■ Australia
House-burning party
Residents of a tiny town danced and drank beer as they watched the home of a convicted pedophile burn to the ground in a suspected arson attack, the Australian newspaper reported yesterday. Up to 40 people swelled Meringur's usual population of 16 on Sunday night to celebrate as flames engulfed the home of Terrence Ellis, 52, the daily said. Ellis was convicted two weeks ago of abusing a young girl from the town in the southeastern state of Victoria and jailed for five years. "It certainly was a bit of a party," the victim's brother said. Victoria police confirmed the fire that destroyed Ellis's timber cottage was suspicious, but an investigator said the heat was too intense to pinpoint where it began. "I don't think they'll get very far," one resident was quoted as saying by the newspaper.
■ Australia
Man steals 12 snakes
A man held up a woman and two children at gunpoint before fleeing with a dozen snakes worth more than A$100,000 (US$74,535), police said yesterday. The man demanded the 12 green tree snakes, which are not venomous, when he approached the door of the woman's home near Adelaide, on Wednesday, state police said. He then stuffed the snakes -- measuring up to 80cm long -- into a duffel bag and bound the woman's ankles and the hands of two boys before fleeing the scene. The snakes are valued at A$9,000 each, police said. Police were investigating the alleged theft, but no suspect had been arrested as of yesterday. The woman and children were not identified.
■ Nepal
Border guards `kill' refugees
A Tibetan exile group said yesterday that Chinese border guards opened fire on dozens of refugees, killing two and wounding several more as they tried to sneak into Nepal from Tibet over the weekend. The refugees were crossing the Nangpa La pass, near Mount Everest on China's side of the border, when Chinese soldiers opened fire, said Lhundup Dorjee of the Tibet Refugee Center in Kathmandu. "Around 42 of them managed to escape and cross in to Nepal, but we don't know what happened to the rest of them," Dorjee said. Neither Chinese nor Nepali officials were immediately available for comment on the reported shootings, which allegedly took place on Sept. 30 at the 5,800m pass just west of Mount Everest.
■ Pakistan
Woman kills spy boyfriend
A woman stabbed to death her boyfriend, who worked for Pakistan's powerful spy agency, for not marrying her, police said yesterday. Mazhar Iqbal, 27, who worked with Inter Services Intelligence, or ISI, as a telephone operator, was killed on Wednesday by his 25-year-old girlfriend in Islamabad. The woman was arrested shortly after the incident. "She was in love with him. She told police that she killed him because he had refused to marry her," a police official said. The woman has not yet been charged and is being held for questioning. She was expected to appear in court yesterday.
■ Hong Kong
Smuggling turns deadly
A Chinese illegal immigrant who was smuggled into Hong Kong inside the wheel-arch of a tourist coach was killed on Wednesday when the vehicle crushed him as he tried to escape, police and media reports said. The elderly man was dragged at least 100m along a busy street, leaving a grisly trail of blood on the road. The victim, who was found with no identification documents, was declared dead on arrival at hospital.
■ Lesotho
603-carat diamond found
A 603-carat white diamond has been found in the tiny southern African kingdom, making it the biggest rock of the century and one of the world's largest, it was announced on Wednesday. "The diamond, named the Lesotho Promise, is the largest reported find this century and ranks as the 15th-largest diamond ever found," said the mine's joint owners, South Africa's Gem Diamond Mining and the Lesotho government. "The stone is an exceptional color, rated D, the top color for diamonds. The largest diamond previously found [in Lesotho] was the 601-carat Lesotho Brown recovered in 1967," the statement said.
■ United States
Rapist posing as officer
At least 10 girls and women have been raped on the Fort Apache Reservation in Whiteriver, Arizona, by a man who poses as a police officer, federal authorities said. Since March, nine girls and one young woman -- all Native American -- have been attacked on a trail between two housing projects between 10pm and 2am, said officials with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The attacks began in March, but the bureau became aware of them only in August. The agency formed a task force of agents to investigate. "Once they saw it was involving someone posing as law enforcement, the BIA made this a high priority," BIA agent Warren Youngman said.
■ Israel
Rogue skipper escapes jail
The commander of an Israeli commercial ship that rammed a Japanese fishing boat, killing seven people, was sentenced to a year of community service in a plea bargain, an Israeli TV station reported. The ship's second officer, Pilastro Zdravko, a citizen of Croatia, was in charge of the Zim Asia container ship when it crashed into the fishing boat on Sept. 28 last year, about 40km off the northern coast of Japan, killing seven of the eight men on the boat. The prosecution accepted the plea bargain because Japanese witnesses were either unable or unwilling to come to Israel to testify in a trial, Channel 2 TV reported. At the magistrate's court in the port city of Haifa on Wednesday, Zdravko was sentenced to six months in prison on a charge of causing death by negligence, but the prison term was converted to a year of public service at the port, the TV report said.
■ United States
Crash kills stunt pilot
A stunt pilot was killed when his single-engine plane crashed on Wednesday while performing a loop at an air show, police said. The crash happened in Tucumcari, 174km west of Amarillo, Texas. Guy "Doc" Baldwin, 60, lost control of the aircraft, Police Chief Larry Ham said. "We don't have any indications there was a mechanical failure," he said.
■ Russia
Suicide figures revealed
The country's suicide rate is the world's second highest, leaving only Lithuania ahead, the director of the Serbsky Center of Social and Legal Psychiatry said as quoted by the RIA Novosti news agency. "Every year 60,000 people take their lives in Russia, if one takes the annual average for the past 12 years," Tatyana Dmitriyeva told reporters on Wednesday. The most endangered group were adults aged 45-55 and adolescents, Dmitriyeva said, explaining that the leading reasons for suicide were biological predisposition, social upheavals, inflation, and stress linked to family conflicts, divorces and loneliness.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
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
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
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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