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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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