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■ CAMBODIA

Husband takes half a house

A couple decided to circumvent the country’s notoriously corrupt and expensive court system in their divorce case by dividing their house in half, literally, local media reported on Thursday. The Khmer-language Koh Santepheap newspaper featured a front-page photo of a precariously perched half of the stilted former home of Meuon Rima and his ex-wife Nhang, both 40, which Rima sawed with surgical precision down the middle. Rima, who sought a divorce on the grounds that his wife refused to nurse him during a recent illness, was last seen driving away from the village in southeastern Prey Veng province with his half of the home.



■ THAILAND

Candidate punches TV host

An underdog in Sunday’s election for governor of Bangkok punched and kicked a television journalist on Thursday, saying he was provoked by tough questions during a live interview. Chuvit Kamolvisit, dubbed Bangkok’s massage parlor king by the Thai press, later apologized for losing his temper and assaulting host Visarn Dilokwanich after the interview.



■ THAILAND

Foreign husbands provide

Foreign husbands of women from Buriram province are pumping 230 million baht (US$6.7 million) into the local economy each year in remittances and spending, a recent survey of the incomes of mixed marriages revealed yesterday. A survey of 967 mixed marriages registered in Buriram Province, 300km northeast of Bangkok, showed foreign husbands have proven good providers for the local economy, the Bangkok Post newspaper reported. Statistics expert Saijit Klutanont estimated that 66 percent of Buriram women married to foreigners had moved overseas and remitted between 10,000 to 20,000 baht (US$294 to US$588) back to their families each month. The remaining 329 couples lived in Buriram, where much of the foreigners’ monthly incomes of between 50,000 to 80,000 stayed.



■ MALAYSIA

Couple killed for smoking

Relatives beat a couple to death in a ritual apparently meant to help the man stop smoking, police said yesterday. The couple died of head injuries after being beaten with broomsticks and motorbike helmets during a family gathering at a Kuala Lumpur home on Wednesday, said Ku Chin Wah, head of the city’s crime investigations department. One of the couple’s sons and three other relatives remain in custody. Four other detained family members have been released, Ku said. Those detained said a nephew suggested the beating ritual after the man said he could not stop smoking and the woman complained of a liver ailment, Ku said.



■ CAMBODIA

Five former rebels face trial

Five former Khmer Rouge soldiers went on trial yesterday in Phnom Phen, charged in the 1996 murders of a British deminer and his translator. Briton Christopher Howes and his interpreter, Houn Hourth, were abducted along with a group of local co-workers in March 1996 by Khmer Rouge guerrillas while clearing mines near the Angkor Wat temple complex, a World Heritage Site in north-western Cambodia. Howes, 37, a former soldier, was said to have behaved heroically during the ordeal, persuading the kidnappers to free all his colleagues except himself and Hourth. Their fate remained a mystery for more than two years, but Scotland Yard confirmed in 1998 that they had been killed in the remote, northern former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Anlong Veng.



■ UKRAINE

President takes rival’s plane

President Viktor Yushchenko seized the aircraft of his rival, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, on Thursday after his plane was forced into an emergency landing. His aircraft had to abandon its journey from Kiev to the western city of Lviv because of “technical problems,” the president’s office said. Upon returning to the airport near Kiev, his delegation then took the plane that was waiting for Tymoshenko, who was due to travel to Moscow for talks with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Tymoshenko later took a charter flight to Moscow.



■ UNITED KINGDOM

School uses sign language

Staff and pupils at a primary school in Brighton, where the children speak 26 languages between them, have turned to sign language to ease their communication problems. Lithuanian, Polish, Arabic, Farsi, Japanese, Mandarin, Wolof and Shona are among the mother tongues of the 55 pupils at Fairlight primary school for whom English is not their first language. Now all the school’s 300 children — and their teachers — are learning to finger-spell words in British sign language and communicate their emotions and feelings using the signing system Makaton. Fairlight’s diversity stems from the fact it attracts many pupils whose parents are international students or academics.



■ RUSSIA

More than 215,000 guns lost

Police say they are searching for more than 215,000 guns that have gone missing from arsenals around the country. An official police list of “missing firearms” has 215,326 entries, up from less than 1,000 in 1991, Interior Ministry official Sergei Fedkin told the Interfax news agency on Thursday. Fedkin said his own ministry was not responsible for the losses. “Experts believe the main source of arms in the criminal world is military bases and, above all, the defense ministry,” he said.



