Indian police said Tuesday they have arrested the heads of an adoption centre suspected of selling at least 17 children to foreign couples, the latest trafficking scandal to hit the country.

Investigators said children aged between six months and 14 years were sold to couples from Europe, America and Asia for between US$12,000 and US$23,000 (between S$17,000 and S$32,000) and taken out of the country.

Police in the eastern state of West Bengal arrested Chandana Chakraborty, head of the Bimala Sishu Griha centre, and her deputy Sonlai Mondal at the weekend after a tip-off from the federal adoption agency.

“In the last two to three years, they have sold at least 17 children,” a police officer told AFP on condition of anonymity.

“We will try to contact the couples and are expecting more arrests in coming days.” One French couple paid 1.5 million rupees (S$32,000) for a child in 2015, he said.

The women were also involved in running two other homes in the area.

“Two people were arrested after raids in three charitable homes on Saturday night,” Sashi Panja, state women and child development minister, told AFP.

It is not clear how the alleged sales escaped official notice.

Investigators said they had been monitoring the charity since June when child welfare authorities found discrepancies in their records and relocated all the children from one of the homes.

India has an estimated 30 million orphans, but the rules governing international adoptions are strict and domestic adoptions remain relatively rare.

Only 4,362 children were legally adopted in 2014 and 3,677 in 2015, according to the Central Adoption Resource Authority.

Experts say couples wanting to adopt in India are often frustrated by lengthy bureaucratic delays and complex rules, pushing them towards the thriving illegal adoption market.

The latest scandal comes four months after police arrested 18 people over the sale of newborn babies in the same state.

The gang stole babies from nursing homes, smuggling them out in biscuit boxes and keeping them at adoption centres before selling them to Indian and foreign couples.

The scale of the operation is still being uncovered, and the remains of five newborn girls were recovered from one of the homes in November.

An Australian woman and her British boyfriend accused of beating to death a policeman on Indonesia’s resort island of Bali are facing a jail term of eight years each in line with prosecutor requests on Tuesday.

Sara Connor, 46, and David Taylor, 34, are on trial for allegedly killing officer Wayan Sudarsa whose battered body was found on a popular beach in August.

The pair were charged with murder over the policeman’s death, which carries a maximum jail term of 15 years, but at Tuesday’s hearing prosecutors said the accused did not intend to kill Sudarsa.

Prosecutor Agung Jayalantara told the court in the Balinese capital Denpasar they should be convicted of a lesser charge they are also facing – group assault causing death – and jailed for eight years each.

Jayalantara said that Taylor had shown remorse although he criticised Connor for being uncooperative. The pair appeared at separate hearings Tuesday.

Judges can impose a greater or lesser sentence than that requested by prosecutors but they often follow the recommendation.

Connor’s lawyer Erwin Siregar labelled the sentence request “incredible”.

“It does not make sense, if you see what kind of role David played,” he said.

Taylor’s lawyer Haposan Sihombing added that “eight years is too much”.

Taylor has admitted hitting the policeman with a pair of binoculars and a beer bottle during a late-night fight on the beach but insists he was acting in self defence as Sudarsa tried to choke him.

The fight started after the Briton accused Sudarsa of stealing Connor’s handbag.

Connor has insisted she is innocent and had simply tried to pull the men apart as they fought.

They fled the scene, but were later tracked down after witnesses reported the incident to police.

Bali, a pocket of Hinduism in Muslim-majority Indonesia, is a popular tourist destination known for its tropical climate and palm-fringed beaches.

Minor crime is common but murders are rare.

At least seven people were killed when multiple Taliban suicide bombers attacked a court complex in northern Pakistan Tuesday, the latest in a series of assaults which have raised fears militants are regrouping.

One bomber was briefly on the loose inside the busy complex in the Tangi area of Charsadda district but was killed by police some 20 minutes after the attack began, officials said.

A second bomber was shot dead by security forces and a third died when he detonated his vest outside the main gates of the facility in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, according to police.

