■UNITED STATES
Cat-stomper resolves case
An actor who stomped his girlfriend’s cat to death has resolved his case with 500 hours of volunteering. Joseph Petcka worked at a New York City soup kitchen and other organizations. His case is expected to be closed without jail time or probation. Prosecutors said Petcka attacked the 3.6kg cat, named Norman, in a drunken, jealous rage in March 2007 after it bit him.
■UNITED STATES
Flying Chihuahuas take off
Chihuahuas have been flying out of California since other states learned about the Golden State’s glut of the little dogs. A group of 20 dogs has already arrived at the Humane Society for Greater Nashua in New Hampshire, thanks to American Airlines, Kinder4Rescue in Studio City and Grey’s Anatomy actress Katherine Heigl. Another group will leave for New Hampshire in the next four days.
■UNITED STATES
‘Captain EO’ returns
Disneyland announced plans on Friday to bring back the 3D sci-fi film Captain EO starring Michael Jackson next February, over 23 years after the attraction debuted in California. The 17-minute film starred the late King of Pop as a singing-and-dancing intergalactic commander. It was directed by Francis Ford Coppola and executive produced by George Lucas.
■UNITED STATES
‘Alien’ writer dies
Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon, whose credits include Alien and Total Recall, has died. He was 63. The Writers Guild of America says O’Bannon died on Thursday. His wife, Diane, told the Los Angeles Times her husband died at St John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, California, after a 30-year battle with Crohn’s disease. He began his career in 1974 with the science-fiction film Dark Star, which he co-wrote with director John Carpenter. O’Bannon continued writing sci-fi and horror pictures throughout his career. His credits include Invaders from Mars, Bleeders and The Return of the Living Dead, which he also directed. He is survived by his wife and his teenage son, Adam.
■MEXICO
Bodies found near resort
Police found six bullet-ridden, decomposing bodies on Friday near a highway leading to a Mexican resort on the Gulf of California. The six men were found half-buried on a dirt road off the highway frequently used by tourists from Arizona to reach the Puerto Penasco resort, widely known as Rocky Point, Sonora state police said. Also, in the Sonora border city of Nogales, state police found a man’s body in a plastic container bearing drug-related messages. The Mexican army reported on Friday that four suspected drug traffickers and two local policemen were killed on Thursday night in a shootout with soldiers in General Zuazua, a town in the outskirts of the northern city of Monterrey. Two policemen apparently had been protecting the traffickers, the army statement said. Also on Friday, gunmen killed Pedro Picasso, assistant football coach of Mexico first-division team Indios, in the border city Ciudad Juarez, said Jacinto Segura, a spokesman for the local prosecutor’s office said.A second, unidentified person also died in the shooting at a cell phone shop. Segura gave no motive, and it was unclear who was the target of the attack.
■CHINA
Two sentenced to death
A court in northeast China sentenced to death a billionaire who hired two people to kill his former business partner following a legal dispute, state media reported late on Friday. Wang Wenxiang (王文襄), 49, paid his personal secretary, Bai Peng (白鵬), and a migrant worker, Yu Yi (于毅), to murder Zhong Yishi (鐘益師) in May this year, Xinhua news agency said. The Municipal Intermediate Court of Harbin also sentenced Bai to death and gave Yu a two-year suspended death sentence, Xinhua said. Wang, whose company Xinheng Corporation is involved in real estate, hired Bai and Yu to kill Zhong, who ran a construction company, following a legal dispute over money, Xinhua reported. Bai and Yu strangled Zhong in an underground garage before burning his body in an abandoned brick kiln, the report said. In a separate case, a businesswoman was sentenced to death by a court in Zhejiang Province on Friday for cheating investors out of 384 million yuan, Xinhua said. The Intermediate People’s Court of Jinhua City handed down the sentence to Wu Ying (吳英), 28, the former owner of the Zhejiang-based Bense Holding Group. Wu collected money from investors over a two-year period, promising them high returns on their investment, but instead used the money to repay loans and run her company.
■SOUTH KOREA
Former PM Han released
Prosecutors released former prime minister Han Myung-sook after questioning her over an alleged bribery scandal amid claims by the main opposition party that the move was politically motivated. The investigation came days after the nation’s former No. 2 official refused to appear before prosecutors over suspicions she took US$50,000 from a businessman in return for favors in 2006 when she was prime minister. Han denied the allegation and exercised her right to remain silent during questioning, said Woo Sang-ho, a former lawmaker and spokesman for the main opposition Democratic Party. Han was released late on Friday. Prosecutors were considering indicting the former prime minister on a bribery charge this week, South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported.
■CHINA
Filipino transvestites jailed
Five Filipino transvestites who lured foreign men from bars in Shanghai before drugging and then robbing them have been jailed for up to 13 years, state media said on Friday. The men, aged between 26 and 30, dressed in women’s clothes when they carried out the robberies between last December and February this year, a Shanghai court found, Xinhua news agency reported. They would go with the men to hotels or the victims’ homes with promises of sex, but once there would drug them with chocolate or beer laced with sleeping pills. The five would then rob the victims of cash, mobile phones, watches and credit cards, the report said, quoting the court. The stolen goods totaled 340,000 yuan (US$50,000), Xinhua said. All five men, who were jailed on Friday for between nine and 13 years, will be deported after serving their sentences, the report said.
■SERBIA
‘Pink Panther’ gang jailed
A Belgrade court on Friday jailed three members of the so-called “Pink Panther” gang for a record-breaking jewel robbery in 2004, Beta news agency reported. The gang has been blamed for robberies around the globe. The court found the three guilty of stealing almost 22 million euros (US$31 million) of jewelery in Tokyo on March 5, 2004, the report said. The stash has never been found.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to visit Canada next week, his first since relations plummeted after the assassination of a Canadian Sikh separatist in Vancouver, triggering diplomatic expulsions and hitting trade. Analysts hope it is a step toward repairing ties that soured in 2023, after then-Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau pointed the finger at New Delhi’s involvement in murdering Hardeep Singh Nijjar, claims India furiously denied. An invitation extended by new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to Modi to attend the G7 leaders summit in Canada offers a chance to “reset” relations, former Indian diplomat Harsh Vardhan Shringla said. “This is a
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