INDIA
Grandma killed for money
Police in Goa said on Thursday that they had arrested two teenage males on suspicion of killing their grandmother and taking her money to gamble on Indian Premier League cricket matches. The youngsters, aged 14 and 15, were among a gang of five held by police for the alleged murder of 65-year-old Linda Cajetan Andrade, who was found dead and naked in her home last month. The group are suspected of stealing 400,000 rupees (US$7,100) and some gold ornaments from her home. “These boys wanted money to bet on the Indian Premier League and the [soccer] Euros,” police superintendent Arvind Gawas said, adding that the cash was used for betting, but that it was unclear how much was gambled. “After the murder and robbery, they sold all the gold and distributed the money amongst themselves,” he said. The five accused were picked up from different locations in the south of Goa after one of them confessed to the crime, Gawas said.
PAKISTAN
Officers told to slim down
The police are cracking down on portly officers after only a quarter of the 19,000 officers in Punjab Province passed a fitness test. Police officers in the South Asian nation are widely seen as corrupt and ineffective. Now their weight is coming under the spotlight as well. The plump police, responsible for safeguarding the most populous province, were warned in letters to trim their waistlines to the regulation 96cm by the end of the month, local newspapers reported on yesterday. Those who fail may be removed from field duties, The News reported. This week, local television channels have been repeatedly screening footage of overweight officers. They were shown snoozing in chairs, talking on the phone and standing belly to belly, buckles straining.
JAPAN
Roman jewelry unearthed
Glass jewelry believed to have been made by Roman craftsmen has been found in an ancient tomb in Japan, researchers said yesterday, in a sign the empire’s influence may have reached the edge of Asia. Tests have revealed three glass beads discovered in the fifth-century Utsukushi burial mound in Nagaoka, near Kyoto, were probably made some time between the first and the fourth century, the Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties said. The institute has recently finished analyzing components of the glass beads. It found that the light yellow beads were made with natron, a chemical used to melt glass by craftsmen in the empire. “They are one of the oldest multi-layered glass products found in Japan, and very rare accessories that were believed to be made in the Roman Empire and sent to Japan,” said Tomomi Tamura, a researcher. The finding in Japan may shed some light on how far east the empire’s influence reached, Tamura said.
NORWAY
Safe sex campaign launched
A sexual health charity asked the country’s men to don condoms for a “sex hour” on Thursday to raise public awareness about safe sex. The sex education organization RFSU had urged men to tear themselves away from television coverage of the Euro 2012 soccer quarter finals for an hour of prophylactic-protected pleasure with a willing partner. The campaign is a result of a study which found that Norwegians were the most sexually active Scandinavians, while at the same time using the least protection, exposing themselves to sexually transmitted diseases, chlamydia in particular. Our motto is sex is good, sex improves your health,” RFSU sexologist Sidsel Kloeew said. Sixty-two percent of Norwegians between the ages of 20 and 35 years did not use a condom the last time they had casual sex. The country has 20,000 cases of chlamydia every year.
BOLIVIA
Police mutiny over wages
About 30 members of an elite police commando unit mutinied in La Paz on Thursday, expelling their commanders and seizing their barracks along with their wives to demand higher wages. The barracks are just 100m from the presidential palace. The protesters were demanding salaries on par with soldiers and a pension equal to 100 percent of their salaries. Police in the country earn about US$144 a month and were not appeased by a 7 percent government-decreed wage increase this year. The mutiny broke out after wives of the police participants were thrown out of the barracks by the men’s superiors.
UNITED STATES
Commerce chief resigns
Secretary of Commerce John Bryson announced his resignation on Thursday, just weeks after he was involved in a sequence of car accidents in Los Angeles that were blamed on a seizure. In a letter to President Barack Obama, Bryson said he would leave the Cabinet, judging his June 9 seizure “could be a distraction from my performance as Secretary.” Bryson is under a felony investigation in California over the two hit-and-run incidents. According to an account of events from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department on that Saturday evening, Bryson’s Lexus rear-ended another car as it waited at a railway crossing in the city of San Gabriel. Bryson then spoke to three men in the damaged car and drove away, but hit their Buick again in the process. He then drove to the city of Rosemead, where he struck a second car. The secretary later was found “alone and unconscious behind the wheel of his vehicle,” officials said. Neither alcohol nor drugs were suspected as being factors in the accidents.
UNITED STATES
Men accused of trial fixing
New York City prosecutors say a teenage girl was offered US$500,000 to leave the country instead of testifying in an upcoming sex abuse case against her former spiritual counselor in Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community. Four men have been accused of trying to bribe and pressure the accuser and her boyfriend to discourage them from testifying against Nechemya Weberman. The men pleaded not guilty on Thursday to various charges, including witness tampering. A defense lawyer said they deny the allegations. Prosecutors say Weberman molested the girl when she was aged 12 to 15. They say he was supposed to be counseling her about their religion. Weberman has pleaded not guilty to sex abuse charges and his lawyer says his client had no knowledge of or involvement with the suspected bribery.
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