The attack was claimed by the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar (JuA) faction of the Pakistani Taliban, which carried out a series of apparently coordinated assaults last week including a powerful bomb blast in Lahore which killed 14 people.

Earlier this month the group vowed a fresh offensive on targets in Pakistan including the judiciary.

“So far seven people have been killed and 15 wounded,” Suhail Khalid, district police chief, told AFP, adding that a lawyer was among the dead.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s office condemned the latest assault.

“We are a steadfast nation and will not be deterred by such attacks. Our government will continue to fight against terrorist elements and we will succeed,” a statement said.

The three attackers had opened fire on police and thrown grenades as they tried to battle their way into the complex, Khalid said.

“Bomb disposal experts told us that each bomber was wearing seven to eight kilogrammes of explosives,” he told reporters.

Hundreds of people including lawyers, judges and citizens normally attend the court complex.

An AFP reporter at the scene said the area was littered with human remains, while a pile of law books stained with blood and riddled with bullets lay strewn outside an office.

Police scoured the area for evidence as military helicopters whirred overhead. An old man whose four-year-old grandson died in the attack wept.

Another man who witnessed the attack, Muhammad Hussain, said he was about to enter the complex when he heard the blast.

“When I looked up I saw three armed men, hurling grenades and opening fire,” said the 35-year-old civil servant, adding he sought shelter in a nearby police barracks from where he heard the gunbattle.

“This continued for some minutes and then I heard another big bang. Some minutes after a policemen told me that it’s all over.” Lawyers and the judiciary are frequent targets in Pakistan. Among last week’s assaults was a bomb blast targeting a van carrying judges in Peshawar, which killed their driver.

Last August JuA along with the Islamic State group claimed a suicide bombing in Quetta that killed 73 people, including many of the southwestern city’s legal community.

Police and troops had been on high alert in Pakistan after last week’s wave of attacks, which killed more than 100 people.

Most, including the Lahore bomb, were claimed by JuA, a faction of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP, or Pakistani Taliban) group.

But the Islamic State group claimed the deadliest of last week’s assaults, a suicide bomb at a Sufi shrine in Sindh province on Thursday which killed 90 people and wounded hundreds.

The emergence of IS and a TTP resurgence would be a major blow to Pakistan, which had enjoyed a dramatic improvement in security over the past two years after a military-led crackdown begun in 2014.

Islamabad launched a violent crackdown in the wake of the recent attacks, saying it killed dozens of “terrorists” and carried out strikes on militant hideouts along the border with Afghanistan. Hundreds of families have been displaced by the firing on both sides of the border, according to officials.

Myanmar police are investigating the murder of four people in northern Rakhine state, the government said Tuesday, days after ending a military campaign in the area the UN has compared to ethnic cleansing.

The corpses of three women and a man were found buried in a field near Luuphanpyin village in Maungdaw township last Thursday, according to the office of de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

“A man’s dead body was found with deep wounds in the left armpit and the head cracked open,” her office said in a statement.

“Two of the three women had deep wounds on their backs and broken spines. The other had no (visible) internal injuries,” the statement added without detailing who the victims were.

The bodies were discovered the day after the government announced the end of army “clearance operations” in the north of the ethnically divided state that were launched to find militants who attacked police posts in October.

The United Nations has said this was used as a cover for a four-month crackdown in which security forces butchered hundreds of Rohingya Muslims.

Some 73,000 of them have since fled to southern Bangladesh, bringing harrowing accounts of how troops gang-raped women, murdered babies and burnt families alive.

UN investigators who interviewed escapees say the violence is so severe it “very likely” amounted to crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.

For months Myanmar has curtailed access to the strip of land near the Bangladesh border and vehemently rejected similar allegations collected by rights groups and journalists.

But the UN’s report has struck a nerve, piling pressure on Suu Kyi’s young government.

Since it was released this month state media has carried almost daily updates on the movements of a state-backed commission tasked with probing allegations of abuse in Rakhine.

