■THAILAND
Record jewel heist at fair
Three men posing as customers stole US$1.7 million in jewelry from a Bangkok gems fair over the weekend in what police yesterday called the biggest heist in recent memory in the country. The men entered a booth at the Bangkok Gems & Jewelry Fair on Saturday and asked the vendor to open a display case containing nearly 100 items with a reported value of 56 million baht (US$1.7 million), then distracted her and ran off with it, said police Lieutenant Colonel Pairote Rattanamanee, in charge of the investigation. It was not immediately clear how the men, believed to be unarmed and of Middle Eastern descent, managed to slip past security at the fair’s convention hall, he said.
■JAPAN
Female elderly top 25%
A record one in four Japanese women is aged 65 or over, internal affairs ministry figures showed yesterday, highlighting fears of a looming demographic crisis in the world’s No. 2 economy. As of Sept. 15, 25.4 percent of the female population were aged 65 or over, topping 25 percent for the first time since comparable data began in 1950, the ministry said. Men and women combined, Japan had a record 28.98 million elderly people, up by 800,000 from a year earlier. The nation’s fertility rate was 1.37 children per woman last year, well below the more than 2 percent needed to maintain the population of 127 million.
■CAMBODIA
Gold thieves use grenades
Two thieves hurled several hand grenades into a local market before robbing a gold vendor of a small amount of gold and cash, the Cambodia Daily newspaper reported yesterday. Provincial police chief Sann Sothea said six gold vendors were injured in Friday’s attack on the market in Kampong Cham province. The robbers escaped with US$250 and an unknown quantity of gold. “It is the first time that the gold robbers used grenades to rob the market vendors like this in Kampong Cham province,” Sann Sothea said. Two vendors were seriously injured in the blasts and four were slightly hurt, he said. Seven market stalls were destroyed.
■SINGAPORE
Piracy at five-year high
Piracy in the South China Sea has hit a five-year high, with tankers and large container ships most prone to attack, an international monitoring agency said yesterday. A spokeswoman for the information sharing center of the Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships in Asia said there were at least 10 cases of sea attacks reported this year. This has surpassed the previous record of nine set during 2005, and more reported cases this year were still being verified. The 10th case involved a Singapore-registered liquefied petroleum gas tanker boarded by six pirates on Sept. 19, with the attacker assaulting the duty officer and robbing the ship’s crew, the center said.
■AUSTRALIA
Inheritance law revised
Mistresses and their offspring are to get a share of the family fortune if unfaithful husbands die without making a will specifically denying them an inheritance, New South Wales legal officer Ruth Pollard said yesterday. She said the legislative changes, which will take effect next year, recognized that some people had “multiple spouses.” She said the amendments would cover same-sex partnerships in which the deceased might have been involved with more than one person and by religious and cultural groups in which men have more than one wife.
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