■INDIA
Fakir charged in murder rite
Police in the southern city of Madurai said on Monday they had arrested a self-styled Muslim fakir, or holy man, for the gruesome murder of an infant boy in a ritual he believed would lend him supernatural powers. Abdul Gafoor, a mystic who claimed he could perform magical feats, had confessed to kidnapping the 18-month-old and then beheading him, police inspector Chidambaram Murugesan said. Gafoor, aided by a female accomplice, had collected a bottle of the child’s blood and then buried the torso, after which he performed various rituals before throwing the bottle into the sea.
■CHINA
Police told to respect rights
The government has ordered police to show more respect for the rights of criminal suspects following controversy over cases in which prostitutes were paraded in public, state media reported yesterday. The order was contained in a circular issued nationwide by the Ministry of Public Security and was prompted by the recent vice cases, the China Daily reported.
■AUSTRALIA
Tours launched in Klingon
Staff at the Jenolan Caves west of Sydney have added a new out-of-this-world attraction — a tour in the Star Trek language Klingon. Currently a self-guided audio tour at the caves in the Blue Mountains is offered in eight languages, but staff came up with the idea of adding the fictional language Klingon as the caves did once feature in the popular TV series. “In the Star Trek universe, Jenolan Caves was first immortalized in the Next Generation episode ‘Relics,’ through the naming of a ‘Sydney Class’ Starship — the USS Jenolan,” the Jenolan Caves Reserve Trust said in a statement.
■AUSTRALIA
Refugee center may reopen
Opposition leaders discussed reopening a refugee processing center in Nauru with the South Pacific island nation’s foreign minister yesterday, despite allegations of human rights abuses at the facility before it closed. Prime Minister Julia Gillard has proposed opening a new offshore center to stem the growing tide of asylum seekers washing up on the country’s shores. She said the facility must be in a country that has signed the UN refugee charter and suggested East Timor. Nauru is not a signatory to the charter, but has said it would consider signing, and it recently offered to reopen a detention center where it housed asylum seekers from 2001 to 2007.
■SOUTH KOREA
Man sent back to N Korea
China has repatriated an 81-year-old former South Korean prisoner of war who had fled North Korea decades after being captured, a newspaper report and an activist said yesterday. Dong-a Ilbo quoted an unidentified government official as saying the man surnamed Jung was sent back despite intensive diplomatic efforts by Seoul to bring him to the South. A foreign ministry spokeswoman said she had no information. Choi Sung-Yong, an activist who campaigns for the return of South Korean abductees, said Jung was forcibly returned to the North in September last year, about a month after being arrested in China where he was hiding.
■EGYPT
Policemen stand trial
Two policemen stood trial yesterday charged with the illegal arrest and torture of an anti-corruption activist who died in their custody, a case that has drawn protests at home and abroad. Awad Suleiman and Mahmoud Salah have not been charged with direct responsibility for the death of Khaled Said, who died on June 6 in the northern coastal city of Alexandria. Witnesses and rights groups say the policemen dragged Said out of an Internet cafe and beat him to death. Egyptian authorities say he died choking on drugs.
■RUSSIA
Satanists jailed for murder
Six youths who declared themselves to be Satanists were on Monday handed jail sentences of up to 20 years for ritually killing and then dismembering four teenagers in a forest. The six — who were all teenagers at the time of the crime — reportedly also ate the body parts of their victims. in a wooded area outside the city of Yaroslavl northeast of Moscow. The group were found guilty of “murdering four people with the aim of carrying out an initiation ritual into a sect and of desecrating the bodies of the dead,” the Yaroslavl regional court said in a statement. The group, four of whom were minors at the time, killed the four teenagers in June 2008, the Interfax news agency reported.
■VATICAN CITY
Painting sparks debate
The city-state’s top art historian shot down a report in its own newspaper that suggested a recently discovered painting was a Caravaggio. The head of the Vatican Museums, Antonio Paolucci, wrote in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano that the work was most likely a copy of an original by a Caravaggio-influenced artist. It was L’Osservatore itself that set the art world aflutter last week with a front-page article headlined “A New Caravaggio,” detailing the artistry behind the Martyrdom of St Lawrence, which had been discovered in the sacristy of a Jesuit church in Rome.
■CANADA
Spy’s passport revoked
The government has revoked the passport of an alleged Russian spy who fled after being freed on bail in Cyprus, Passport Canada spokeswoman Veronique Robitaille said on Monday. Cypriot officials confirmed earlier this month that Christopher Metsos, the alleged paymaster of a Russian espionage ring, had assumed the identity of a dead five-year-old Canadian boy to obtain a passport. Metsos was among 11 people — four of whom claimed to be Canadian — indicted on charges of conspiring to act as secret agents in the US on behalf of the SVR, the successor to the KGB. The 10 arrested in the US were sent back to Moscow after pleading guilty, but Metsos has not resurfaced since skipping bail in Cyprus.
■MEXICO
Inmates protest at prison
Dozens of prisoners protested on the roof of a prison in Gomez Palacio, Durango State, on Monday after their guards and officials were accused of releasing inmates to carry out drug-related revenge killings. Inmates gathered on the roof of the prison as about 60 family members protested outside to demand the return of the prison’s director, who was detained after being accused of allowing prisoners out to commit killings. The protesters also demand the restoration of prison visits and a ban on transfers of high-risk prisoners.
■BRAZIL
Protesters free workers
Protesters on Monday released workers from the construction site of an Amazon hydroelectric plant that Indians say is being built on an ancient burial ground. The Indians initially freed about 100 workers and later the last five senior employees who had been kept inside the Dardanelos plant in the city of Aripuana, national Indian bureau coordinator Antonio Carlos Ferreira Aquino said. On Sunday, about 300 Indians from eight tribes blocked them from entering or leaving the construction site. They were demanding compensation for what they consider an offense to their culture and traditions, and they released the workers after winning a meeting with authorities for talks on reparations. Aquino said state officials authorized the plant’s construction before the site was known to be on top of the burial ground.
■UNITED STATES
Cancer faker jailed
A Tennessee judge has sentenced a woman to 42 months in prison for faking breast cancer, telling her it was “reprehensible” that she took donations of sick leave, money and cancer patient support services for five years. “It seems like to me some confinement is necessary,” Hamilton County Criminal Court Judge Don Poole said on Monday after a four-hour hearing in which attorneys for 39-year-old Keele Maynor of Chattanooga asked for a probation sentence that would allow her to work and pay about US$54,000 in restitution. Poole added 10 years of probation to the sentence for Maynor, a mother of three, and ordered her taken into custody immediately. She will be eligible for parole after serving one-third of the prison sentence. He ordered her to start making US$300 monthly restitution payments after her release.
■UNITED STATES
Bewigged robber nabbed
Swissvale, Pennsylvania, police say a man robbed a bank wearing a woman’s blond wig, fake breasts under a sweater and clown pants. Police say 48-year-old Dennis Hawkins was sitting in a parked car covered in red dye from an exploding packet in a bag of money when he was arrested on Saturday.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema