■INDIA
Students held in murder case
Three schoolboys have been arrested for murder after the body of a classmate was found beheaded and tied to a tree, police said yesterday. A group of youngsters made the grim discovery last week as they went to play cricket by a river in the city of Pune, about 160km from Mumbai. The victim, Abhishek Ghorpade, 15, is thought to have been decapitated with a sickle. His head has yet to be recovered but was believed to have been thrown into the river, police said. Ghorpade left home for a friend’s birthday party last Wednesday evening and told his parents he would be home late, the Pune Mirror newspaper said.
■INDIA
Gunman faces execution
The lone surviving gunman of the 2008 Mumbai attacks could be executed this year if he does not appeal his death sentence, a senior government official said yesterday. Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab, 22, was found guilty of waging war on India, mass murder, conspiracy and terrorism offences last week over the assault, which left 166 people dead and more than 300 injured. Home secretary G.K. Pillai said Kasab’s fate depended on whether the Pakistani national challenged the sentence through the higher courts and filed an appeal for clemency to the country’s president. “If he doesn’t file any appeal anywhere I think the chances of him getting hanged this year are quite high,” he told the CNN-IBN news channel in an interview.
■VIETNAM
Dissidents’ appeal starts
A court yesterday began hearing the appeal of a high-profile group of dissidents jailed for trying to overthrow the communist regime, a court official said. Foreign diplomats and journalists were denied access to the hearing in southern Ho Chi Minh City. The case, originally tried in January, was the most prominent in a series of arrests and convictions of dissidents and bloggers over the past year and triggered criticism from the US, EU and Britain. Human rights lawyer Le Cong Dinh, Internet entrepreneur Tran Huynh Duy Thuc and Le Thang Long, have asked the higher court to review their case. Thuc received a 16-year sentence while Dinh and Long were sentenced to five years each.
■CHINA
Torrential rain hits south
Torrential rains caused by the El Nino weather phenomenon have swept across parts of the south, toppling homes, destroying crops and killing at least 70 people, state media reported yesterday. More flooding was expected. Flooding caused by the heavy rains — which started a month earlier than normal — damaged more than 80,000 homes and damaging large swaths of cropland, affecting more than 10 million people across 13 provinces and cities, the State Flood Control and Disaster Relief Headquarters said on its Web site.
■SOUTH KOREA
Millionaire turns matchmaker
A millionaire who advertised for a son-in-law has found the perfect man after sifting through 400 responses, a matchmaking agency said yesterday. The 78-year-old identified only as Kim began looking for a husband for his 38-year-old only daughter in July, a spokesman for the Sunoo agency said. Kim, who is worth 40 billion won (US$35 million), had specified someone aged between 37 and 42 who grew up in a harmonious family, with a good character and a stable job. Ten of the applicants were selected for interview. The right man, a 41-year-old surnamed Lee, met the daughter for the first time in October and they will tie the knot on Saturday, the spokesman said.
■RUSSIA
Released pirates likely dead
Pirates released on the open sea after hijacking an oil tanker last week never made shore and are likely dead, news agencies quoted a military source as saying yesterday. Officials said last week that 10 pirates accused of hijacking the MV Moscow University in the Gulf of Aden were set free after their capture by forces aboard a warship because there were no grounds to prosecute them. “According to the latest information, the pirates who seized the Moscow University oil tanker failed to reach the shore. Evidently, they have all died,” the source was quoted as saying by news agencies. The military official said the suspects were stripped of their weapons and navigation equipment and, about 300 nautical miles from shore, were put into one of the speed boats they used in the hijacking, the reports said.
■RUSSIA
Putin grieves for miners
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin yesterday grieved with relatives of 90 miners and rescue workers killed or missing in explosions at the country’s largest coal mine as chances faded of finding more survivors. At least 47 miners and rescue workers are confirmed to have died in the double blast at the Raspadskaya mine in southwestern Siberia while 43 miners are missing, the local branch of the emergencies ministry said. A visibly strained Putin, dressed in black and his voice choked with emotion, told relatives in the Kemerovo region the government would do all it could and visited the injured in hospital, pictures showed.
