christ and Mahatma Gandhi. Although the site removed ads for Buddha G-strings and dog T-shirts, items depicting Jesus and Shiva remained.
■ China
Docs remove WWII bullet
Doctors have removed a bullet from a woman's skull -- 64 years after it lodged there when Japanese troops shot her, the woman's doctor and a newspaper reported on Tuesday. Jin Guangying, 77, went home on May 3 following the four-hour operation and was in fine condition, said Zhou Hong, the head of surgery at Renci Hospital in Jin's native Jiangsu Province. Jin was 13 years old in 1943 when she was shot while delivering food to her father, a member of a guerrilla unit fighting the Japanese Imperial Army the Shanghai Daily newspaper reported. While she survived under her mother's care, the bullet apparently went undetected, the paper said. It said Jin suffered from periodic headaches and seizures that sometimes left her babbling and foaming at the mouth. Fearing she might have a tumor, her family had arranged for a scan that revealed the presence of the bullet, it said.
■ China
Ban to be expanded
The government has announced a ban on exports of all antiques dating before 1911 in a bid to curb the outflow of priceless art treasures, the China Daily reported on Wednesday. An existing ban affects relics made before 1795 but the date will be pushed forward to 1911, the final year of the Qing Dynasty and the end of imperial China, it said.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Artist eats corgi in protest
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