SINGAPORE
Garbage hoarder found dead
A 76-year-old man who lived alone was found dead in his flat, which was piled to the ceiling with garbage he had collected from bins over the past decade, a report said yesterday. An emergency services team took nearly an hour on Monday to dismantle the apartment’s heavily locked front door after neighbors complained of a stench and as long to find the remains after going through the junk, the Straits Times reported. Police confirmed yesterday that they found the body of a man in his 70s in a public housing flat and were investigating it as an “unnatural death.” A neighbor told the Straits Times that the man’s wife and daughter moved out about 10 years ago and his hoarding habit began at about the same time. He would rummage through dustbins in the area and stash items he found in plastic bags in his apartment. “When I asked him what was in the bags, he said he had treasures,” the neighbor said.
GERMANY
Man listed as dead, alive
For 31 years, Rene Seiptius had been counted among the thousands of people killed while trying to escape the confines of communist East Germany. As it turns out, he was alive all along. “I can’t explain how it could have happened,” Seiptius said on Monday. Seiptius first attempted to cross the deadly strip of land that once separated East Germany from the West in 1981, when he was 17. He and two friends managed to tiptoe past a row of minefields, but they triggered fire from an automatic spring gun. One of Seiptius’ crew died and their cover was blown. They were quickly arrested by border guards, but records kept by East Germany’s notorious secret police showed Seiptius as having died during the botched escape attempt. “I’ve been alive for the last 48 years,” he said. Eventually his name found its way onto a list of all the people who had died along Germany’s East-West border compiled by a museum in Berlin. The case was not made public until recently, when Seiptius’ ex-wife stumbled across an article on the Web site of German broadcaster NDR, which listed Seiptius as deceased. “It was pure coincidence,” Patricia Seiptius said. “I was looking for something online and one of the search results was this article, I looked at it and there was his name. I couldn’t believe it.”
AUSTRIA
Climber in crevasse ordeal
Mountain rescuers on Tuesday extracted a 70-year-old German man claiming to have been stuck for about a week in a glacier crevasse, police said, calling it incredible that he was still alive. The climber, who has not been named, was only slightly injured after his ordeal, although he was very cold and exhausted. He was airlifted to hospital in Innsbruck by helicopter. He told rescuers that he had set off about a week ago without crampons and that at about 3,000m up he had slid into the 20m deep crevasse. Other mountaineers were eventually alerted by his cries and called in rescuers. “It is a sensation that he survived there for a week,” police said. “He was very lucky.”
FRANCE
Man jailed for stabbing dog
A 51-year-old man has been given an eight-month prison sentence for killing a dachshund by repeatedly stabbing it with a fork, a court spokesman said on Tuesday. The homeless man was sentenced on Monday after being arrested at the weekend. Routine police checks revealed he was wanted on France’s Indian Ocean island of Reunion for animal cruelty after killing the dog, which belonged to the family he had been staying with.
ITALY
Police raid cannabis factory
Police have found a flourishing cannabis factory in an abandoned metro tunnel built beneath Rome during the Benito Mussolini era, a police officer said on Tuesday. Police raided the tunnel, which is 1km long and was officially a mushroom farm, on Saturday after detecting the pungent odor of marijuana around its entrance last week. The tunnel is close to the Italian central bank’s vaults in southeastern Rome. Video footage released by the police showed thriving marijuana plants stretching along the last section of the 4,000km2 tunnel, along with stacks of bags filled with cannabis next to weighing and processing equipment. Italy’s financial police said they had confiscated 340kg of the drug worth an estimated 3 million euros (US$3.7 million). The 57 year-old owner of the farm has been arrested.
SOUTH AFRICA
Serial killer suspect arrested
A man suspected in a string of grisly rapes and murders that gave a community the moniker “village of death” has been arrested, the Daily Dispatch said yesterday. Bulelani Mabhayi, 39, was arrested on Sunday after an elderly woman was found hacked to death the night before in the Eastern Cape village of Tholeni, the paper reported. He is being charged with a string of unresolved rapes and murders in the village, where 19 women have been slain since 2009, a police spokesman said. Police took Mabhayi to the village, where he pointed out the homes of his suspected victims, police said. Residents said they were relieved but still scared. “We don’t know if he was the only one committing these crimes or not,” resident Nowinile Mayekiso said.
MEXICO
Animals meet the press
It wasn’t just another political dog-and-pony show. Mexico’s leftist presidential candidate brought a pig, a sheep and chickens to a news conference on Tuesday. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador says the animals were given to voters by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in exchange for votes. Lopez Obrador has filed court appeals against election results showing he finished 6.6 percentage points behind the PRI’s candidate. The pig was the most vocal of the group. The sheep quietly munched on grass placed on the floor of Lopez Obrador’s headquarters, while the chicken and some turkeys pecked aimlessly. Lopez Obrador’s supporters say the PRI also handed out gift cards and household goods during the campaign, accusations the PRI denies.
AUSTRIA
‘Frozen Dumbo’ a success
Scientists have succeeded for the first time in impregnating an elephant with frozen sperm, ultrasound pictures presented by Vienna’s Schoenbrunn Zoo showed on Tuesday. The scan shows a 10.6cm long, five-month-old fetus with its trunk, legs, tail, eyes and ears clearly discernible. The fetus, which was scanned in April, is due to be born to 26-year-old African elephant Tonga in or around August next year after a pregnancy of about 630 days, the zoo said. Elephants have been impregnated with fresh or refrigerated sperm in the past in an effort to protect endangered species, but frozen sperm can be transported further, and allows the female elephant to be inseminated at her most fertile time. The sperm was taken from a sedated wild elephant in South Africa using electroejaculation in the project known internally as “Operation Frozen Dumbo,” a zoo spokeswoman said. It took eight months to clear customs on its way to France due to lack of an established procedure for such wares.
Indonesia and Malaysia have become the first countries to block Grok, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, after authorities said it was being misused to generate sexually explicit and nonconsensual images. The moves reflect growing global concern over generative AI tools that can produce realistic images, sound and text, while existing safeguards fail to prevent their abuse. The Grok chatbot, which is accessed through Musk’s social media platform X, has been criticized for generating manipulated images, including depictions of women in bikinis or sexually explicit poses, as well as images involving children. Regulators in the two Southeast Asian
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
The Chinese Embassy in Manila yesterday said it has filed a diplomatic protest against a Philippine Coast Guard spokesman over a social media post that included cartoonish images of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Jay Tarriela and an embassy official had been trading barbs since last week over issues concerning the disputed South China Sea. The crucial waterway, which Beijing claims historic rights to despite an international ruling that its assertion has no legal basis, has been the site of repeated clashes between Chinese and Philippine vessels. Tarriela’s Facebook post on Wednesday included a photo of him giving a
ICE DISPUTE: The Trump administration has sought to paint Good as a ‘domestic terrorist,’ insisting that the agent who fatally shot her was acting in self-defense Thousands of demonstrators chanting the name of the woman killed by a US federal agent in Minneapolis, Minnesota, took to the city’s streets on Saturday, amid widespread anger at use of force in the immigration crackdown of US President Donald Trump. Organizers said more than 1,000 events were planned across the US under the slogan “ICE, Out for Good” — referring to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is drawing growing opposition over its execution of Trump’s effort at mass deportations. The slogan is also a reference to Renee Good, the 37-year-old mother shot dead on Wednesday in her
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