■ AUSTRALIA
Lesbians get life sentences
Two lesbian lovers, one whom drank blood as part of a vampire culture, were sentenced to life in prison yesterday for what a judge said was the "evil" killing of a girl they bludgeoned to death with a concrete block. Jessica Stasinowsky, 21, and Valerie Parashumti, 19, pleaded guilty to murdering 16-year-old Stacey Mitchell in Perth in 2006 because she was annoying. Judge Peter Blaxell said the murder was "sexually perverse" and "evil," after the court was told the two women became sexually aroused as they battered the girl and then kissed while standing over her body as she lay dying.
■ AUSTRALIA
Socialite jailed for four years
A Swedish-born socialite was jailed yesterday for nearly four years for plotting to murder two witnesses in her boyfriend's drug trial. Charlotte Lindstrom, 23, who was a regular in the social pages of Sydney's papers, had pleaded guilty and agreed to give evidence against others involved in the case. She was accused of offering A$200,000 dollars (US$185,000) to an undercover policeman to kill two men who were scheduled to give evidence against her boyfriend Steven Spaliviero.
■ CHINA
Taxi gang detained
Police have broken up a Shanghai-based taxi gang accused of ripping off foreigners, state media reported yesterday. Eight members have been detained for allegedly blackmailing 13 passengers and stealing 50,000 yuan (US$7,000) in cash or goods, the China Daily said. The drivers are suspected of charging extremely high prices and then robbing or intimidating passengers that refused to pay. Complaints were first made in 2006, including one where a passenger paid US$1,000 for a ride that should have cost around 50 yuan, the report said.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Welsh can write to EU
The people of Wales will be able to pen letters to the EU in their ancient tongue from later this year when Welsh is added to the EU's linguistic lexicon. The British government has agreed to make Welsh a "co-official language" in EU institutions, a spokesman for the Welsh Assembly said, prompting critics to say the translation money could be better spent. Wales sees Spain as a model. Three regional languages, Catalan, Galician and Basque, have "co-official" status. This means citizens can write to and receive a reply from the EU's council of member states, the European Parliament and the European Commission in their own language.
■ FRANCE
Dying not allowed here
The mayor of Sarpourenx has issued a decree banning residents from dying in his territory unless they own a spot in the overcrowded cemetery and warned of "severe punishment" for offenders. Mayor Gerard Lalanne said he had taken the radical measure to protest against a legal ruling preventing him from enlarging the burial ground in the village of 260 people. "The first dead person to come along, I'll send him to the state's representative," he said. Lalane said he had been inspired by the mayor of the village of Cugnaux, which had also outlawed death as a protest last year and thus won the right to enlarge the village's cemetery.
■ FRANCE
Girl fined for letter to mom
A letter sent by a 13-year-old girl in Macon to her late mother, addressed to "Paradise Street, Heaven," was returned to the sender with a postage fine slapped on, the Journal de Saone-et-Loire newspaper said on Thursday. On the second anniversary of her mother's death, Anais wanted to send her a "message of love, like a bottle in the ocean," the report said. But two days after she sent it, marked with her mother's name but no stamp, it was returned as a mistaken address -- along with a 1.35 euro (US$2) fine for unpaid postage. The post office said there really was a town in the area called Ciel, or Heaven, but the street was unknown.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Bottled water banned
The government said on Thursday it would ban bottled water at meetings and other official business, just weeks after a minister said shunning tap water was morally questionable. Cabinet Secretary Gus O'Donnell wrote "to the head of every government department suggesting they should replace bought-in bottled water with tap water for all meetings in future," a statement said. A number of departments, including the environment and business ministries, have already stopped using bottled water at meetings, but the new extended policy is expected to come into effect later this year, the statement said.
■ GERMANY
Monk caught with porn
A Benedictine monk has been caught with about 230 pornographic films in his room in a monastery in Bavaria, the Abendzeitung newspaper reported on Thursday. The discovery was made after the monk was caught trying to steal four gay pornography DVDs from a sex shop in Wuerzburg, the paper said. After an assistant caught him stealing the films, the 49-year-old fled, throwing his loot in a rubbish bin before being caught by police. The monk lives at the 900-year-old Maria Laach Abbey in Rhineland-Palatinate.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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