INDIA
Youths behead man on train
Police were searching yesterday for a gang of knife-wielding youths who beheaded a man on a train in an eastern state in front of horrified passengers. Khokon Ghosh, a 37-year-old sweet seller, was set upon on Monday afternoon near Bazarshau station, about 190km north of Kolkata in West Bengal. “The assailants escaped after the driver stopped the train midway hearing passengers scream,” district police superintendent Humayun Kabir said. “Preliminary investigation has revealed that Ghosh was murdered over some local issues in his village,” he said.
SOUTH AFRICA
Anti-apartheid activist dies
Academic and distinguished linguist Neville Alexander, who spent time in jail with former president Nelson Mandela, died of cancer aged 75 on Monday, the University of Cape Town said. Born in the southern town of Cradock in 1936, the activist would go on to campaign against apartheid in the 1950s and spend a decade on Robben Island. Alexander obtained his doctorate in German at the University of Tuebingen in then-West Germany in 1961. Three years later he was convicted for conspiracy to commit sabotage against the white minority regime, along with other members of the National Liberation Front, which he co-founded. He spent the next 10 years on Robben Island, a political prison off the coast of Cape Town. One of Alexander’s companions was Mandela, who spent 27 years in various jails before he was released and became the country’s first black president in 1994.
CANADA
Senator’s wife in court
A senator’s wife appeared in a Saskatoon court on the couple’s one-year wedding anniversary on Monday after spending a long weekend in jail for threatening to down an aircraft. Maygan Sensenberger, 23, was arrested late on Thursday last week for allegedly threatening passengers, swearing and arguing with her much older husband, Senator Rod Zimmer, 69, during an Air Canada flight. Police spokeswoman Alyson Edwards told reporters that Sensenberger “threatened to take down the plane” and to harm her husband during an apparent lovers’ quarrel that began soon after takeoff and escalated throughout the flight. “Attempts by the [flight’s] crew and other passengers to intervene were met with hostility,” Edwards added, citing witness statements to police. Sensenberger, who was granted bail during her brief court appearance in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, faces possible life in prison if convicted of causing a disturbance and endangering an aircraft. Zimmer is a member of the Senate’s human rights and transport and communications committees. His office declined to comment on his wife’s legal woes.
UNITED KINGDOM
Terrorism sponsor jailed
An Algerian national was jailed for seven years by a Scottish court on Monday for funding a man who carried out the first-ever suicide bombing in Sweden. Nasserdine Menni was convicted of transferring money to sports therapist Taimour Abdulwahab, who blew up his car and then himself in a botched attack near a busy shopping street in Stockholm on Dec. 11, 2010. Abdulwahab killed himself and injured two people in the bombing. Menni sent a total of £5,725 (US$9,044) to a bank account in Abdulwahab’s name in the knowledge that it could be used for terrorism purposes, Glasgow High Court heard.
UNITED KINGDOM
Wild cat claims unfounded
Police said on Monday that they have found no evidence to support area residents’ claims that they had spotted a big cat prowling the countryside near the village of St Osyth, in the southeastern county of Essex. Sunday’s reported sightings alarmed many of the village’s 4,000 people and authorities sent about 40 officers, tranquilizer-toting zoo experts and a pair of heat-seeking helicopters to the area in an effort to find the beast. However, a police spokeswoman said that, after an extensive search, “we’ve found no evidence” of a lion. The creature spotted on Sunday night may have been a large domestic cat or a wildcat, she added. The official, who spoke on customary condition of anonymity, demurred, noting that the people interviewed by police were convinced they had spotted a lion. That aside, she said, “we’ve stopped searching for it.” It seems the mysterious “Essex Lion” will join a number of other mythical beasts that at times appear and then disappear into Britain’s forests and seaside — particularly in the dead of summer, when journalists struggle to fill papers and news bulletins.
UNITED STATES
Catholic bishop in booze rap
The Roman Catholic bishop newly chosen by the Vatican to lead the archdiocese of San Francisco and two other Bay Area counties publicly apologized on Monday after he was arrested and held behind bars over the weekend on suspicion of drunken driving. Salvatore Cordileone, 56, appointed last month by Pope Benedict XVI to preside over more than 500,000 Catholics as metropolitan archbishop of San Francisco, was taken into custody on Saturday near San Diego State University, according to the San Diego Police Department. He was jailed on suspicion of driving under the influence after he was stopped at a police checkpoint and failed a field sobriety test, police spokesman Detective Gary Hassen said. The bishop was released on US$2,500 bail, about 11 hours after his arrest, he said. Cordileone acknowledged that his blood-alcohol level was found to be over the legal limit, apologized for his “error in judgement” and said he felt “shame for the disgrace I have brought upon the church and myself.” Cordileone has been particularly outspoken in church opposition to same-sex matrimony as chairman of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage, a role that has put him at odds with many Catholics in the largely gay-friendly Bay area.
CANADA
Man charged in corpse find
The estranged boyfriend of a Chinese-Canadian woman whose body parts were discovered scattered throughout Toronto has been charged in her killing, police said on Monday. Chun Qi Jiang, 40, a construction worker who moved to Canada in 2002, was arrested in Toronto on Sunday and charged with murder. Peel regional police inspector George Koekkoek told a press conference the victim, Guang Hua Liu, 41, had been dating Jiang. Mid-month police recovered an arm, thigh and two calves from a creek in an eastside suburb of Toronto, as well as a foot, two hands and a head belonging to the victim from a park west of the city. Hikers had stumbled upon a foot floating in the Credit River, triggering a massive search by police divers and sniffer dogs. A passerby, meanwhile, alerted police when he spotted an arm and leg in a creek on the east side of Canada’s largest city. Locating Liu’s remaining body parts is part of the ongoing investigation, Koekkoek said. A forensic examination has not yet determined the cause of death.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.