■ FINLAND

Web site pulls game

An Internet game in which players roam a school and kill kindergarteners with a shotgun has been pulled from a children’s gaming site one week after the country’s worst school shooting. “We have removed pages from our site that are not necessarily appropriate for younger family members,” lastenpelit.fi said in a statement on its Web site. The game, Kindergarten Killer, can be found on the Web.



■ BURUNDI

Albinos go into hiding

Albinos have been forced to go into police protection after gangs killed three of them for their body parts, reports said. The BBC said that four albinos were taken to a provincial town, where police guarded them. Two of the albinos killed were found with limbs missing, the BBC quoted local police as saying. An investigation by the BBC in Tanzania claimed witchdoctors were behind the killings of 26 albinos in last than a year. Albino body parts are believed to be of use in potions to make people rich.



■ RUSSIA

Man eats ex-wife’s passport

A man faces a jail term after eating part of his ex-wife’s passport during a dispute over her right to live in his apartment. The man tore out the page from her passport and ate it in the presence of police dealing with the dispute in Nizhny Novgorod, an official was quoted as saying in the daily Vremya Novostei. The man has been charged with “destroying official documents,” assault and threatening behavior. The page contained a registration stamp confirming the ex-wife’s right to live in the apartment.



■ UNITED STATES

Ike uncovers huge fossil

A paleontologist whose beach-front home in Caplen, Texas, was destroyed during Hurricane Ike has found a football-sized tooth in the debris. Dorothy Sisk and Jim Westgate are scientists at Lamar University. They discovered the fossil tooth in the front yard of Sisk’s home in Caplen on the devastated Bolivar Peninsula. Westgate believes the fossil is from a Columbian mammoth common in North America until around 10,000 years ago. The tooth looks like a series of boot soles or slices of bread wedged together. It is expected to be sent to the Texas Memorial Museum in Austin.



■ MEXICO

Armed men steal planes

Armed men stole five small planes from a private airstrip in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa on Tuesday by overpowering a police officer and flying away, security forces said. The group of around 20 men stormed the small airstrip at dawn, seized the officer’s gun, tied him up, filled the planes with fuel and flew off, said Emma Quiroz, spokeswoman for the government’s anti-organized crime operations in Sinaloa. It was not clear if there was a link to drug gangs who use small aircraft to spirit cocaine through northern Mexico toward the US.



■ UNITED STATES

Engineer’s wife sent to jail

The wife of an engineer who exported US defense technology to China has been sentenced in Santa Ana, California, to prison for her role in the plot. Rebecca Laiwah Chiu was sentenced on Thursday in federal court to three years in prison after pleading guilty last year to acting as an unregistered foreign agent. Her husband is Tai Mak. He was sentenced to more than 20 years in prison this year. Prosecutors say he was stealing information on submarine propulsion systems from defense contractor Power Paragon, where he worked.



■ VENEZUELA

Chavez orders murder hunt

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has ordered authorities to quickly solve the murder of a prominent student leader who helped lead opposition protests. Education Minister Hector Navarro told Venezuela’s state news agency on Thursday that Chavez wants police to catch those who killed Julio Soto “as soon as possible.” The student leader’s vehicle was sprayed with gunfire on Wednesday as he was leaving his university in the western city of Maracaibo. Police said nothing was stolen from him. It remains unclear if the killing was politically motivated. Soto helped lead protests last year against sweeping constitutional changes proposed by Chavez.



■ UNITED KINGDOM

Ambassadors letter leaked

Britain’s ambassador to Washington believes Barack Obama is “maybe aloof, insensitive” and “was finding his feet” before being “diverted” by his quest for the White House, a report said yesterday. The Daily Telegraph newspaper reported that ambassador Nigel Sheinwald wrote to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown two months ago to brief him on the Democratic nominee for US president, in sometimes unflattering detail. Although describing Obama’s speeches as “elegant” and “mesmerizing” and saying the Illinois senator was “highly intelligent” and had “star quality,” the letter warned his policies were “still evolving,” the Telegraph said. The leaking of the letter is likely to prove embarrassing for Brown, who was forced to deny last month that he backed Obama after writing an article in which he appeared to support the Democrats.




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