INDIA
Witchdoctor held in death
Police said on Wednesday they had arrested a witchdoctor and his family over the alleged sacrifice of a two-year-old boy in a tribal area. Police were alert after the boy went missing on Tuesday while playing on the street in the Durg district in Chhattisgarh state. “The witchdoctor, his wife and three children were arrested yesterday after the bloodied body of the child was recovered from their worship place along with the knife used for the crime,” district police chief Amit Kumar said. The witchdoctor had said bloodstains at his home were the result of him slaughtering a goat, Kumar said. However, when police checked the house, they found the body of the child covered with a cloth.
AUSTRALIA
Woman’s car runs over her
A Melbourne woman was rushed to hospital on Wednesday after being run over by her own car — twice. Paramedic Craig Brooks yesterday said the woman forgot to pull the hand brake before getting out of the car and that it rolled down her driveway and knocked her down, leaving her unable to move. The woman told paramedics “that the car ran over her lower abdomen and legs before crossing the street, hitting a fence on the other side of the road, bouncing back and running over her again.”
NEW ZEALAND
Tokelau teen trio rescued
Three teenage boys from the remote island of Tokelau have been rescued by a tuna ship near Fiji after 50 days adrift in the Pacific Ocean. The boys, aged 14 and 15, went missing in a small aluminum boat early last month and were presumed to have died after unsuccessful searches by the air force. Tai Fredricsen, the first mate of the San Nikunau told Radio New Zealand the trio were were found on Wednesday off the coast of Fiji, which is 1,420km from Tokelau. They were said to be dehydrated and sun-burned and would be taken to hospital when the ship reaches Fiji today.
DENMARK
TV station ‘self-censoring’
Culture Minister Per Stig Moeller accused a TV station of self-censorship on Wednesday after it delayed airing a comedy series about a bungling group of terrorists because of security concerns. A spokesman for private SBS TV said The Cell was indefinitely delayed because of terrorist threats against the country. Moeller told the online edition of Berlingske Tidende that it was a case of “self-censorship fed by fear.” He also demanded that the channel pay back 4.5 million kroner (US$810,000) of public money used to film the show if it does not broadcast it. The Cell is a 12-episode series directed by Danish-Egyptian director Omar Marzouk about the misadventures of three Islamic extremists in Denmark.
GERMANY
Breast implants threatened
A woman who got breast implants with a loan from her then-boyfriend now fears her assets could be repossessed after she failed to fully reimburse him, the 20-year-old woman told Bild newspaper. The ex-boyfriend is demanding she return the 4,379 euros (US$5,800) he gave her to pay for her surgery last year or he’ll call the police and get the repossessors involved, Bild reported on Wednesday. “It’s true that Carsten signed a loan agreement shortly before the operation,” the woman, named only as Anastasia, was quoted saying. “The condition was that I wouldn’t have to pay him back if I stayed with him for a year.” However, they split shortly after her surgery. The woman said she had sent 3,000 euros into the man’s account last week.
UNITED STATES
Obama stops ‘shellacking’
He couldn’t preserve the political lives of fellow Democrats this month, but he can still save a turkey. President Barack Obama pardoned “Apple” and his feathered friend “Cider” on Wednesday in an annual White House ritual ahead of Thanksgiving. “Today, I have the awesome responsibility of granting a presidential pardon to a pair of turkeys,” said Obama, standing with his two daughters in the White House Rose Garden. “Now, for the record, let me say that it feels pretty good to stop at least one shellacking this November.” Democrats lost strength in the Senate and their majority in the House of Representatives on Nov. 2 in elections Obama described famously as a “shellacking,” or heavy beating. Politics took a backseat to the high-profile turkey ceremony on Wednesday, however, and the president — calling it “one official duty I am sworn to uphold as the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth” — made the most of it.
UNITED STATES
Ex-priest tried to hire hitman
A defrocked Roman Catholic priest has been charged with trying to hire someone to murder a Texas teenager who accused him of sexual abuse two years ago, officials said on Tuesday. John Fiala, 52, was arrested by state troopers yesterday after he negotiated a US$5,000 hit with an undercover agent, the Texas Department of Public Safety said in a statement. The investigation began after a neighbor tipped off the sheriff of a nearby county, the San Antonio Express-News reported. “I received a call from an unnamed informant who was having problems with the way Fiala was acting,” Edwards County Sheriff Don Letsinger told the paper. “I really was kind of surprised that he would stick his neck out this far and talk to people he didn’t even know about having someone murdered.”
UNITED STATES
Shop owner hits jackpot
A shop owner in western Pennsylvania has sold himself a winning US$1.8 million lottery ticket — and as the seller of the ticket, he’ll get an extra US$10,000. Ron Rea owns Tobacco World stores in Uniontown and Belle Vernon. He bought the winning ticket for the Nov. 18 Match 6 Lotto drawing at the Belle Vernon store. Rea says he doesn’t play the lottery’s Daily Number, but he spends about US$20 a day on tickets for games with higher odds, telling the Herald-Standard of Uniontown: “If you hit, your life’s changed.”
ARGENTINA
Father charged with rape
A 62-year-old Argentine man was arrested and charged with raping his daughter for more than 30 years and fathering 10 children with her, in a case “even worse” than that of Austria’s Josef Fritzl in 2008, a judge said on Wednesday. The man has been charged with repeated sexual abuse and incest, crimes which carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, he added. The man, whose identity was not disclosed, was arrested in June for alleged cattle rustling, prompting his daughter, now aged 43, to report him to the police despite his threats of harm if she talked.
BRAZIL
Doctor gets 278 years
A Brazilian reproductive medicine specialist was sentenced to 278 years in prison for sexually abusing 39 of his patients, local media reported on Tuesday. Roger Abdelmassih, a well-known Sao Paulo fertility doctor, was accused of 56 cases of sexual abuse of patients in his private clinic. He was convicted of abusing patients both during examinations and sometimes when they were in recovery rooms.
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000
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