CHINA
Man denied his final wish
A man who texted police to donate his body and organs to science before hanging himself was denied his final wish because he had not applied in advance. “I have decided to donate my body and all my organs to charity. When you receive my message, I will already be dead. Sorry for bothering you,” the message to police read according to Xinhua news agency. The man, surnamed Wang, was later found hanging from an air conditioning unit outside his house in Hangzhou, in the eastern province of Zhejiang, it reported. Wang, 30, suffered from muscular dystrophy, police said. A wheelchair was found by his side with a walking stick and two notes. He felt he had suffered enough, but wanted to make a final contribution to society, Xinhua said. “My last and biggest wish is to donate all my useful organs and body to charity. I hope you respect my choice,” it cited one of the notes as reading, but the local branch of the Chinese Red Cross refused to accept the donation as Wang had not applied in advance or taken the necessary checkup, Xinhua added.
AUSTRALIA
Millipedes suspects in crash
Black Portuguese millipedes were the main suspects in a rear-end collision between two trains on Tuesday after hundreds of the tiny creatures were found squashed in a slippery mess on the track. “Millipedes are one of the factors we are going to take into account,” said David Hynes, spokesman at the Public Transport Authority of Western Australia. Six passengers were treated for stiff necks after a train pulling into a station at Clarkson, 40km north of Perth, ran into a stationary one, the train company said. “What happened in previous instances is trains which were traveling at speed have gone over an infestation, crushed them and made the tracks slimy. The train loses traction and the train has slipped,” Hynes said.
AFGHANISTAN
Fishermen kill six children
Security forces have arrested eight policemen for accidentally killing six children when firing a rocket into a river to catch fish, officials said yesterday. The incident took place on Friday in the Doshi district of the northern province of Baghlan when policemen on the bank of a river fired a rocket-propelled grenade into the water. “The rocket went astray and hit a place where children were playing, killing six and wounding two others,” the interior ministry said in a statement. “Eight police personnel accused of misusing government weapons that killed these children have been arrested and handed over to military prosecutors for investigation,” it said. Using explosives to kill and catch fish is not uncommon in Afghanistan. In some parts of the country people even use electrical generators and bare wire to catch fish, posing an extreme danger to swimmers.
UNITED KINGDOM
Police hunt grave robbers
Police are hunting criminals who apparently tried to dig their way into a couple’s grave to steal jewelry that had been buried with them. The diggers spent a night excavating a hole a meter long and a meter deep next to the plot where Henry and Betty Brazil were laid to rest. They tried to disguise their work by placing two boxes upside down in the hole and covering them with soil, presumably planning to return to finish the job, but relatives of the Brazils spotted the apparent attempted grave robbing at the cemetery in Gloucester and police were called. Relatives are now standing guard at the grave to deter the offenders from returning.
GERMANY
Boy finds mummy in attic
Police, prosecutors and forensics experts are facing a mystery after a 10-year-old boy found a human mummy in a sarcophagus in a corner of his grandparents’ attic. A CT scan has revealed a well-preserved human skull, with an arrow sticking out of the left eye socket, and large parts of a skeleton with the arms crossed over the chest, the newspaper Kreiszeitung has reported. The boy’s father, Lutz-Wolfgang Kettler, said his own father, who died 12 years ago, traveled to North Africa in the 1950s and may have brought back the mummy as a grisly souvenir. Pathologist Andreas Nerlich of Munich’s Bogenhausen hospital told news Web site Spiegel Online that, while the skull and the bones are real, the mummy is “a fake, made from one or several human bodies.” Police and prosecutors have taken note of the case in the town of Diepholz, Lower Saxony state, and are waiting for more information on where the body came from before looking into the possibility of modern-age foul play.
UNITED STATES
Family finds shipwreck gold
A Florida family who spend their time together hunting for treasure struck it rich over the weekend, hauling up an estimated US$300,000 worth of gold from an historic wreckage in the Atlantic Ocean. Brent Brisben, whose company owns the rights to the wreckage, said Rick and Lisa Schmitt, and their grown children Hillary and Eric, found gold chains and coins from the wreckage of a convoy of 11 ships that went down in a hurricane off the coast of Florida in 1715 en route from Havana to Spain. Briben’s company bought the rights to the wreck site from the heirs of legendary treasure hunter Mel Fisher in 2010 and allows others, including the Schmitts, to search under subcontracting agreements.
UNITED STATES
Surfboard pierces windshield
A man was driving along a Honolulu freeway over the weekend when a surfboard crashed through the windshield just inches from his face, leaving him with only scratches on his face and arms. Jerrin Ching was driving on the H-1 freeway on Sunday morning when the red surfboard came out of nowhere and pierced through the glass, he told KHON-TV. Witnesses told police the surfboard fell off an overpass and bounced off a school bus. Ching said he on his way to pick up a friend at the University of Hawaii, when “all of a sudden I see this red thing come out of nowhere and turns out it was a surfboard. And it just crashed through my windshield.” It is not known who the board belongs to, or where it came from. “Can you please claim your board, and I don’t know, pay for the windshield or something?” Ching said. “Because you almost killed me.”
CANADA
Taser incident investigated
Ontario’s police watchdog is investigating an incident in which an 80-year-old woman was struck by police with a Taser and fractured her hip. Special Investigations Unit spokeswoman Monica Hudon on Tuesday said three police officers approached the woman at about 3:30am on Wednesday last week as she walked along a road in Mississauga, Ontario. Hudon said the officers spoke with the woman until “at some point” an officer fired his Taser. Hudon said the woman fell to the ground and was rushed to hospital for treatment of a fractured hip, among other injuries. The province announced on Aug. 28 it would permit officers to carry Tasers.
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,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the