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■ CHINA
Body found on mountain
A body found on a mountain in Sichuan Province may be that of a Japanese climber who disappeared 26 years ago, a mountaineering official said yesterday. Villagers reported the discovery on Mount Gongga to rescuers who are searching for missing Australian hiker Andrew Clem Lindenmayer, 47, who was reported missing in the area last month, said Liu Feng of the Sichuan Mountaineering Association. He said the body may be that of a member of a 12-strong mountaineering team from Hokkaido, Japan, who came to climb Gongga in May 1981. Eight of the climbers disappeared after falling.

■ CHINA
Sex before marriage OK
More than half of people think sex before marriage is acceptable, but a third say the partners must be in love, the Xinhua news agency said yesterday, citing results of a recent poll. A survey, initiated by the Renmin University, collected 5,951 responses from people of different age groups, professions and education in 10 provinces and municipalities including Beijing and Shanghai. The results showed 32.7 percent said premarital sex should not be condemned as long as the couple loved each other, while almost 29 percent regarded premarital sex as a private matter. While 12.8 percent said premarital sex was immoral, they also said it was understandable.

■ CHINA
Fee for baby tracking
A hospital is charging parents a daily fee to protect babies from being kidnapped, triggering anger from some mothers but a strong defense from authorities, state media reported yesterday. The hospital in Guangdong Province is asking parents to pay 40 yuan (US$5) per day to put an electronic tag on their baby. Hospital security chief Qin Suijin said the local government had given permission to introduce the charge and that it would help avoid both abductions and giving babies to the wrong parents. Other parents welcomed the technology, which works by attaching a tiny radio transmitter to the infant's ankle.

■ CHINA
Blind man built bad bridge
Two officials were jailed for letting a blind contractor build a bridge that collapsed during construction, injuring 12 workers, state media reported. Xinhua news agency said late on Monday that a court in Jiangxi Province sentenced village chief Huang Wenge to 18 months in jail and local party leader Xia Jiazhong to 12 months. The two hired a contractor for a bridge-building project, who then transferred the construction to another contractor, Xia Huaqing, who is blind. Xinhua said that when Xia Huaqing suggested changing the design, the two passed the alterations without telling senior officials. The new design was being used when the bridge collapsed in March, Xinhua said.

■ PHILIPPINES
Robbers killed in shootout
Four bank robbers were killed in a shootout with police near the Makati financial district in Manila yesterday, police said. Two other suspects were arrested as police and bank security guards thwarted the heist on Metropolitan Bank and Trust. The incident is the second attempted bank robbery to end in violence in two weeks. On Monday last week, two security guards were killed and five people wounded, including a 12-year-old student, when some 20 robbers armed with automatic rifles attempted to steal an armored van owned by Banco de Oro in the suburban Sucat district.

■ UNITED KINGDOM
Judge denies flashing
One of Britain's most senior judges exposed himself to the same woman twice on a crowded commuter train, a court heard on Monday. Lord Justice Richards, 56, exposed himself to the woman on two separate occasions on the overland train from Raynes Park, southwest London, to Waterloo, the City of Westminster magistrates court heard. The woman, a city worker in her 20s, identified the judge in a video parade after following him and taking photographs of him with her mobile phone. Lord Justice Stephens said he was "a little surprised" and it was a case of mistaken identity.

■ NETHERLAND
Ethnic cleanser sentenced
The Yugoslav war crimes tribunal convicted a wartime leader of Croatia's rebel Serbs of murder, torture and persecution yesterday and sentenced him to 35 years in prison for a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign of non-Serbs in Croatia. Judges said Milan Martic, 52, was responsible for hundreds of murders from 1991 when Serbs in the Krajina region of northeastern Croatia rebelled and set up a breakaway ministate until 1995 when Croatian forces recaptured the area. He was also was convicted of ordering two days of indiscriminate cluster bomb shelling of Zagreb in May 1995 that killed at least seven civilians and injured more than 200.

