■ China
`Free hugs' a flop
A "free hugs" campaign aimed at cheering up strangers by hugging them on the street seems to have failed, with some huggers being hauled away by police for questioning, media said on Monday. The campaign hit the streets of Beijing, Changsha and Xian this weekend, with participants opening their arms to embrace passers-by and brandishing cards saying "free hugs" and "care from strangers," the Beijing News said. In the capital, police took away four huggers briefly for questioning.
■ China
Lawyers demand protection
Shanghai's Bar Association called on the authorities yesterday to crack down on violence after a lawyer was beaten while making inquiries on a client's behalf. He Wei, 41, suffered a perforated eardrum and was held hostage for two hours in a dispute involving the owner and six employees of the Fuwei Printing company, the Shanghai Daily reported. He was inquiring into the case of his client, Zhang Xiufang, 17, who lost three fingers in a machinery accident but was denied compensation by the company.
■ China
Crackdown on downloads
A new round of a campaign has been launched to crack down on illegal downloads of films, music and software in efforts to curb rampant piracy, state media reported yesterday. The three-month campaign will target illegal Web sites and their operators, who have profited from providing platforms for Internet piracy, Beijing News quoted the National Administration of Copyright as saying. Authorities were currently investigating more than 300 cases, after collecting evidence from film and software industries in the US and at home, it said.
■ Bangladesh
Train derails, worker killed
A railway worker was killed in the southeastern part of the country when a train carrying more than 1,000 passengers derailed, an official said yesterday. Five coaches of the train bound for the capital Dhaka derailed late on Monday after leaving the port city of Chittagong, said Shafiqul Khan, a railway spokesman. Minor train accidents are frequent in the country, which has a 2,800km network of track that was mostly laid between the 1860s and 1940s.
■ India
Rebel commander killed
Troops on Monday shot dead a top commander of Kashmir's dominant rebel group Hizbul Mujahedin, a defense spokesman said. The militant, a close associate of the group's leader Syed Salahuddin, was killed in a shoot-out in the disputed Himalayan region, he said. "A top commander of the Hizbul Mujahedin, Noor Mohammed alias Javed Burky, a former body guard of Syed Salahuddin, was killed in a gunfight in Doda District," 240km from Kashmir's winter capital of Jammu, the spokesman said.
■ India
Cyclone kills four
A cyclone off the coast of India's southern Andhra Pradesh state has weakened although heavy rains lashing the area have claimed four lives, officials said on Monday. The cyclone made landfall on Monday evening causing torrential downpours in coastal districts, said Satya Kumar, who heads Hyderabad's weather office. The authorities rescued 70 people stranded by floods, a government spokesman said. According to preliminary information, more than 750 houses were damaged by the storm, he said. Kumar said the had received heavy rains beginning late on Sunday and "more widespread rain or thundershowers were expected."
■ India
Pitt helps to build houses
Hollywood star Brad Pitt has joined former US president Jimmy Carter to help volunteers from a Christian charity build homes for the poor in the western part of India, the organization said. Pitt, who is in the country shooting a film with partner Angelina Jolie, dropped by the tourist town of Lonavla on Monday to briefly lend a hand to thousands of volunteers from Habitat for Humanity. Each year since 1984, Carter and his wife Rosalynn have spent a week building homes for the organization around the world and promoting its work. This week they were also joined by former Australian cricket captain Steve Waugh, among others. Photographs showed Pitt fixing a window grill.
■ Czech Republic
Japanese wins Kafka award
The Japanese author Haruki Murakami received the nation's foremost literary award, the Franz Kafka Prize, in Prague on Monday. Murakami traveled to the Czech capital for the first time to pick up the award, which commemorates the author whose most famous works include The Castle, The Metamorphosis and The Trail. "I really appreciate this Franz Kafka international literary award, maybe because Franz Kafka is one of my favorite authors of all time," Murakami said after he became the sixth recipient of the prize.
■ Cyprus
Bodies left to rot in morgue
Health authorities are trying to work out how two rotting corpses were left behind in a decommissioned mortuary with the electricity switched off after a hospital move early this month, officials said on Saturday. A funeral director made the macabre discovery after going to the mortuary of a new hospital which opened in the Cypriot capital three weeks ago, to collect a body for burial, Cypriot newspapers reported. Failing to find it there, he went to the old de-commissioned hospital on Friday and found two corpses in freezers which had been switched off. The condition of one was so bad that it had to be buried immediately.