■SAUDI ARABIA
King targets corrupt officials
King Abdullah on Monday ordered that charges be pressed against officials over the deaths of 122 people in flash floods, which sparked a rare media outcry against alleged corruption. The floods, caused by torrential rain in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah last year, damaged thousands of houses built in dry river beds, and raised questions about the fate of public funds destined for sewage and drainage systems in the city. The royal order came after heavy rains killed three people last week in the capital Riyadh, exposing weaknesses in infrastructure and emboldening calls for greater transparency in public fund management in the world’s top oil exporter.
■GERMANY
‘Pill’ doctor sentenced
A Berlin doctor who admitted giving group therapy session participants illegal drugs that left two dead and 10 hospitalized has been convicted and sentenced to more than four years in prison. The 51-year-old, whose name was not released in line with privacy rules, was convicted on Monday of causing bodily harm leading to death for giving the patients ecstasy and other drugs last year. The news agency DAPD reports he was also convicted of violating drug laws, but found not guilty of attempted murder.
■MOROCCO
Elton John ignores ban
British singer Elton John will perform as planned at a festival this month despite calls from the country’s main Islamic party for the gay star to be banned, organizers said on Monday. Artistic director Aziz Daki said that canceling the concert on the grounds of John’s homosexuality would “undermine the respect of privacy” and “breach certain values that the international Mawazine festival is based on.” The main opposition Islamist Justice and Development Party had called on Friday for the singer to be banned from the festival in Rabat, arguing his appearance would pose “a risk of encouraging homosexuality in Morocco.”
■UNITED STATES
Tornadoes kill five
Tornadoes ripped through Oklahoma as storms that killed five people and injured at least 58 blew cars off highways, toppled homes and sent baseball-size hail crashing through windshields in a daylong onslaught. Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management spokesman Jerry Lojka said two people were killed on Monday in Oklahoma City and three were killed in Cleveland County, south of the city.
■CANADA
Prince of Pot to surrender
The nation’s self-styled “Prince of Pot” rallied supporters on Monday before turning himself in to authorities to be extradited to the US to face a five-year jail term. Marc Emery, 52, is alleged by US prosecutors to have sold more than 4 million marijuana seeds through the mail via his Web site. About 75 percent of the seeds went to US customers. Emery and his wife are still holding out hope that he may be allowed to serve his sentence in a local jail to be near his family, if Public Safety Minister Vic Toews consents. No charges have ever been filed against him in Canada.
■CANADA
Terror plotter pleads guilty
A Canadian Muslim has pled guilty to plotting to storm parliament as well as bomb a nuclear facility, a stock exchange and other targets, the court said on Monday. Fahim Ahmad, 25, was charged with participating in a terrorist group — the so-called “Toronto 18,” arrested during a police sting operation in 2006 — and instructing others to carry out terrorist activities. He changed his plea to guilty halfway through his trial, a court official said. The trial of two codefendants would continue. Ahmad is the ninth person to be convicted in the terror plot. He will be sentenced on June 15. Charges were dropped against seven others.
■UNITED STATES
New law will cost Phoenix
Phoenix Deputy City Manager David Krietor says the city could possibly lose hotel and convention center business worth about US$90 million over the next five years because of fallout from Arizona’s new immigration law. He says officials have compiled a “watch list” tracking the potential fallout that includes four organizations that have canceled events and more than a dozen groups that have expressed concerns about the new law. The US$90 million figure represents the estimated amount of money that those groups’ members would spend in the region.
■PERU
Punch(es) for Mothers’ Day
Sports promoters in the city of Huancayo honored its mothers by inviting them to slip on gloves and head protectors and try to punch each others’ lights out. Ten women took a day off from farm work to spar in three-round bouts while clad in polleras, the colorful, embroidered skirts typical of the Andean region. Some were knocked down by powerful blows, but quickly got back up. The event drew about 200 spectators.
■UNITED STATES
Look, but still no touching
Playboy readers who can only imagine what it would look like if a nude centerfold jumped right off the page will soon know. Next month’s edition of the magazine, which goes on sale on Friday, will come with 3D glasses to view the otherwise blurry Playmate of the Year centerfold. Editorial director Jimmy Jellinek said he hopes the issue will remind people that for all the infatuation with the Internet, there is nothing quite like having a magazine in your hands.
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