Critics have rejected the body, which is led by retired general turned Vice President Myint Swe and includes no Muslims, as toothless.

The UN’s top official on preventing genocide, Adama Dieng, has said it is “not a credible option” and called for an international investigation into the claims.

Myanmar’s persecution of the more than one million Rohingya who live in Rakhine state has long drawn international criticism.

They are loathed by most people in the Buddhist majority country, who consider them illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, and forced to live in conditions akin to apartheid.

A Japanese zoo has culled 57 native snow monkeys by lethal injection after finding that they carried genes of an “invasive alien species”, officials said Tuesday.

The Takagoyama Nature Zoo in the city of Futtsu in Chiba prefecture east of Tokyo, housed 164 simians which it believed were all pure Japanese macaques.

But the operator and local officials discovered about one-third were crossbred with the rhesus macaque, which in Japan is designated an “invasive alien species”.

A city official told AFP on Tuesday that Japanese law bans the possession and transport of invasive species, including the crossbreeds, and that culling of them is allowed under the law.

He said the monkeys were put to death by lethal injection over about one month ending early February.

The zoo operator held a memorial service for the monkeys at a nearby Buddhist temple to appease their souls, he added.

Snow monkey-rhesus macaque crossbreeds were designated for culling when Japan’s environment law was revised in 2013.

“They have to be killed to protect the indigenous environment,” an official with the Chiba prefectural government said.

But Japan’s Environment Ministry said exceptions can be made, such as cases in which zoos apply for permission to keep them.

“There are many zoos in the country, which rear animals that became classified as invasive species after the law was created,” a ministry official said.

Though the killing of the monkeys may appear cruel, environmentalists said it is crucial not to allow any contacts between foreign and native species lest the natural balance be upset.

Junkichi Mima, spokesman for conservation group WWF Japan, said invasive species cause problems “because they get mixed in with indigenous animals and threaten the natural environment and ecosystem”.

The snow monkey, known in Japan as Nihonzaru (Japanese macaque), is brown in colour with a red face, and the mountainous area near the zoo is designated as a wild habitat for them.

The zoo started feeding wild snow monkeys in 1957 and held dozens in a rough fence, the city official said.

But in the 1990s, the rhesus macaque, which originates in China and Southeast Asia, started to increase in the area. Chiba prefecture said that since 2005 it has culled wild ones in a bid to stamp them out.

The Takagoyama zoo conducted DNA testing on its snow monkeys and discovered the mixture.

“Preventing exposures to foreign animals is very important,” said Tomoko Shimura of the Nature Conservation Society of Japan.

Remember how we all swooned when we learnt that Taiwanese actress Barbie Hsu’s husband is naming his new hotel in Taipei after her?

Now Hotel S is in the spotlight again for operating without a licence.

Taiwanese media reported that the hotel – Chinese businessman Wang Xiaofei’s latest venture – was recently fined TWD$500,000 (S$23,000) for opening for business before its official launch on April 15.

According to Apple Daily Taiwan, Hotel S’s website was found to have accepted online room reservations.

A spokesperson from Taipei City’s information and tourism department told Chung Tien Television in a phone interview that it was alerted to the incident by members of the public.

She said that the authority will impose the maximum fine of TWD$500,000 on the hotel for operating without a licence.

However, Hotel S’s public relations officer Jesse has denied the allegations and said that the hotel has not received notification of any offence.

According to Jesse, the hotel had been conducting trial runs of services such as room reservations and food tastings while waiting for its operating licence to be approved.

Hsu has declined to comment on the incident, saying that she is unfamiliar with Hotel S’s operations.

minlee@sph.com.sg

KUALA LUMPUR – A second autopsy was not performed on the body of Kim Jong-nam, says Health Director-General Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah.

He said the analysis on the post-mortem examination to confirm the identity of the deceased and the cause of death was still pending.

He added that Kim’s body was managed respectfully and medical specimens taken were handled as provided by law to maintain the chain of custody.

