■UNITED STATES
Cat-stomper resolves case
An actor who stomped his girlfriend’s cat to death has resolved his case with 500 hours of volunteering. Joseph Petcka worked at a New York City soup kitchen and other organizations. His case is expected to be closed without jail time or probation. Prosecutors said Petcka attacked the 3.6kg cat, named Norman, in a drunken, jealous rage in March 2007 after it bit him.
■UNITED STATES
Flying Chihuahuas take off
Chihuahuas have been flying out of California since other states learned about the Golden State’s glut of the little dogs. A group of 20 dogs has already arrived at the Humane Society for Greater Nashua in New Hampshire, thanks to American Airlines, Kinder4Rescue in Studio City and Grey’s Anatomy actress Katherine Heigl. Another group will leave for New Hampshire in the next four days.
■UNITED STATES
‘Captain EO’ returns
Disneyland announced plans on Friday to bring back the 3D sci-fi film Captain EO starring Michael Jackson next February, over 23 years after the attraction debuted in California. The 17-minute film starred the late King of Pop as a singing-and-dancing intergalactic commander. It was directed by Francis Ford Coppola and executive produced by George Lucas.
■UNITED STATES
‘Alien’ writer dies
Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon, whose credits include Alien and Total Recall, has died. He was 63. The Writers Guild of America says O’Bannon died on Thursday. His wife, Diane, told the Los Angeles Times her husband died at St John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, California, after a 30-year battle with Crohn’s disease. He began his career in 1974 with the science-fiction film Dark Star, which he co-wrote with director John Carpenter. O’Bannon continued writing sci-fi and horror pictures throughout his career. His credits include Invaders from Mars, Bleeders and The Return of the Living Dead, which he also directed. He is survived by his wife and his teenage son, Adam.
■MEXICO
Bodies found near resort
Police found six bullet-ridden, decomposing bodies on Friday near a highway leading to a Mexican resort on the Gulf of California. The six men were found half-buried on a dirt road off the highway frequently used by tourists from Arizona to reach the Puerto Penasco resort, widely known as Rocky Point, Sonora state police said. Also, in the Sonora border city of Nogales, state police found a man’s body in a plastic container bearing drug-related messages. The Mexican army reported on Friday that four suspected drug traffickers and two local policemen were killed on Thursday night in a shootout with soldiers in General Zuazua, a town in the outskirts of the northern city of Monterrey. Two policemen apparently had been protecting the traffickers, the army statement said. Also on Friday, gunmen killed Pedro Picasso, assistant football coach of Mexico first-division team Indios, in the border city Ciudad Juarez, said Jacinto Segura, a spokesman for the local prosecutor’s office said.A second, unidentified person also died in the shooting at a cell phone shop. Segura gave no motive, and it was unclear who was the target of the attack.
■CHINA
Two sentenced to death
A court in northeast China sentenced to death a billionaire who hired two people to kill his former business partner following a legal dispute, state media reported late on Friday. Wang Wenxiang (王文襄), 49, paid his personal secretary, Bai Peng (白鵬), and a migrant worker, Yu Yi (于毅), to murder Zhong Yishi (鐘益師) in May this year, Xinhua news agency said. The Municipal Intermediate Court of Harbin also sentenced Bai to death and gave Yu a two-year suspended death sentence, Xinhua said. Wang, whose company Xinheng Corporation is involved in real estate, hired Bai and Yu to kill Zhong, who ran a construction company, following a legal dispute over money, Xinhua reported. Bai and Yu strangled Zhong in an underground garage before burning his body in an abandoned brick kiln, the report said. In a separate case, a businesswoman was sentenced to death by a court in Zhejiang Province on Friday for cheating investors out of 384 million yuan, Xinhua said. The Intermediate People’s Court of Jinhua City handed down the sentence to Wu Ying (吳英), 28, the former owner of the Zhejiang-based Bense Holding Group. Wu collected money from investors over a two-year period, promising them high returns on their investment, but instead used the money to repay loans and run her company.
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