■JAPAN
‘Brutal’ murderer to hang
A 52-year-old man was yesterday sentenced to death for murdering seven relatives and neighbors in what the judge called a crime of extraordinary brutality. The Kobe District Court ruled Yasutaka Fujishiro should face the gallows for using a hammer and a knife to kill his 80-year-old aunt, two cousins and four others in 2004. “The brutality was extraordinary,” chief judge Makoto Okada said, public broadcaster NHK reported. Fujishiro was driven by a grudge against his relatives and neighbors when he sneaked into the house of his aunt in a small western city of Kakogawa before dawn. He killed her and her two sons and seriously wounded the wife of one of the sons. He then went to another house in the neighborhood, where he killed the family of four and set fire to the place.
■AUSTRALIA
Cyber-stalker sent to jail
A woman was yesterday sentenced to more than two years in prison for stalking American Idol contestant Diana DeGarmo over the Internet from the opposite side of the world. Tanya Maree Quattrocchi, 23, pleaded guilty earlier this month to four charges of cyber-stalking for hacking into DeGarmo’s MySpace account and intercepting her e-mails and those of her mother, Brenda, and housemate, model Donielle Morris. DeGarmo was the 2004 runner-up in the US television singing contest. The Victoria state County Court sentenced Quattrocchi, of Melbourne, to 26 months in prison.
■HONG KONG
Nine nabbed for ‘clean’ fight
Nine people were arrested after a street brawl involving workers armed with shovels and cleaning equipment, police said yesterday. The group of cleaners and renovation workers began fighting in a row over work issues during a job at a vacant shop in the North Point area on Thursday. Police were called in to break up the fight, which resulted in eight workers being taken to hospital for minor injuries and the arrest of all the workers.
■AUSTRALIA
Scrap coins return home
Damaged coins shipped to China as scrap metal are being spirited back and laundered through vending machines, Sydney police said yesterday. The curious currency swaps came to light when a 26-year-old was spotted feeding heaps of damaged A$2 (US$1.50) coins into shopping center vending machines and retrieving pristine coins by pressing the refund button. The man, who was charged with obtaining a benefit by deception, told police he bought the coins on the black market in China.
■NEW ZEALAND
Parrot snatches passport
Polly wants a passport — and isn’t above stealing one. A brazen parrot, which spotted a Scottish man’s passport in a colored bag in the luggage compartment under a tour bus, nabbed the document and made off into dense bush with it, the Southland Times newspaper reported yesterday. The bird — a parrot of the Kea variety — made its move while the bus was stopped along the highway to Milford Sound on South Island, and the driver was looking through the compartment. “My passport is somewhere out there in Fiordland. The Kea’s probably using it for fraudulent claims or something,” the passport owner, who did not want to be named, told the newspaper. “I’ll never look at a Kea in the same way.”
■INDONESIA
Rescuers search for Afghans
Rescuers searched for survivors yesterday after a wooden boat packed with Afghan migrants sank off the western coast, killing at least nine people and leaving 11 others missing, the navy said. More than a dozen Afghans have been found alive in the Malacca Strait, about 50km from land, a naval officer said.
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