■ JAPAN
Man burns home over toys
A man has admitted to burning down his family home after his mother threw away some of his favorite robot toys from the Gundam animation series. Yoshifumi Takabe, aged 30 and living with his mother, said he had become suicidal after she dumped some of the robots, of which he had enough to fill 300 boxes stacked to the ceiling, the Sports Nippon Shimbun said yesterday. The blaze on Aug. 9 last year completely destroyed their two-story wooden house in Kasai, Hyogo Prefecture, but no one was injured. “The Gundam figures are like the partners I spend my life with,” he reportedly said after pleading guilty at western Kobe’s District Court. “I wanted to die with them in a fire if they were to be thrown out.”
■ AUSTRALIA
Convict escapes to visit mom
A prisoner who gave police the slip at an airport and was eventually found drinking beer in a pub said he’d only wanted to see his mother. Kayd Thorp, 24, took cover in bushland and swam across a Brisbane city creek to dodge search teams in a six-hour manhunt on Tuesday, which ended when he was discovered having a pint in a local pub. “I think his beer was still being poured when they swooped,” an officer told the Courier Mail newspaper. “He didn’t even get to blow the froth off.” Thorp was preparing to board a flight to Victoria to face charges over the fatal beating of a man in February when he managed to escape his police escorts. Officers told Brisbane Magistrates Court Thorp was not handcuffed and fled while officers were checking in their bags. When he was caught, Thorp said he had only wanted to see his mother one last time.
■ JAPAN
Transvestite steals panties
A teacher at a school for the blind has been arrested for allegedly stealing a woman’s underpants from a laundromat while dressed in a miniskirt and wearing a blonde wig, police said yesterday. Police later confiscated about 150 female garments, including more underwear and knee-high boots, from the home of Tsuyoshi Hirano, 43, a teacher at a prefectural school for the visually impaired, the Nikkan Sports Shimbun reported. The victim, a 22-year-old woman, realized her underpants were missing from a drying tumbler in a coin laundromat in Fukuoka, western Japan. When she saw Hirano get into a car parked outside, she reported the license plate number to police, Kyodo News reported. “At first glance, I knew ‘she’ was a ‘he,’” she reportedly told police.
■ VIETNAM
Tropical storm kills four
The government says a tropical storm that hit the country has killed four people and left 10 others missing. The national floods and storms control committee says tropical storm Mindulle also injured 20 others when it slammed the north-central coast on Tuesday. A disaster official in central Danang City said yesterday that authorities are still searching for 10 crew of a fishing boat that went missing while seeking shelter. The government says the storm damaged more than 4,000 houses and 25,000 hectares of rice fields.
■ INDIA
‘Saffron terror’ poses threat
Home Minister P. Chidambaram warned yesterday that Hindu extremists posed an increasing risk to national security, dubbing the threat as “saffron terror.” The color saffron is associated with Hindu nationalism in India, and some right-wing groups have been linked to militant attacks in the west of the country.
■ ISRAEL
Settlers admonish PM
Settlers warned yesterday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will face his “day of judgment” if he caves in to pressure to further limit settlement construction in the West Bank. “This is not a time to mince words as this is literally a day of judgment for our prime minister and government,” said Naftali Bennett, head of Yesha, the main association of settlers in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory. Yesha warned of “serious diplomatic and political implications” if Netanyahu reneges on his promise to resume issuing building permits. The issue of settlements is expected to figure prominently in the new round of direct Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations starting in Washington next Thursday.
■ BAHRAIN
Stabbing suspect arrested
Authorities in Bahrain arrested a suspect on Tuesday in the case of a Canadian singer whose body was found stuffed inside a suitcase at London’s Heathrow Airport in 1999, according to London’s Scotland Yard. The force said that Youssef Ahmed Wahid was arrested in the Gulf state in what it described as a planned operation and his extradition was pending. The body of 28-year-old Fatima Kama, who shared an address with Wahid, was found in a suitcase abandoned on the third floor of a Heathrow Airport parking lot in 1999. Wahid, a former Kuwait Airways steward, was arrested within days of the discovery in his hometown of Ramadiyeh, Lebanon. He denied any involvement and was released. Police have said that the motive for the slaying may have been theft.
■ MOLDOVA
Police seize uranium
Moldova has seized almost 2kg of the radioactive substance uranium-238 from a suspected group of traffickers including former interior ministry officials, officials said on Tuesday. Police found 1.8kg of the substance in a garage in the capital Chisinau where it was under guard and in a special container, interior ministry spokesman Chiril Motpan said. He said that the people linked to the operation wanted to sell it for 9 million euros (US$11 million) and had previous convictions for possessing radioactive materials in Moldova, Russia and Romania. He said the group of seven people included two former interior ministry officials who were now retired.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
First lady gives birth
Samantha Cameron, the wife of the prime minister, gave birth on Tuesday to the couple’s fourth child, a 2.7kg girl, while on a family holiday in the southwest of England. David Cameron, who took office in May, said the birth had come as “a bit of a shock” as the baby had not been expected until next month. “We’re absolutely thrilled. She is an unbelievably beautiful girl and I’m a very proud Dad,” he said in Truro, Cornwall.
