■ INDIA
Public smoking banned
New Delhi imposed a new ban on smoking in public places on Thursday, four years after a largely ignored earlier prohibition saw people continue to puff away in restaurants, clubs and bars. One in three smokes some form of tobacco, officials say, and a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in February this year said one in every 10 deaths in the country from 2010 would be smoking-related.
■ INDIA
Stampede death toll rises
The death toll from a stampede of Hindu worshippers at a temple in northwestern town of Jodhpur has risen to 224, officials said yesterday. Jodhpur’s top administrative official Kiran Soni Gupta said by telephone that 77 more deaths reported by relatives were confirmed by the local administration, adding to the earlier death toll of 147. Doctors at two state-run hospitals where 54 injured were admitted for treatment said the condition of two wounded was “critical.”
■ RUSSIA
Daily links Ukraine, Georgia
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko sold arms to Georgia to help it fight the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia and Russia, the Russian daily Izvestia reported yesterday, citing documents it had seen. Over the last two years, Ukraine had sold Georgia seven Buk-M1 air-defense systems, Izvestia said. Although the weapons systems were indispensable for the protection of Ukrainian strategic sites, Yushchenko had allowed nearly half of his country’s own stocks to be sold off, wrote the paper. Ukraine had also sold Georgia 200 Strela and Igla air-defense systems, Soviet-era T-72 assault tanks and Grad rocket-launchers, the paper said. These rocket-launchers, “chosen with the help of the United States” had been used by the Georgian army on Aug. 8 when it launched its bid to take back control of South Ossetia by force, Izvestia said.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Holocaust denier arrested
An Australian jailed in Germany and Austria for expounding his view that there were no mass killings of Jews in World War II has been arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport, news reports said yesterday. Former high school teacher Gerald Frederick Toben, 64, was refused bail in London’s Westminster Magistrate’s court and was to appear again today for an extradition hearing, Australia’s ABC Radio reported. Toben was arrested under a EU arrest warrant because he is wanted by the District Court in Mannheim, Germany, on charges of publishing material on the Internet of an anti-Semitic and/or revisionist nature.
■ GERMANY
Jobless man hands in cash
An unemployed construction worker found a package filled with 16,000 euros (US$22,600) in cash and items of gold jewelry beside a busy road — and turned it over to authorities, police said on Wednesday. The 56-year-old father of a disabled son, whose family relies on state unemployment benefits of about 600 euros per month, spotted the large brown envelope while cycling along a road near Ermstedt in the eastern state of Thuringia, a police spokesman said. “It would have come in handy for the heating bill. But my conscience got the better of me. It was a hard decision to go to the police,” the finder, Thomas Liedtke, was quoted as saying in Bild newspaper. The origins of the money were not known, the police said.
■ FRANCE
Manual on radicals issued
Security officials from several European countries have developed a manual to help prison authorities prevent their jails from becoming incubators for Muslim extremists. The manual, developed by France, Germany and Austria, includes signs that may indicate that a prisoner was becoming radicalized, including the presence of a growing beard. The document was distributed at a two-day closed-door conference of European security experts that ended in Paris on Wednesday. Prisons “can be a facilitator and an accelerator” of radicalization and inmates are often “strongly destabilized” and therefore malleable, said Christophe Chaboud, head of France’s Anti-Terrorist Coordination Unit. The manual contains input from European and other security officials, including New York City police, Chaboud said. For security reasons, there are no plans to make its contents public. Hugues de Suremain, a spokesman for the International Prison Observatory, voiced fears the manual could further stigmatize Muslim inmates, who lack the range of religious benefits provided to Christians.
■ MEXICO
‘Condom-mobile’ robbed
Missing in the country: 5,000 condoms, sound equipment and a motor used to inflate a giant prophylactic, all stolen from a “condom-mobile” used to promote HIV/AIDS awareness. The coordinator of an HIV/AIDS awareness tour, Polo Gomez, said the truck was taken on Sunday from its parking spot in front of a friend’s house in Mexico City. It was recovered on Wednesday in a shopping mall parking lot in a northern suburb — minus the condoms and the equipment. Gomez said the thieves left some 800 HIV tests and a 7m inflatable prophylactic, which were also in the vehicle. The truck wasn’t hard to locate. It features painted images of a peeled banana, the exposed part shaped like a condom.
■ MEXICO
Fattest man to get married
Manuel Uribe, the world’s fattest man in last year’s Guinness Book of Records, said on Wednesday that he would wed this month, after losing nearly half his original weight. “It will be a hefty wedding, on a large scale, but with a low-calorie banquet,” the 43-year-old said. Uribe, who lives in his bed, in February said he had dropped 230kg from 590kg. He said he would marry a widow named Claudia, to whom he has been engaged for two years, on October 26 at home in Monterrey. The media-friendly man expanded his wedding plans after offers of sponsorship from international magazines, television stations and local mayors who offered a cake for 400 guests.
■ MEXICO
Decapitations, bodies found
Police found a headless body and the head of another person, as well as nine other bodies in the north of the country on Wednesday in the latest spate of gruesome killings in the country. The decapitated body of a man in his 30s lay alongside its head in an abandoned house in the center of the volatile city of Ciudad Juarez, bordering the US, said Alejandro Pariente, spokesman for Chihuahua State authorities. Two dogs were found playing with the head of another person in the municipality of Casas Grandes in the same state, forensic services said. The bodies of six other men and one women were found in other areas of the northern state on Wednesday, authorities said.
■ UNITED STATES
Skeleton sells for US$500
Richards’ Auction Gallery in Tipton, Indiana, had one interesting item up for sale this week just in time for Halloween: A real human skeleton. The bones, wired together to keep them in place, were sold for US$500 on Tuesday. The winning bidder then donated the skeleton — believed to be that of a European man — to a forensics center for research. Auctioneer Tim Richards found the skeleton among furniture and boxed items he collected from New Castle for the auction. The bones had apparently been someone’s macabre decoration.
■ VENEZUELA
Opposition leader killed
Authorities in Caracas are investigating the fatal shooting of a student leader who helped organize protests against constitutional amendments proposed by President Hugo Chavez. Julio Soto, a student leader at the University of Zulia, was killed on Wednesday by unidentified gunmen in the western city of Maracaibo. Local Police Chief Jose Gonzalez said he believes Soto was specifically targeted because the assailants sprayed his vehicle with gunfire and then fled without taking anything. But Justice Minister Tarek El Aissami said authorities have not yet determined if the killing was politically motivated.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the