This is his statement in full:

The National Institute of Forensic Medicine Kuala Lumpur Hospital received a dead body of a North Korean National from the Investigating Police Officer for post-mortem examination on 15th February 2017 at 10.00 AM.

The post-mortem examination was carried out at 12.45 PM on 15th February 2017 and completed at 6.45 PM on the same day, in accordance with Section 331 of Malaysia’s Criminal Procedure Code. The Investigating Police Officer was present throughout the post-mortem examination.

The team involved in the post-mortem examination of the deceased person comprised of qualified and experienced Consultant Forensic Pathologists, Forensic Radiologist and Forensic Odontologist.

The body underwent a full post-mortem Computed Tomography, external and internal post-mortem examination and Forensic Dental examination; all of which were conducted professionally in the same premise and with compliance to International Standards.

The management of the body was done in a respectful way and medicolegal specimens taken were handled according to the provisions of the law to maintain the chain of custody.

The medicolegal specimens were handed over to the Investigating Police Officer immediately after the post-mortem examination to be sent to accredited laboratories for analysis. These analyses are meant to confirm the identity of the deceased person and also the cause of death; both of which are still pending at the moment. There has been no second autopsy performed on this deceased person.

Thank you.

DATUK DR. NOOR HISHAM ABDULLAH

DIRECTOR GENERAL OF HEALTH MALAYSIA

21st February 2017

Read also: Kim Jong Nam’s death: Murder only shows up Kim Jong Un’s insecurity
N Korean officials objected to autopsy on Kim Jong Nam’s body: Malaysian sources
Kim Jong-nam’s last words – ‘Very painful. I was sprayed with liquid’
Kim Jong-nam murder: Security stepped up at KL hospital mortuary
Najib rejects N.Korea’s demand to jointly probe Kim’s killing

The name “Ivanka” is quickly getting popular in China it seems.

Chinese companies have submitted at least 65 applications to use Ivanka Trump’s name as a trademark for their products, reported the South China Morning Post.

An additional 40 companies have registered their corporate identities under the name Ivanka, as listed by a search on the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System.

These firms belong to diverse industries, from selling undergarments to seafood.

A quick search on China’s largest e-commerce platform Taobao also reveals a raft of products already being sold under the “Ivanka” brand.

China’s laws allow for businesses to use foreign names, or the Chinese translation of them, as trademarks.

The daughter of US President Donald Trump already runs a fashion business under her name.

Since 2012, Ivanka Trump Marks LLC owns the rights to use the name “Ivanka” for shoes and clothing in China.

The company has since filed more applications for jewellery, bags and other products.

But other firms keen on “Ivanka” for unrelated products may well stand a chance at owning a piece of the brand.

Trump himself had for years struggled to win back the rights to his name in the Asian country.

A Chinese construction firm had earlier secured a 10-year trademark on “Trump.”

But just last week, China gave Trump his long sought after trademark.

This happened after Trump’s meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping, in which he endorsed the One China policy – after previously angering China by saying it was “negotiable.”

So far, Trump has yet to comment on Chinese businesses trademarking his daughter’s name, though he has in the past come to her defence.

Read the full article here.

Mashable is the go-to source for tech, digital culture, and entertainment content for its dedicated and influential audience around the world.

JAKARTA  – Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak said on Tuesday that comments by the North Korean ambassador casting doubt over a Malaysian investigation into the killing of the estranged half-brother of North Korea’s leader were “diplomatically rude”.

“The statement by the ambassador was totally uncalled for. It was diplomatically rude. But Malaysia will stand firm,” Najib told reporters.

Read also: N Korea, Malaysia row as Kim killing film emerges

North Korean ambassador Kang Chol said his country “cannot trust” Malaysia’s handling of the probe into the killing.

Kim Jong Nam, the half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, was killed at Kuala Lumpur International Airport last week. South Korean and US officials believe he was assassinated by North Korean agents.

Read also: Kim Jong-nam’s last words – ‘Very painful. I was sprayed with liquid’