INDIA
Villagers behead ‘witch’
A 63-year-old woman was dismembered and beheaded by machete-wielding villagers who accused her of practicing witchcraft, police said yesterday. Seven people have been arrested over the death of Moni Orang, a mother of five who was seized from her home in Assam state on Monday after local priests said she was casting spells. “The attackers, armed with machetes and other crude implements, descended on the village and took away Moni Orang from her house and then brutally killed her,” senior police official Manabendra Dev Roy said. “She was decapitated and her limbs were chopped off.” Yesterday, villagers stormed the local police station to protest against the arrests. “Moni was a witch and had cast evil spells on her enemies,” villager Kiran Teronpi said on local TV. “There is no place for such sorcerers and so her killing is justified.”
MEXICO
Probe implicates soldiers
Military investigators have found evidence showing that soldiers were likely involved in the disappearance of seven young people in Zacatecas state, the Secretariat of National Defense said on Monday. Relatives of the two women and five men have told local media that they were detained by soldiers in a house in the town of Calera on July 7. Their bodies were found in a neighboring town with signs of torture and execution-style bullet wounds to the head over the weekend, or 11 days later, according to their families. The secretariat said in a statement that military prosecutors “found evidence of a probable participation of military personnel” in connection with “the disappearance” of the group.
UNITED STATES
Sleep linked to Alzheimer’s
New research suggests poor sleep might increase risk of Alzheimer’s disease by spurring a brain-clogging gunk that in turn further interrupts shut-eye. Disrupted sleep might be one of the missing pieces in explaining how a hallmark of Alzheimer’s, a sticky protein called beta-amyloid, starts its damage long before people have trouble with memory, researchers said on Monday at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference. “It’s very clear that sleep disruption is an underappreciated factor,” said Matthew Walker of the University of California, Berkeley, who presented data linking amyloid levels with people’s sleep and memory performance. “It’s a new player on the scene that increases risk of Alzheimer’s disease.” The new research suggests that sleep problems actually interact with some of the disease processes involved in Alzheimer’s, and that those toxic proteins in turn affect the deep sleep that is so important for memory formation.
RUSSIA
Selfie destroys Lenin statue
A statue of Vladimir Lenin, headless after an attack by a drunk man, has now lost its torso after a selfie-happy Siberian tried to pose alongside the image of the iconic Soviet leader, a local official said on Monday. “A young man wanted to have his picture with Lenin, so he climbed up onto the monument’s pedestal,” the official from Siberia’s Moryakovsky village said on condition of anonymity. “He then lost his balance and hung on by grabbing Lenin’s torso.” Both the torso and the selfie-taker then fell down, with the latter ending up in the hospital with a fractured leg and wrist, the official added. Dozens of people in the country have been killed in selfie-related accidents since the beginning of the year, the police have said.
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
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