■ China
Seven die in store fire
A fire at a department store in eastern China yesterday killed seven people, state media said. Eighteen people lived in the five-story building in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province, where the fire broke out in the early morning, Xinhua news agency said. "Local firefighters were searching for any possible survivors after they discovered seven bodies," Xinhua said, adding that two people had been rescued. It gave no details of the fate of the other nine.
■ China
Chip smugglers busted
Smugglers dug a tunnel between sewers in mainland China and Hong Kong and used it to smuggle mobile phones and computer chips, reports said yesterday. The narrow tunnel, just wide enough for a person to crawl through, was found by Chinese customs and police officers under the border town of Shenzhen, the official Xinhua news agency said. The South China Morning Post reported that police had also discovered two other tunnels. Seven people, two from Hong Kong and five from China, were arrested after authorities swooped on a Shenzhen flat they had shared during the fortnight it took to dig the 20m tunnel.
■ South Korea
Manga still a no-no
The government isn't ready to lift bans on some forms of Japanese entertainment because of remaining public hostility here toward the peninsula's former colonial ruler, the culture minister said yesterday. South Korea began lifting some of its restrictions on Japanese culture in the late 1990s, such as ending restrictions on films and computer games. However, Japanese animation and TV shows are still banned.
■ Cambodia
French tourist murdered
A French national was fatally stabbed in the seaside resort town of Sihanoukville, police said yesterday. Jean-Pierre Blouin, 63, was found floating in the surf off a popular beach on Tuesday with stab wounds to his neck and head, deputy police chief So Bunnoeun said. The victim's passport, identity card and empty wallet were found nearby, he said. Blouin had entered Cambodia last Friday as a tourist. A French embassy official in Phnom Penh confirmed that a French national had been killed and that the attack was under investigation.
■ Thailand
Police seize burned fetuses
Police on Wednesday seized two burned human fetuses which they said had been used by a Buddhist monk in an occult ritual. Police raided the residence of Prayong Suthito at Pa Photisomphan Temple in the province of Roi-et after receiving a tip off that he had practiced black magic, burning the fetuses to produce a good luck charm, a police spokesman said. Police have yet to file charges against Prayong because they have no legal grounds to do so unless someone files a complaint that their baby was stolen and may have been used in the ritual, he said. Prayong had acknowledged carrying out the ritual two years ago, the spokesman said.
■ India
Polio cases quadruple
A polio outbreak in the state of Uttar Pradesh is undermining the fight against the virus, health officials said yesterday. The government has reported 283 cases so far this year, more than four times the 66 recorded last year. Tens of thousands of children were missed by state health workers over the past year during rounds of immunization, leading to a resurgence of the virus, they said.
■ United States
Sex `bomb' case dropped
Prosecutors dropped all charges against a man who said an airport security guard misunderstood him when she thought he said a sexual device in his backpack was really a bomb. Mardin Amin, who appeared in a Cook County circuit court on Wednesday morning, has said he actually told the female security guard at O'Hare International Airport last month that the small, black object was a "pump" -- as in a penis pump. Amin's attorney, Eileen O'Neill-Burke, had said earlier that her client was embarrassed to explain the object to the security guard in front of his mother, who was traveling with him -- so he whispered.
■ United Kingdom
City council bans doormats
Residents in government-funded housing in Bristol, western England, are up in arms over a decision by their local city council to ban doormats because they pose a "tripping hazard" for anyone escaping a fire, the Guardian reported yesterday. Bristol City Council has set a deadline of Sept. 18 for tenants in communal dwellings to comply with the request, in a letter addressed to the residents living in the council's 32,000 properties. If the doormats are not removed by the Sept. 18 deadline, a letter to tenants says: "Any mat remaining ... will be removed and subsequently disposed of." "This is absolutely ludicrous," Roger Perry, 62, was quoted as saying.
