■ Pakistan
Rain electrocutes 15
A public holiday was declared in the southern city of Karachi yesterday after the heaviest rains for four years killed at least 15 people, mostly by electrocution. All government offices and schools in the port city of 12 million people were closed for the day, Sindh Province government spokesman Salahuddin Haider said. Electrocution is a common problem after rains here, where the infrastructure is often basic and many people set up crude illegal power lines to steal electricity.
■ Indonesia
H5N1 death suspected
A woman died of suspected bird flu in a village that has been hard hit by the disease, a hospital official said yesterday, as health workers investigated a new possible cluster of the H5N1 virus. Euis Lina died on Thursday night -- three hours after being admitted to hospital in West Java Province with symptoms of the disease, said Yati Maryati, the hospital's director. He was awaiting laboratory test results to confirm the cause of death. Lina was from Cikelet, a hamlet 150km southeast of Jakarta, where bird flu killed a 9-year-old a girl earlier this week.
■ Japan
Chopsticks receive boost
A company is conducting a campaign to help the country's fast-food addicted population to re-learn the fading art of eating with chopsticks, according to a report in the Yomiuri Shimbun yesterday. Hyozaemon has dispatched its employees around the nation to give 20-minute lectures on how to use the utensils correctly. The instructors teach how to grip them, and provide tips on choosing the right size chopsticks for your hands.
■ Cambodia
Street kid gets 20 years
A court has sentenced an 18-year-old street boy to 20 years in prison for stabbing a British bar owner to death during a botched robbery in February, a court official said yesterday. Lao Chamrong, also known as Tong Chen, was arrested near the royal palace in Phnom Penh as he was cleaning blood off his knife after stabbing David Mitchell, from Walsall, England, five times in the chest, police investigators said. "He admitted to the court that he murdered the British man," prosecutor Ngeth Sarath said. "We sentenced him to 20 years in jail." Lao Chamrong told the court he broke into Mitchell's house looking for food but was interrupted.
■ Japan
Court rejects appeal
The Tokyo High Court rejected an appeal yesterday from a chemist sentenced to death for allegedly producing Nazi-invented sarin gas used in his cult's deadly 1995 attack on the Tokyo subway. Masami Tsuchiya, 41, was convicted of heading the chemical unit of the Aum Supreme Truth cult, whose nerve gas killed 12 people and injured thousands of others on rush-hour trains. "The court has dropped the appeal," said a High Court official, upholding the 2004 sentence given by the Tokyo District Court over the 1995 subway attack and other crimes. Tsuchiya conspired with the cult's guru Shoko Asahara, who has also been sentenced to death, to develop deadly chemicals.
■ Vietnam
Evacuations ordered
Authorities ordered the evacuation of thousands of people yesterday in the central and northern regions to avoid flash floods and landslides triggered by prolonged rains that have killed at least 19 people. Floods after torrential rains since last Friday hit the central highlands' coffee-growing region and four central coastal provinces, killing at least eight people in Binh Thuan Province and four in Nghe An Province, a government report said. Six others drowned in four provinces and one died in the Mekong delta province of Dong Thap. The floods also displaced thousands of people, inundated 5,000 houses and submerged nearly 40,000 hectares of crops.
■ China
Engineers not up to scratch
Most engineering students are not qualified to practise the profession upon graduation, a newspaper reported yesterday. Educators from China and abroad cited a lack of quality education and professionals working in the field as the source of the problem with 8 million engineering students, the largest number in the world, the Shanghai Daily said. As a result, only 14 percent of engineering graduates become qualified engineers, and most graduates give up engineering and take up other careers within nine years of graduating, according to research conducted by the East China University of Science and Technology.
■ China
Police cage mentally-ill man
A mentally-ill man in southeastern Guangxi region who killed a neighbor has been released by authorities but forced to live in a metal cage in his home, state media reported yesterday. The man was exempted from legal responsibility after authorities decided his mental illness was to blame for the June killing of his neighbor, the Beijing News reported. But police delivered a metal cage to his home after his release, pushed him into it and welded up its metal door, the report said, quoting his wife Wang Xueyu. The newspaper said the man had been eating, sleeping and going to the toilet in the cage.
■ United Kingdom
Doherty pleads guilty
Rock singer Pete Doherty pleaded guilty yesterday to possessing illegal drugs, including heroin and cocaine, and is due for sentencing on Sept. 4, a court official said. The singer, a self-confessed drug addict, appeared at Thames Magistrates' Court in London after spending the night in custody. On Thursday, the 27-year-old frontman of rock band Babyshambles, was charged with seven counts of possessing drugs between April and early this month.
■ United Nations
Troops in prostitution case
The UN has launched an investigation into allegations that its peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo had engaged in financing child prostitution, a spokesman said on Thursday. The case was first thought to have involved Congolese soldiers in the northeastern region of South Kibu, but it was discovered that UN peacekeepers were part of the child prostitution ring, Stephane Dujarric said. "The UN mission is shocked and appalled by allegations of the existence of a vast prostitution ring involving peace troops," he said.
