NEPAL
Elephant kills three villagers
Police say a wild elephant entered a village in southeastern Nepal and trampled three villagers to death and injured two more. Police official Satya Narayan Rajbangsi says the elephant entered Prithvinagar village on Wednesday night and trampled the villagers before being chased away. The village is located about 250km southeast of Katmandu, near the border with India. Rajbangsi said on Friday that the village has never been attacked by elephants before. Wild elephants have been known to enter villages looking for stored grains and sugarcane and sometimes attack humans when they try to stop them.
CAMBODIA
Former anti-drug chief jailed
A court official says the former head of Cambodia’s anti-drug trafficking agency has been sentenced to life in prison for drug-related corruption. Prosecutor Phan Vanrath says the Banteay Meanchey provincial court yesterday sentenced former police Lieutenant General Moek Dara for taking bribes and masterminding drug trafficking. Moek Dara was secretary-general of the National Authority for Combating Drugs before his arrest in January last year. His aide, Chea Leng, was sentenced to life in prison on the same charges. Former anti-drug officer Morn Deurn, who remains at large, was sentenced in absentia to 25 years. The court, about 300km northwest of Phnom Penh, fined the trio nearly US$500,000 — the same amount they took in bribes.
CHINA
18 people die in bus crash
A bus went out of control and slipped from a snow-covered bridge in southern China, killing at least 18 people and injuring 37, state media reported yesterday. The overloaded bus was carrying 57 people when it crashed in Guizhou Province on Wednesday afternoon, the Xinhua news agency said. It had been traveling from Anhui Province when it plunged from the bridge into a valley 10m below. The accident follows the deaths of 13 people on Tuesday in central Hunan Province, where a truck crossed a highway divider and crashed head-on into a bus traveling in the opposite direction. A separate truck-bus collision in southwestern Yunnan Province on Wednesday killed eight and injured 13, Xinhua said yesterday.
VIETNAM
90kg tumor cut away
A man left unable to walk by a tumor on his right leg that weighs more than the rest of his body went under the knife yesterday to have the growth removed, hospital officials said. Nguyen Duy Hai’s massive 90kg tumor is to be cut away by a team of doctors in a risky 10-hour procedure that has only a 50 percent success rate, the France-Vietnam hospital in Ho Chi Minh City said. Hai, 31, who suffers from a rare genetic disorder, has been living with the tumor since he was four years old. He had part of his leg amputated when he was 17, but the tumor, which is not cancerous, continued to expand, making it difficult for Hai to walk and sleep.
SOUTH KOREA
North Korean spy charged
Prosecutors yesterday charged a North Korean spy who was arrested after entering the country posing as a refugee, a report said. The 47-year-old surnamed Kim arrived in June last year with 14 genuine refugees, but was arrested last November after his real identity was revealed during questioning, Yonhap news agency said. Kim had crossed the Tumen River into China and traveled on to Thailand with the others
BRAZIL
Lula da Silva starts therapy
Former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva began a first session of radiation therapy on Wednesday for a cancerous tumor in his throat. The popular 66-year-old former president spent several hours at Sao Paulo’s Sirio-Libanes Hospital, before returning to his home in the Sao Paulo suburb of Sao Bernardo do Campo, officials said. A statement from the hospital said Lula would undergo “daily radiation sessions from Monday to Friday.” The outpatient treatment, expected to last between five and seven weeks, aims to completely eradicate the tumor, which was first detected in October. Late last year, Lula underwent three chemotherapy sessions, also at Sirio-Libanes Hospital, and doctors said the last one shrank his cancerous tumor by 75 percent.
BRAZIL
Floods kill at least eight
Civil defense officials say floods and mudslides caused by heavy rains have killed at least eight people and forced more than 13,000 to leave their homes in the southeast of the country. The civil defense department in Minas Gerais State said on Wednesday on its Web site that nearly 9,800 people left their homes as rivers overflowed their banks and mudslides hit several areas. Five people drowned or were killed by mudslides. In Rio de Janeiro, the civil defense service said the floods killed three people and forced 3,800 to leave their homes. Outside Rio, floods threaten the same hillside communities that were hit a year ago by mudslides and floods that killed more than 800 people, forcing about 20,000 from their homes.
CANADA
Bishop sentenced for porn
A former Roman Catholic bishop was sentenced on Wednesday to 15 months in prison for importing child pornography, some laced with religious imagery, but he was set to be freed after already serving time in jail. Raymond Lahey, 71, resigned as head of the Nova Scotia diocese of Antigonish in 2009 after a search at the Ottawa airport of his laptop computer uncovered a cache of child pornography. He pleaded guilty in May. The more than 600 photographs and videos found by police included scenes of bondage, and boys in sex acts wearing a crucifix and rosary beads. Having earned double credit for eight months spent in prison awaiting sentencing, Lahey will not face any more jail time, but he still faces strict conditions, including having no contact with youths.
VENEZUELA
Chavez back on TV, radio
President Hugo Chavez plans to resume his popular weekly radio and television program Alo Presidente on Sunday after it went off the air for seven months when he was diagnosed with cancer. The program was broadcast for the last time on June 5 after running since shortly after Chavez became Venezuela’s president in 1999. The renewed broadcasts were announced on Twitter by Communication and Information Minister Andres Izarra.
COLOMBIA
State pays for operations
The state will pay for the removal of breast implants made by a bankrupt French company that were linked to a global health scare, the health ministry said on Wednesday. The implants appear to have had an unusually high rupture rate, prompting the authorities in France to urge women to have them removed. The health ministry said the state would pay for removal of the implants if a doctor recommended it or if they ruptured and there was a medical emergency.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not