■ United States
UAE sued over jockeys
The rulers of the United Arab Emirates are being accused in a civil lawsuit of enslaving tens of thousands of young boys over the past three decades and forcing them to work under brutal conditions as camel jockeys. The Miami lawsuit, seeks class-action status and was filed last week by unnamed parents of boys as young as two years old who were allegedly abducted, enslaved and sold to serve as a backbone in the popular Arab sport of camel racing. More than 30,000 boys could have been victimized in what the suit calls "one of the greatest humanitarian crimes of the last 50 years."
■ United States
Car flies into building
A car hit a dirt embankment at high speed and flew 60m into the second story of an apartment building, killing the driver, police said. The driver, Vincent Pontillo, 43, of Mount Sinai, was wearing a seatbelt and was found dead in the 2004 Honda Accord, Suffolk County police said. He was heading down a street on Tuesday when he reached a dead end and the car was launched from a 1.2m dirt embankment. The car penetrated the building up to its rear bumper, police spokesman Officer William Fairchild said. Police do not suspect Pontillo had been drinking. His body was transported to the county coroner for an autopsy.
■ Indonesia
Militant sentenced
The Denpasar district court yesterday sentenced a young Islamic militant to 15 years in jail for his role in last year's suicide bombings on Bali. Judge Daniel Palitin said that Anif Solchanudin, a 24-year-old mobile telephone salesman, was "proven without doubt to have participated in acts of terrorism," and had persisted with his wish to become a suicide bomber even though death sentences were meted out to three Islamic militants involved in the 2002 bombings in Bali which killed 202 people. Solchanudin denied any advance knowledge of the attacks.
■ United States
Dalai Lama to be honored
The House of Representatives passed a bill on Wednesday to award the Dalai Lama the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest US civilian honor. The Senate passed the same bill in May. The award is in recognition of the Dalai Lama's advocacy of religious harmony, non-violence and human rights and his efforts to find a peaceful solution to the Tibet issue through dialogue with the Chinese leadership.
■ United States
Bank robber panics
Two people spent three hours cowering in the basement of a bank in suburban Chicago after an armed robber threatened to hold them hostage, authorities said. But what they -- and the scores of police who surrounded the building -- did not know was that the robber ran away in a panic. A man armed with a handgun walked into the Heritage Bank around 11am and told a teller that he was robbing the bank. "Something went wrong," FBI spokesman Ross Rice said. "He ordered two employees into the basement. The others fled the bank and he fled the bank ... nobody saw him leave." Police eventually stormed the building and found only the two employees.
■ Italy
Polish workers feared killed
More than 100 Poles, lured to Italy by the promise of work, have disappeared there, according to the Web site of the Polish police. It is feared some were murdered while working like slave laborers in the tomato fields of Puglia. In July Italian and Polish police seized 25 people after an inquiry revealed that thousands of Poles had been hired to work on farms that had been described by the chief organized crime prosecutor of Italy as "out and out concentration camps." The inquiry reportedly also uncovered evidence of murder.
■ United Kingdom
Study links music, lifestyle
Fans of hip hop music are likely to have had more sexual partners in the last five years while many of those who prefer classical strains will have tried cannabis, according to a study released yesterday. Psychologist Adrian North from the University of Leicester surveyed 2,500 Britons to find out how their musical tastes related to their lifestyles and interests. Almost 38 percent of hip hop devotees and 29 percent of dance music fans were more likely to have had more than one sexual partner in the last five years compared to just 1.5 percent of country music fans.
■ United States
Richards dies of cancer
Former Texas governor Ann Richards, the witty and flamboyant Democrat who went from homemaker to national political celebrity, died at home on Wednesday night after a battle with esophageal cancer, a family spokeswoman said. Richards rose to the governorship with a come-from-behind victory in 1990, cracking a half-century male grip on the governor's mansion and celebrated by holding up a T-shirt that showed the state Capitol and read: "A woman's place is in the dome." She lost to now President George W. Bush in 1995.
■ United States
Houston files for separation
The marriage of Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown -- which withstood drug addiction, Brown's numerous arrests and domestic abuse allegations -- is coming to an end. Houston filed papers in Orange County Superior Court in California last Friday requesting a legal separation from her husband of 14 years, and citing irreconcilable differences.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
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