■ PHILIPPINES
Lightning kills mourner
A woman who was on her way to a neighbor's wake was fatally struck by lightning, while seven other mourners were injured on the island of Guimaras, officials said yesterday. Marilou Ecol, 45, suffered severe burns and died on the spot as she and the seven others huddled under a shed in Nueva Valencia in Guimaras Province during a rain storm on Tuesday, provincial disaster relief coordinator Teresita Siazon said. Ecol's 12-year-old daughter, Mariel, who was hugging her mother when the lightning struck, suffered second degree burns, Siazon said in a telephone interview. Two boys, aged 12 and 16, also suffered burns but were not seriously hurt, Siazon said. The victims were walking to the wake of a dead neighbor and sought shelter from the rain under the shed, she said.
■ MYANMAR
Famous poet arrested
A prominent poet was arrested after authorities deciphered a poem that contained a hidden message criticizing junta leader Than Shwe, colleagues said yesterday. Authorities arrested Saw Wai on Tuesday, a day after his poem February 14 was published in a popular weekly magazine, said friends and colleagues who spoke on condition of anonymity. The eight-lined poem was about love and romance ahead of Valentine's Day. But if read vertically, the first word of each line formed the phrase: "Power crazy senior general Than Shwe." Head of the junta since 1992, Than Shwe has little tolerance for criticism. He keeps himself sequestered in his newly built capital, Naypyitaw, deep in the countryside. Several news vendors said the journal, A Chit (Love), an entertainment and gossip magazine, had been removed from news stands.
■ MALAYSIA
Cow killed after car crash
Thieves stole an adult cow, squeezed it into the back seat of a car and drove off with it, but abandoned the animal when the vehicle crashed into a tree, police said yesterday. The cow, injured in the crash, was slaughtered by villagers. The thieves managed to push the cow into the back of a mid-sized sedan on Tuesday night, but were spotted by villagers who gave chase, said a police official in the northern state of Kedah. It was not clear how the thieves managed to get the cow into the car. A blurry photograph in the New Straits Times showed the cow's head with closed eyes sticking out of the back seat window of the crashed car.
■ CHINA
CCP pushes `pure' texting
Chinese Communist Party officials in Henan Province have urged mobile phone-wielding citizens to send rousing "red" text messages instead of blue jokes, but the response has been more derision than revolution. Nanyang city recently told residents to "mobilize to compose and send healthy, positive, uplifting red text messages," the China Youth Daily reported yesterday. "Red sentences occupy the text message culture front!" party officials urged in a local newspaper, the report said. "The broad masses of residents should mobilize ... and fight the vulgar with the healthy,"the announcement said. But many people have responded to the campaign with only more catcalls, the newspaper reported. "Too funny, this itself is a joke," said one message pasted on an Internet site. Others wondered whether officials should be doing more useful things. "All of you wallow in wine and women and want us to be pure-minded and puritanical," one Nanyang resident told the paper. "It's going a bit far."
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