■ Saudi Arabia
Cops apologize for blunder
Just because women are banned from driving, it doesn't stop police fining a woman for not carrying a driving license. The Shams newspaper said police insisted the 300 riyal (US$80) fine imposed on Dalal Chewish had to be paid before her passport could be renewed. It said her husband Fahd Eissa tried to convince police that it was impossible for a woman to be fined for not carrying a driving license, but to no avail. A passport official acknowledged that a mistake had been made. "There was a mistake. The officer issued the fine to the husband but he noted the ID number of the wife instead of that of her husband," the official said.
■ Colombia
Grabber gets the message
Grab a woman's behind, go to jail. That's the precedent established on Monday by the Supreme Court, which ruled that a messenger who was convicted of fondling a woman without her consent last year had caused her "violent injury." The court was reviewing the case of Victor Garcia, a messenger who was sentenced to four years for sexual assault. Garcia was riding his bicycle in June last year when he stopped to grab the backside of a woman walking along a path. "It was an attack on the honor of the victim," Judge Alvaro Orlando Perez said. But the court also ruled that Garcia had committed simple assault, rather than sexual assault, and ordered him freed to stand trial on the lesser charge.
■ Germany
`Love witch' loses case
A woman won a lawsuit against a "love witch" who failed to induce her ex-boyfriend to come back with rituals under the full moon designed to cast a spell over him, a Munich court said on Monday. "The witch lost," said Munich district court spokeswoman Ingrid Kaps. The "love witch" was ordered to return her 1,000 euro (US$1,300) fee and pay "several hundred euros" in costs. "The plaintiff was in despair after her boyfriend left and tried to get him to return with help from a woman who calls herself a `love witch,'" she added. "The court has ruled it was a service that was `objectively impossible' to render."
■ United States
Needle panic in school
A Vermont high school student found a used needle and syringe by the side of a road and jabbed eight fellow students last Thursday and Friday, police and school officials said. Jabbed students at Bellows Free Academy in St. Albans were urged to be vaccinated immediately against hepatitis B. The student who wielded the needle threw it away, officials said. Police have not been able to recover it and do not know whether it was infected, police officer Frank McCarty said. A 16-year-old student will be charged with eight counts of assault, police said. "He just walked up and stabbed me with a needle and said, `You now have hepa-titis,'" student Ava Staples said. "I'm pretty nervous."
■ United States
Bat saliva trial gets go-ahead
An experimental stroke treatment, desmoteplase, based on the saliva of vampire bats, rose from the dead on Monday days after a safety panel stalled human testing because of a potential safety risk, its developers said. An independent panel monitoring clinical trials of the drug said on Monday a large study could resume. Last week it had halted patient recruit-ment so that it could investigate additional data to evaluate a possible safety issue. The medicine's German developer, Paion AG, and US partner Forest Laboratories said they expected the trial results by the middle of next year.
■ United States
Bush movie tanks
The provocative film Death of a President, which imagines the assassination of George W. Bush, bombed at the North American box office with a meager US$282,000 grossed from 143 theaters in its first weekend. The pseudo-documentary played at 91 US theaters and 52 Canadian cinemas during its first three days of release, averaging an estimated US$1,970 per screen, according to dis-tributor Newmarket Films, which reportedly paid US$1 million for US rights to the picture. "That's a very poor opening," said Brandon Gray, an analyst at industry watcher Web site boxofficemojo.com.
■ United States
Hitman faces execution
A hitman sentenced to death for murdering a witness to a drive-by shooting is sche-duled to be executed today in Texas, the US' busiest death row. Donell Jackson was paid US$200 and some marijuana cigarettes to kill Mario Stubblefield on Aug. 31, 1993, before the 17-year-old could testify again in court about the drive-by shooting he had witnessed. On the night of the murder, Jackson showed up at Stubblefied's home under the guise of being a friend of a relative, and asked to speak to him outside. Once outside, authorities said Jackson pulled out a gun and fatally shot the teen in the neck and head.
■ Chile
Pinochet under house arrest
Former dictator Augusto Pinochet was placed under house arrest and indicted for the first time on torture charges for abuses at a secret detention center where President Michelle Bachelet and her mother were once held, the judge handling the case reported on Monday. Two court officials notified Pinochet at his suburban Santiago mansion of the decision by Judge Alejandro Solis, who on Friday had charged Pinochet with one homicide, 35 kidnappings and 24 cases of torture at Villa Grimaldi, one of the most infamous detention centers in the early years of his 1973-1990 dictatorship. Pinochet's chief defense lawyer, Pablo Rodriguez, said he will appeal Solis' ruling "all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary."
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
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