■ AUSTRIA
Kadyrov escapes indictment
Prosecutors in Austria said on Tuesday that they had filed a formal indictment against three men in connection with the killing of a Chechen whistleblower in Vienna last year. However, the prosecutors said they did not have enough evidence to charge Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, who had earlier been implicated in the crime. In April, Austria’s public prosecutor’s office, citing circumstantial evidence, announced after a yearlong investigation that the whistle-blower, Umar Israilov, had been fatally shot during a botched kidnapping ordered by Kadyrov, accusations that the Chechen leader has repeatedly denied.
■ COLOMBIA
Hit lists sow fear
Police on Tuesday said they are investigating disturbing hit lists circulating on Facebook that have been linked to the murders of two teenagers out of 100 names on them. Police teams have been sent to Puerto Asis where the slayings were taking place to discover who is behind the lists, which are sowing panic in the southern town, police General Jose Leon Riano said. Officials said the crime scare started on Aug. 16 when two teens, aged 16 and 17, were shot dead while riding a motorbike. A day later, Puerto Asis students received via Facebook a first list of 69 names on it, which included the two killed. Since then, another two lists have been issued, panicking parents. Police said they were considering whether the lists were a joke or game between adolescents in the town.
■ UNITED STATES
Ousted official declines job
The Department of Agriculture official ousted during a racial firestorm last month has declined an invitation to return to fulltime work at the agency. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack says Shirley Sherrod did agree to work as a consultant to help the department improve its civil rights performance. She was forced out earlier this year when an excerpt of a speech she gave several years ago was posted by a conservative blogger on the Internet. The remarks seemed to show Sherrod, who is black, giving short shrift attention as a local agriculture adviser to a poor white farmer’s plea for financial assistance.
■ UNITED STATES
Thieves leave sex tape
It wasn’t tough to identify the suspects in a break-in at a rural home at Washington State. The bare facts were right there. Grays Harbor County sheriff’s chief deputy Dave Pimentel says the man and woman were caught having sex on camera on Monday when someone arrived to collect the mail while the homeowner was away, according to broadcaster KXRO-AM. The naked couple fled, leaving behind the camera, which had been stolen elsewhere. Pimentel said on Tuesday that deputies who checked the video recognized the couple from previous contacts. The woman was arrested for investigation of burglary. An arrest warrant has been issued for the man.
■ UNITED STATES
Dog abuser stays in prison
An Alabama parole board on Tuesday refused to grant conditional release to a man serving a seven-year prison sentence for setting his pit bull on fire and beating him with a shovel, the board said. The eight-year old dog, named Louis Vuitton, has fully recovered from his 2007 ordeal and was present at the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles hearing as a material witness against his former owner, Juan Daniels, 26. Daniels lit the animal on fire with lighter fluid in the 2007 attack.
■ UNITED STATES
Huge marijuana farm found
Authorities say narcotics task force agents have seized an estimated 25,000 marijuana plants worth up to US$100 million on a Southern California farm believed to be run by Mexican drug traffickers. Sheriff’s deputy Steve Reed, a member of the San Diego County Integrated Narcotics Task Force, was on helicopter patrol looking for marijuana farms on Tuesday when he spotted the plants growing on the Santa Ysabel Indian Reservation. Drug Enforcement Administration spokeswoman Amy Roderick says the plants were taken to an undisclosed federally operated facility to be destroyed.
‘GROSS NEGLIGENCE?’ Despite a spleen typically being significantly smaller than a liver, the surgeon said he believed Bryan’s spleen was ‘double the size of what is normal’ A Florida surgeon who is facing criminal charges after allegedly removing a patient’s liver instead of his spleen has said he is “forever traumatized” by that person’s death. In a deposition from November last year that was recently obtained by NBC, 44-year-old Thomas Shaknovsky described the death of 70-year-old William Bryan as an “incredibly unfortunate event that I regret deeply.” Bryan died after the botched surgery; and last month, a grand jury in Tallahassee indicted Shaknovsky on a charge of manslaughter. “I’m forever traumatized by it and hurt by it,” Shaknovsky added, also saying that wrong-site surgeries can happen “during
Kouri Richins, a Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband is to serve a life sentence for his murder without the possibility of parole, a judge ruled on Wednesday. Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing a cocktail given to her husband, Eric Richins, with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022. A jury also found her guilty of four other felonies, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Feb. 14, 2022, with a
Former Chinese ministers of national defense Wei Fenghe(魏鳳和) and Li Shangfu (李尚福) were both sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve over graft charges, state news agency Xinhua reported on Thursday, underscoring the severity of the purge in the military. The armed forces have been one of the main targets of a broad corruption crackdown ordered by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) after coming to power in 2012. The purges reached the elite Rocket Force, which oversees nuclear weapons as well as conventional missiles, in 2023. Earlier this year they escalated further, resulting in the removal of the top general in
‘PERSONAL MISTAKES’: Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison A southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government and has resigned from her city position, officials said on Monday. Eileen Wang (王愛琳), mayor of Arcadia, was charged last month with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favorable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected
RSS