■ Israel
Minister to be indicted
The attorney general has decided to indict a top minister and key ally of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on charges of sexual harassment, in a new blow to a government that emerged politically weakened this week from a 34-day war against Lebanese guerrillas. Justice Minister Haim Ramon was informed on Thursday that he is entitled to a hearing "to try to convince the attorney general otherwise," said Moshe Cohen, a Justice Ministry spokesman. Ramon, 56, is suspected of forcibly kissing an 18-year-old female soldier during a farewell party at a government office.
■ United Kingdom
`Wicked' mom jailed
A woman who gave her 9-year-old son heroin and crack cocaine was sentenced to nine years in jail on Thursday for what a judge called "an act of pure wickedness." Judge Anthony Niblett said Emma Kelly, 31, had betrayed her son by providing him with drugs, on one occasion giving him heroin outside the gates of his school. "There can be no greater betrayal of a mother's trust and duty towards her child," the judge said, passing sentence at Hove Crown Court in southern England.
■ Netherlands
Man gets high on chocolate
Police at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport on Thursday released a warning for hallucinogenic dark chocolate bars after a homeless man ate one and confused their uniforms with wedding dresses. "He ate some and we found him hallucinating," a police spokesman said. "Several days later he brought us another bar that he had just found and we passed it on to the forensic institute.". Tests showed the 72 percent cocoa dark chocolate contained psilocine, a mind-altering substance found in hallucinogenic mushrooms and considered to be a hard drug. Police later found more chocolate bars on the ground and in airport trashcans.
■ Burina Faso
Cave-in traps miners
Rescue workers battled yesterday to save dozens of illegal gold panners trapped underground when a disused mine shaft collapsed, police said. Three people were confirmed killed when the mine collapsed on Thursday, six more escaped and some 46 were still believed to be underground, police in Poura district said.
■ Cuba
Castro on the mend
President Fidel Castro is getting better and every precaution has been taken to prevent aggression against Cuba, his brother said in his first public statement yesterday since the Cuban leader was hospitalized. "Every step has been taken to prevent any attempt at aggression. The nation is giving strong proof of its self-reliance," Raul Castro, 75, said in an extensive interview with the official newspaper Granma titled "No Enemy Can Defeat Us." He said Fidel, 80, was undergoing a "satisfactory and gradual recovery," from his intestinal operation last month, which on July 31 led to the temporary transfer of power to Raul, who is also defense minister. He said his brother's "progressive recovery" was due to "his exceptional physical and mental nature."
■ United States
Gibson pleads no contest
Mel Gibson, who ignited a furor with his anti-Semitic rant after being stopped for speeding last month in Malibu, California, pleaded no contest on Thursday to a drunken driving charge and was spared jail time in a deal with prosecutors. Gibson, who was placed on probation for three years, did not appear in Malibu Superior Court for the hearing. Under the terms of his plea deal, Gibson was ordered to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for a year, including five times a week for the first four-and-a-half months, and to enroll in an alcohol abuse program for three months and make a public service ad on the dangers of drinking while driving. In addition, he was fined US$1,300 and had restrictions placed on his driving for 90 days.
■ Russia
`K19' saved from scrapyard
A Soviet submarine involved in a notorious accident which threatened to trigger nuclear war has been saved by its former cook, just weeks before it was due to be scrapped. Vladimir Romanov, now a multimillionaire businessman, wants to turn the K19 into a museum. Romanov, who owns Edinburgh's Hearts football club, snapped up the nuclear craft -- made famous in the film K19: The Widowmaker starring Harrison Ford -- from a wrecking yard in northern Russia. He plans to get it moved to a berth in Moscow. Inside the sub will be exhibits on its history and a club for submariners.
■ United Kingdom
Stolen headdress found
An ancient headdress -- considered one of Peru's most prized artifacts and missing for more than two decades since being looted from an archaeological dig -- was recovered in a raid on a London law firm, police said on Thursday. Specialist art detectives seized the antiquity from the London firm after a lengthy investigation into stolen goods, London's Metropolitan police said. The centuries-old artifact -- fashioned from a sheet of embossed gold, with a feline face at its center and eight curving tentacles -- is estimated to be worth around US$1.9 million, experts said.
■ United States
Forced confession ruled out
Three Rwandan rebels charged with murdering two US tourists in Uganda were tortured and coerced into confessing, a federal judge ruled on Thursday, barring US prosecutors from using the confessions in court. The ruling dealt federal authorities a major setback in a case stemming from the 1999 deaths of eight sightseers, including two Americans, who had traveled to a remote rain forest hoping to see rare mountain gorillas. The three rebels said Rwandan officials bound and beat them until they confessed to the US investigators. Doctors said scars supported those claims.
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
ISSUE: Some foreigners seek women to give birth to their children in Cambodia, and the 13 women were charged with contravening a law banning commercial surrogacy Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday thanked Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni for granting a royal pardon last year to 13 Filipino women who were convicted of illegally serving as surrogate mothers in the Southeast Asian kingdom. Marcos expressed his gratitude in a meeting with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, who was visiting Manila for talks on expanding trade, agricultural, tourism, cultural and security relations. The Philippines and Cambodia belong to the 10-nation ASEAN, a regional bloc that promotes economic integration but is divided on other issues, including countries whose security alignments is with the US or China. Marcos has strengthened
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