■ NIGERIA
Fighters release hostages
An armed group fighting for control of oil resources in the Niger Delta has released 12 foreign workers and one Nigerian it had been holding hostage, police said yesterday. "Twelve foreigners and one Nigerian were handed over last night [Monday]. The governor went to release them himself and brought them to Yenagoa," Julian Opaleke, the police chief of the southern Bayelsa state, told AFP. Officials gave the nationalities of the foreigners released as three Americans, five Britons, two Indians, a Filipino and a South African.

■ UNITED KINGDOM
Man jailed for honor killing
A father who ordered his daughter's brutal death for falling in love with the wrong man in a so-called honor killing was found guilty of murder on Monday. Banaz Mahmod, 20, was strangled with a boot lace, stuffed into a suitcase and buried in a back garden. More than 100 homicides are under investigation in Britain for being potential "honor killings." Mahmod Mahmod, 52, and his brother Ari Mahmod, 51, planned the killing during a family meeting, prosecutors told the court. They had accused the victim of shaming her family by ending an abusive arranged marriage, becoming too Westernized and falling in love with a man who did not come from their Iraqi village.

■ CAR
French aid worker killed
A French aid worker was shot and killed in the Central African Republic (CAR) while traveling to a town facing poor health conditions, the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders said. Elsa Serfass, 27, a logistics specialist with the group, was killed on Monday while traveling from the group's regional base in the African country as part of an "exploratory mission" of the health conditions in the town of N'Gaoundal, the organization said. Rebels control much of the area where Serfass was killed, but it was unclear if they were involved in the attack.

■ UNITED STATES
Hmongs rally for ex-general
As many as 1,000 ethnic Hmongs gathered outside a federal courthouse in Sacramento, California, on Monday in support of a former Hmong general accused of plotting to overthrow the Laotian government. "Free Vang Pao! Free the Hmong!" protesters shouted as Vang Pao's lawyers argued in court that the 77-year-old ex-general was not violent or a flight risk. A judge denied Vang bail in the case, charging him and nine others in the US with planning the coup. Hmong supporters like 26-year-old Nikki Heu said they felt betrayed by the US after Hmongs died and villages were destroyed fighting communists in the Vietnam War.

■ LIBYA
Bush warned off case
Libya urged US President George W. Bush on Monday to stay out of the case of six foreign medics sentenced to death for infecting Libyan children with HIV and allow Tripoli to reach a solution with the EU. "We hope that Bush and others will leave us to continue negotiations with the concerned parties so as to find a solution to this crisis," Abdelati Labidi, Libya's junior foreign minister, told reporters. Bush, ending a European tour in Bulgaria, said securing the release of five Bulgarian nurses was a high priority for the US. Bush spoke on Monday after EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner and German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier held talks in Libya.

■ UNITED STATES
Court orders teen's release
A Georgia court ordered the release on Monday of a man sentenced to 10 years in prison for having consensual oral sex with a girl when the two were teenagers. Georgia's attorney general said he would appeal. Genarlow Wilson, now 21, was sent to prison in 2005 for aggravated child molestation, then a felony with a minimum mandatory sentence of 10 years and lifetime registration on the state's sexual offender list. A sports star and honor student, Wilson was 17 when he was videotaped at a 2003 New Year's Eve party having oral sex with a 15-year-old girl. Georgia legislators changed the law last year to make oral sex among teens a misdemeanor.

■ UNITED STATES
Rooster `killer' may get off
A New York man who acknowledged biting the head off a rooster after a neighbor spotted the animal's headless torso outside the apartment accepted a prosecution offer on Monday that could lead to the case against him being dismissed. Humberto Rodriguez was arrested on June 29 last year and charged with animal cruelty after the neighbor called the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). Rodriguez said he killed the bird because the rooster had injured his pet pigeon, an ASPCA official said. The deal that Rodriguez accepted means he does not have to enter a guilty or not guilty plea, and his case will be dismissed if he is not arrested within the next six months.

■ UNITED STATES
Jail a wake-up call: Hilton
Paris Hilton believes her jail sentence was a message from God to change her party-loving lifestyle and become a positive role model for women who look up to her. In a phone call from the hospital facility of a prison in Los Angeles, Hilton told Barbara Walters on ABC TV's The View, on Monday: "I used to act dumb. It was an act ... and that act is no longer cute." Hilton has said she will not appeal the decision to send her back to prison to serve her 45-day term.


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