AUSTRALIA
Backpacker killer dies
Ivan Milat, whose grisly serial killings of seven German, British and Australian backpackers horrified Australia in the early 1990s, died in a Sydney prison yesterday, ending hopes of a deathbed confession to more unsolved slayings. He was 74. The road worker had been in custody since 1994 and was diagnosed in May with terminal esophageal and stomach cancer. Milat died in the medical wing of Long Bay Prison, New South Wales state Corrective Services said. He was convicted of murder in the deaths of three German, two British, and two Australian backpackers after giving them rides while they were hitchhiking. The serial killings came to light when the mutilated corpses were found in a forest near Sydney in 1992 and 1993.
INDONESIA
Three killed in Papua
Three people have been killed in Papua region, with police saying that they were civilians, while a rebel group that took responsibility said they were undercover intelligence officers. The clash came as President Joko Widodo was to visit the region — wracked by a decades-old independence insurgency — after months of mass demonstrations and deadly unrest. Police said that on Friday rebels killed three motorbike taxi drivers in Intan Jaya, a central region in the nation’s easternmost territory. “Two of them were shot, while the other one was stabbed to death,” Papua police spokesman Ahmad Mustofa Kamal told reporters.
RUSSIA
US’ Syria action criticized
Moscow on Saturday criticized the US’ decision to send armored vehicles and combat troops into eastern Syria to protect oil fields. Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said that “what Washington is doing now, the seizure and control of oil fields in eastern Syria under its armed control, is, quite simply, international state banditry.” He added: “All hydrocarbon deposits and other minerals located on the territory of Syria do not belong to the IS [Islamic State] terrorists, and even less to the ‘American defenders from IS terrorists,’ but exclusively to the Syrian Arab Republic. The real cause of this illegal action by the United States in Syria lies far from the ideals that Washington has proclaimed and from the slogans of fighting terrorism.”
INDIA
Ayodhya sets lamp record
The city of Ayodhya has set a Guinness world record by illuminating hundreds of thousands of earthen lamps as part of an annual Hindu festival. Representatives from Guinness World Records on Saturday handed the certificate to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath after witnessing the lighting of 409,000 oil lamps on the banks of the Sarayu.
UNITED STATES
Cobain cardigan sold
A quarter-century after grunge’s enigmatic rhapsodist took his own life, Kurt Cobain’s iconic cigarette-singed cardigan worn during Nirvana’s 1993 “Unplugged” performance has sold for US$334,000. The tattered, olive-green, Manhattan-brand, button-up sweater, which has never been washed since Cobain wore it, came with dark stains and a burn hole. The seller, Garrett Kletjian, owner of Forty7 Motorsports, bought it four years ago for US$137,500. “This cardigan, it’s the holy grail of any article of clothing that he ever wore,” said Darren Julien, chief executive officer and president of Julien’s Auctions. “Kurt created the grunge look; he didn’t wear show clothes,” Julien told reporters in New York.
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
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
CARTEL ARRESTS: The president said that a US government operation to arrest two cartel members made it jointly responsible for the unrest in the state’s capital Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday blamed the US in part for a surge in cartel violence in the northern state of Sinaloa that has left at least 30 people dead in the past week. Two warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel have clashed in the state capital of Culiacan in what appears to be a fight for power after two of its leaders were arrested in the US in late July. Teams of gunmen have shot at each other and the security forces. Meanwhile, dead bodies continued to be found across the city. On one busy street corner, cars drove
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to