World briefs

INDIA At least 27 people are killed and dozens injured in a stampede during a Hindu religious bathing festival on a river bank in southern India. More on p13

THAILAND Testimony begins in a criminal defamation lawsuit filed by Thailand’s navy against a small news website over a report it posted saying naval forces accepted money to assist or turn a blind eye to the trafficking of refugees from Myanmar by sea. More on p12

THAILAND A military court sentences eight people to five-year jail terms for distributing online content said to have insulted the country’s monarchy.

S KOREA’s beleaguered spy agency acknowledges it explored the purchase of technologies to intercept communications on the popular Kakao Talk smartphone chatting service, but maintains it only intended to strengthen its monitoring of rival North Korean agents, not South Koreans, lawmakers say. More on p13

N KOREA A South Korean student from New York University who is being detained in North Korea for allegedly entering the country illegally says he hopes to be released soon.

MYANMAR President Thein Sein has not yet decided whether to pursue a second term and will base his decision on how the ruling party fares in parliamentary elections later this year, his office says.

FRANCE is celebrating Bastille Day with a display of fighter jets and with anti-terrorist forces marching in the yearly parade in Paris for the first time as the country’s leadership tries to show its muscle against extremists. The national holiday yesterday comes after the country was hit by terror attacks in January that killed 12 people, and after an extremist beheaded his employer last month and caused an explosion that injured two people.

PAKISTAN A Pakistan court grants bail to top model Ayaan Ali, who has been held since March after being caught trying to fly to Dubai with half a million dollars in cash in her luggage.

S KOREAN police say they have arrested a university professor for forcing a former student to eat human feces and subjecting him to other cruel acts.

JAPAN Nintendo Co. President Satoru Iwata’s death is being mourned by game fans around the world. They’re sharing Iwata Mii avatars, creating pictures with farewell messages on the Nintendo drawing game Splatoon and sending Tweets with “ThankYouIwata” hashtags.

GERMANY Scientists working at the world’s biggest atom smasher say they have discovered a new kind of particle called “pentaquarks.” The existence of pentaquarks was first proposed in the 1960s by American physicists Murray Gell-Mann and Georg Zweig. Gell-Mann, who coined the term “quark,” received the Nobel Prize in 1969. The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, says the discovery was made by a team working on one of the four experiments at the Large Hadron Collider beneath the Swiss-French border.