World briefs

CHINA A bear in central China has bitten off the arm of a 9-year-old boy who tried to feed it through its cage, state media and a doctor said yesterday. Media reports said the attack happened Saturday afternoon at Pingdingshan Hebin Park in Henan province, which has a zoo inside. The boy managed to push his arm through the bear’s cage to feed it when the bear bit him. He lost his entire right arm, which had to be amputated.

CHINA A court on Friday jailed two journalists accused of taking bribes and smearing an engineering company with fabricated articles, one of a series of recent scandals surrounding the state-controlled media.
The Yuelu District Court in the central city of Changsha sentenced Chen Yongzhou to one year and 10 months in jail and fined 20,000 yuan (USD3,300) for what it said were false reports accusing construction equipment manufacturer Zoomlion of announcing phony financial information. The co-writer of the articles, Zhuo Zhiqiang, was sentenced to 10 months and fined 10,000 yuan ($1,600).

PAKISTAN A Pakistani court upholds the death sentence of a Christian woman whose 2010 conviction for blasphemy led to the assassination of two politicians who supported her, a defense lawyer says. Asia Bibi, a 50-year-old mother of five, had appealed before the Lahore High Court against the ruling, in which she was found guilty of insulting Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.

INDONESIA’s defeated presidential candidate meets president-elect Jokowi Widodo for the first time since the bitterly contested polls in July, in a sign that political tensions in the Southeast Asian nation might be thawing.
PAKISTAN A Pakistani court upholds the death sentence of a Christian woman whose 2010 conviction for blasphemy led to the assassination of two politicians who supported her, a defense lawyer says. Asia Bibi, a 50-year-old mother of five, had appealed before the Lahore High Court against the ruling, in which she was found guilty of insulting Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.

VATICAN CITY  Catholic bishops scrapped their landmark welcome to gays Saturday, showing deep divisions at the end of a two-week meeting sought by Pope Francis to chart a more merciful approach to ministering to Catholic families. The bishops failed to reach consensus on a watered-down section on ministering to homosexuals. The new section had stripped away the welcoming tone of acceptance contained in a draft document earlier last week.

NEPALESE officials closed a section of a popular Himalayan trekking route yesterday after rescuers, overwhelmed with last week’s snowstorms that killed at least 38 people, had to save new hikers who set out after the blizzards on the same deadly trails. The dead from the blizzards and avalanches that hit the upper section of the Annapurna trekking circuit in northern Nepal included foreign trekkers, local guides and villagers.

UKRAINE The Ukrainian president has said his country has reached an agreement with Russia on supplies of natural gas for the winter. When Russia cut off gas supplies to Ukraine in June over unpaid bills, it raised the risk that Ukraine would be left without heating. President Petro Poroshenko said in a television interview late Saturday that Russia has agreed to supply Ukraine with gas through March 31 at a price of USD385 per 1,000 cubic meters.