■ Australia
Outback murder trial to start
An Australian mechanic was ordered yesterday to stand trial over the outback murder three years ago of British backpacker Peter Falconio. Following a five-week committal hearing, Magistrate Alasdair McGregor told a Darwin courthouse that there was enough evidence to commit Bradley John Murdoch to trial for murdering Falconio and abducting and assaulting his girlfriend, Joanne Lees. Falconio disappeared on lonely stretch of highway north of the central Australian town of Alice Springs in July 2001 and his body has never been found. Prosecutors allege Murdoch flagged down the couple's van before shooting Falconio and abducting Lees, who escaped and hid in the bush.
■ Nepal
Maoists issue death list
Maoist insurgents have issued a "death sentence" to nine local journalists working in western Nepal, newspaper reports said yesterday. The Maoist death order followed the killing last week of Dekendra Raj Thapa, a journalist associated with state-owned Radio Nepal. Among the journalists in the Maoist hit list are two journalists associated with the country's biggest publishing house, Kantipur Publications. The Maoists said it was the verdict of their people's court to eliminate the local journalists, the largest Nepali language daily Kantiupur reported.
■ New Zealand
Storm paralyzes Wellington
A mail delivery woman in rural Wairarapa, north east of Wellington, has gone missing in the violent storm lashing central New Zealand that has cut all air and sea links, Radio New Zealand news reported yesterday. New Zealand Post has since canceled mail deliveries because conditions were too dangerous for workers. The storm, with winds gusting up to 198km an hour, has all but paralyzed New Zealand's capital Wellington. High winds and heavy rain have halted ferries to the South Island, closed the airport, and severed road and rail links both within the Wellington area and to the rest of the North Island.
■ Myanmar
Release Suu Kyi: Annan
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called for the immediate release of Myanmar's opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and urged the government to open "a substantive dialogue" with opposition parties and ethnic minorities to demonstrate its commitment to restore democracy. He warned on Tuesday that Myanmar's efforts to draft a new constitution will lack international credibility until the government considers opposition views. On July 9, Myanmar adjourned a constitution-drafting convention after nearly two months of closed-door discussions. It is unclear when it will resume. Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party boycotted the convention because the government refuses to release her from house arrest.
■ China
Beijing targets phone sex
China's communist leaders, in a fresh move to eradicate pornography, have targeted the telephone sex industry, ordering severe punishment for anyone offering the service, the official People's Daily said yesterday. The call came within days of the start of a nationwide project to crack down on Internet pornography. "With the rapid development of the paid-call service market in China, some lawbreakers make use of this form to spread obscene information and even conduct prostitution," Minister of the Information Industry Wang Xudong was quoted as saying.
■ United States
FBI inquiries questioned
Several Democratic lawmakers called for a Justice Department investigation on Tuesday into the FBI's questioning of would-be demonstrators about possible violence at the political conventions, saying the questioning may have violated the First Amendment. In a letter to the department's inspector general seeking an investigation, the lawmakers said the FBI inquiries appeared to represent "systematic political harassment and intimidation of legitimate anti-war protesters." Officials at the Justice Department and the FBI said they had not seen the letter and could not comment on its specific points but defended the recent efforts by the bureau to question demonstrators around the country, saying the inquiries have been aimed solely at detecting and preventing violence at the Republican convention in New York and other major political events.
■ Canada
Big sleep for `The Big Guy'
Montreal underworld boss Frank Cotroni, aka "The Big Guy" who was accused of links with leading New York mobsters, has died at the age of 72, reports said Tuesday. Cotroni, whose late brother Vincent was regarded as the head of the Montreal mafia, died of brain cancer, French language television stations here reported. The Cotroni family was tabbed in a 1976 report by a provincial commission on organized crime as a Canadian wing of the New York Bonanno mob which conducted a reign of fear in the 1960s. Frank Cotroni spent several years in prison. He was last released in 2002 after serving part of a seven-year sentence for conspiring to import 180kg of cocaine into Canada. He had originally been freed conditionally in 2001, but was rearrested after police spotted him at a Montreal restaurant with suspected underworld figures with whom he had promised not to associate.
■ United States
Costco's new line
A US discount warehouse chain known for piling 'em high, and selling 'em cheap, is offering cut-price coffins along with the buckets of ketchup and two-gallon tubs of ice-cream under a new pilot program. Costco Wholesale Corp. began selling the US$800 caskets in two of its Chicago stores this week and has already taken some orders, spokesman Bob Nelson said. The Universal Casket Company caskets come in six models in a variety of colors and 18-gauge steel. Consumers place an order electronically and their coffin is delivered to their home within 48 hours. The chain is watching the experiment closely and could put caskets on the shopping list of all its warehouses stores if it's a success. "This is not something we have a lot of experience with," said Nelson, "but we felt it was an area where we could offer a value."
■ United States
Shark victim found
The Coast Guard has recovered the headless body of a diver who was killed by a shark off the coast of Mendocino County in California. Randy Fry, 50, was attacked on Sunday afternoon in shallow water near Westport while diving for abalone with a companion. His body was recovered on Monday, while his companion escaped injury. A friend of Fry's estimated that the shark was between 5m and 5.4m long. "It was over in five seconds," said Red Bartley, who witnessed the attack. It was the state's first shark fatality since last August.
A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It might sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this point, it’s: ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
CHEER ON: Students were greeted by citizens who honked their car horns or offered them food and drinks, while taxi drivers said they would give marchers a lift home Hundreds of students protesting graft they blame for 15 deaths in a building collapse on Friday marched through Serbia to the northern city of Novi Sad, where they plan to block three Danube River bridges this weekend. They received a hero’s welcome from fellow students and thousands of local residents in Novi Said after arriving on foot in their two-day, 80km journey from Belgrade. A small red carpet was placed on one of the bridges across the Danube that the students crossed as they entered the city. The bridge blockade planned for yesterday is to mark three months since a huge concrete construction
DIVERSIFY: While Japan already has plentiful access to LNG, a pipeline from Alaska would help it move away from riskier sources such as Russia and the Middle East Japan is considering offering support for a US$44 billion gas pipeline in Alaska as it seeks to court US President Donald Trump and forestall potential trade friction, three officials familiar with the matter said. Officials in Tokyo said Trump might raise the project, which he has said is key for US prosperity and security, when he meets Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba for the first time in Washington as soon as next week, the sources said. Japan has doubts about the viability of the proposed 1,287km pipeline — intended to link fields in Alaska’s north to a port in the south, where
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