Accused Hyundai chief’s suicide
Seoul: Chung Mong-Hun, the chairman of Hyundai Asan, leapt to his death from his 12th-floor office. Mr Chung had been charged over his alleged role in a scandal involving the former South Korean president Kim Dae-Jung’s government, which is accused of secretly sending millions of dollars to North Korea to secure an inter-Korean summit.(AFP)
Hometown burial for rebel leader
Freetown: Foday Sankoh, Sierra Leone’s former rebel leader, was buried in a simple ceremony after his body was returned to his family by a United Nations-backed special court. Sankoh died last Tuesday of natural causes aged 70. He was being tried over his role in the country’s civil war between 1991-2001 in which 200,000 people were killed. He was buried in the northern town of Magburaka. (AFP)
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Gas blamed as blast kills 31
Ahmedabad: At least 31 people were killed and 35 injured when exploding cylinders of cooking gas caused a three-storey building to collapse in India’s western state of Gujarat, police said. The explosion in the city of Surat, 155 miles from Gujarat’s commercial capital, Ahmedabad, was so powerful that two adjoining buildings also collapsed. (AFP)
Two held over lorry bombing
Moscow: Authorities have detained two people in connection with the suicide attack on a military hospital in southern Russia on Friday in which at least 50 people were killed, Sergei Fridinsky, the Russian deputy prosecutor-general, said. They had recently sold the lorry used by suspected Chechen rebels in the attack in the town of Mozdok. (AFP)
Dead actress ‘had been hit in the face’
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Paris: Marie Trintignant, 41, the French actress, who died in Lithuania on Friday after a row with her boyfriend, had received several blows to the face, an initial post-mortem examination found.
She had suffered a swelling of the brain and had been in a coma for five days.
Bertrand Cantat, 39, the lead singer of the French rock group Noir Desir, has been placed in custody in Lithuania until August 14, when he is expected to be extradited to France. His lawyer would not comment on the findings, saying that he would wait for the definitive post-mortem results in a few days. (AFP)
Saudi man jailed for wife’s crime
Riyadh: A Saudi court has sentenced a businessman to three years in jail because his wife tortured their Indonesian maid “by inserting a heated screwdriver into her genitals”, the newspaper al-Madina reported. The husband, who did not know what his wife was doing but took responsibility for her actions, was also sentenced to a unspecified number of lashings and ordered to pay £6,200 in damages. (AFP)
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Berlusconi: ‘I’m almost German’
Berlin: Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, brushed aside a dispute with Germany that threatened Italy’s six-month presidency of the European Union. “In Italy I am almost seen as a German for my workaholism,” he told the German daily Bild. “I am almost a German,” he said, adding that he also had Italian qualities such as “the talent for imagination”. (AFP)
Drought hits China farming
Beijing: Drought in large parts of China has left more than eight million people short of drinking water and laid waste to millions of hectares of arable land south of the Yangtze. Across the country, record high temperatures of 40C (101F) and above have been recorded. Shanghai, China’s industrial and commercial centre, is enduring its longest period of hot weather for more than 50 years. (AFP)