■CHINA
Drought affects 240,000
Officials warned yesterday that 240,000 people were suffering from water shortages in a mountainous region that has been hit by a five-month-long drought, state media reported. Parts of the Guangxi region have had little rain since August, forcing villagers to travel kilometers to fetch water, Xinhua news agency reported. “Local governments have been sending water trucks to those villages that suffer severe shortages,” a spokesman at the drought relief headquarters was quoted as saying. “We are organizing local residents to dig wells and divert water from elsewhere to the drought-hit areas,” he said. Drought has hit several parts of China in the past year, leaving millions short of water.
■PHILIPPINES
Japanese robbed, killed
A Japanese man living in the Philippines has been robbed and shot dead by fellow bus passengers near Manila, police said yesterday. Hiromi Honda, 59, was attacked by five unknown suspects shortly after he boarded the bus in Dasmarinas town, south of Manila on Friday morning, a police report said. The attackers, who were also aboard the vehicle, ordered the driver to stop and immediately opened fire with at least two handguns, it added. Honda, who lived in the area with a Filipina girlfriend, avoided the initial volley by running away but the suspects chased him and shot him dead, the report said. The gunmen stole the victim’s necklace and wallet and fled, it added.
■INDIA
Boat sinks, 12 dead
Twelve people died and at least 20 others were missing and feared drowned yesterday after an overcrowded boat jammed with Hindu pilgrims capsized in a river in the south, police said. The accident occurred as the boat was crossing the Godavari River in Andhra Pradesh state, police superintendent Madhava Chary said from West Godavari district, 500km from state capital Hyderabad. About 50 passengers were on the boat, which capsized early in the morning and had the capacity to carry 35 passengers, police said. “We have retrieved 12 bodies so far, including five women and four children. Another 20 to 25 people are still missing,” Chary said, adding some of the passengers were able to swim to safety. Rescue vessels and divers were dispatched to search for missing passengers, most of whom hailed from nearby villages.
■NEW ZEALAND
Virginity up for auction
A cash-strapped student has gone online to auction her virginity to help pay her university fees. The 19-year-old has offered her virginity “by tender to the highest bidder” on the ineed.co.nz website which is based in Hamilton, where Waikato University has its headquarters. Under the heading “Relationship For Sale,” the teenager, calling herself “Unigirl,” said she was attractive, from the North Island, and desperate for money to pay ongoing university fees. “I have never had a sexual relationship and am still a virgin,” her advertisement said. “I am offering my virginity by tender to the highest bidder as long as all personal safety aspects are observed. This is my decision made with full awareness of the circumstances and possible consequences.” She said she was fit, healthy, with a trim physique and had “no medical conditions of any nature,” however she did not respond to a local newspaper request for an interview. Web site proprietor Ross McKenzie told the Waikato Times the Web site’s policy was that if an ad was legal and did not offend the general standards of society “it was okay.”
■RUSSIA
Leopard faces eviction
A pet leopard named Cleopatra has become the latest victim of a bitter housing dispute in Moscow where residents are fighting to save their riverside houses from demolition. The leopard, which lives in a cage at a housing development, faces eviction and confiscation as its owner’s house is due to be demolished by city authorities. The natural resources ministry said on Friday that the leopard should be removed from its owner and given to a zoo or rehabilitation center. If the leopard proves to be a Far Eastern leopard, an endangered species native to Russia, it will be taken to a special center in the southern Russian city of Sochi, the ministry said. The owner of the leopard, businessman Sergei Bobyshev, said he has little hope of holding on to his pet. “If they take away my Cleopatra, she will die. Once I left her for a week with my friends. All that time she didn’t eat anything and waited for my return,” he said.
■POLAND
Church fingerprints kids
A Polish priest has installed an electronic reader in his church for schoolchildren to leave their fingerprints in order to monitor their attendance at mass, the Gazeta Wyborcza daily said on Friday. The pupils will mark their fingerprints every time they go to church over three years and if they attend 200 masses they will be freed from the obligation of having to pass an exam prior to their confirmation, the paper said. The pupils in the southern town of Gryfow Slaski told the daily they liked the idea and also the priest, Grzegorz Sowa, who invented it. “This is comfortable. We don’t have to stand in a line to get the priest’s signature [confirming our presence at the mass] in our confirmation notebooks,” said one pupil, who gave her name as Karolina.
■UNITED STATES
Zoo probes zebras’ death
Officials at Utah’s Hogle Zoo say they’ve launched an investigation into the deaths of two Grevy’s zebras. Officials said on Thursday that zookeepers found the first animal, Taji, dead in his exhibit area on Tuesday. A necropsy conducted that day identified no obvious cause of death. Staff found the second zebra, Monty, in distress and began treatment on Wednesday. He was later euthanized. Associate Director of Animal Health Nancy Carpenter said staffers were consulting with other veterinary experts to determine what caused the deaths. The US Department of Agriculture has been invited to participate in the investigation. Taji and Monty came to Utah in 1998. Grevy’s zebras are native to Africa and are considered endangered.
■UNITED STATES
Chicken on subway probed
A video posted online that shows a man kissing and snuggling a live chicken aboard the New York City subway has viewers giggling and the city transit agency launching an investigation. The subway rider who took the video said on Thursday that it was one of those New York moments she felt compelled to record. Kylie Kaiser, a 27-year-old architect, and two friends boarded a Manhattan train at around 7pm on Tuesday when they saw the man. “He was on his back, rolling from side to side, kissing, hugging and lifting the chicken up in the air,” she said. She said the man was oblivious to everything around him and didn’t respond to onlookers. NYC Transit spokesman Charles Seaton said no passengers reported the incident. He said only service animals, such as guide dogs, and animals in carriers are permitted in the subway.
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
ISSUE: Some foreigners seek women to give birth to their children in Cambodia, and the 13 women were charged with contravening a law banning commercial surrogacy Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday thanked Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni for granting a royal pardon last year to 13 Filipino women who were convicted of illegally serving as surrogate mothers in the Southeast Asian kingdom. Marcos expressed his gratitude in a meeting with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, who was visiting Manila for talks on expanding trade, agricultural, tourism, cultural and security relations. The Philippines and Cambodia belong to the 10-nation ASEAN, a regional bloc that promotes economic integration but is divided on other issues, including countries whose security alignments is with the US or China. Marcos has strengthened