A MAN, who was merely threatening suicide in protest of his wife travelling overseas for work, accidentally hung himself from a tree, Makkal Osai reported.

To make it worse, neighbours and authorities who arrived at the scene could not retrieve the body as it was quite a long way to climb up the tree that Saturday night.

P. Thanbipillai, 40, was left hanging from the tree overnight.

Earlier, he was trimming some branches near his house in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

The father of two, whose wife had just returned home from an overseas assignment, got annoyed to hear that she wanted to travel again for another assignment.

While he was up on the tree, he mimicked the act of hanging himself, telling his wife he would do it for real if she went abroad again.

But he somehow ended up accidentally hanging himself and died on the spot. His body was brought down on Sunday morning.

> An Indian restaurant owner in Klang is upset that lottery tickets no longer include Tamil words, Makkal Osai reported.

The tickets, the report said, used to contain information such as draw dates and locations in Tamil.

The man, who had been a lottery ticket agent for 30 years, claimed this would be unfair to the punters.

AIRSOFT guns to fire metal bullets can easily be purchased via Facebook, reported Berita Harian.

The daily said that the guns, costing between RM600 (S$201) and RM3,000, were being sold through several closed groups on the social media platform.

The daily said the guns were at a scale of 1:1, which meant that they resembled real guns and were being smuggled from countries such as Thailand and China.

A distributor told the daily that while buying the guns from Thailand was cheaper, services offered by local distributors included letting customers know where they could “play” with the guns safely.

“You need to enter a kuat (closed knit) group, meaning that it is well-connected to the heads of police stations.

“That’s a licence to play,” said the distributor, adding that he could also procure airsoft guns made to resemble Glock guns retailing at RM780 per piece.

The daily said customers needed to pay a deposit when placing the order.

Kedah police chief Senior Deputy Comm Datuk Zamri Yahya said smuggled guns had been seized through police raids based on public tips.

“There has been no arrests or information on gun selling through social media yet as the raids are being carried out when the guns are smuggled in,” said Zamri, adding that the sale and ownership of imitation guns was an offence.

RAIPUR, India – Police killed eight suspected rebels including five women in a gunbattle in central India on Tuesday, local officers said, the latest deadly encounter in the country’s long-running Maoist insurgency.

Police ambushed a large group of heavily armed Maoists in a rebel stronghold near the border of Chhattisgarh and Telangana states, triggering a battle which began in early morning and lasted six hours, they said.

“Forces today killed at least eight Maoists in Sakler forest,” Santosh Singh, a senior police officer, said in Sukma district, some 390 kilometres from the Chhattisgarh state capital Raipur.

“Among those killed are five female and three male Maoists,” Singh told AFP, add that six assault rifles were found with the rebels.

Sukma police chief D. Shravan Kumar said elite anti-Maoist police squads launched the ambush in a joint state operation after receiving a tipoff about rebel movements through the forest.

India’s Maoist insurgency began in the 1960s, inspired by Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, and has cost thousands of lives.

The rebels, described by former prime minister Manmohan Singh as India’s most serious internal security threat, say they are fighting authorities for land, jobs and other rights for poor tribal groups.

The rebels operate in at least 20 Indian states but are most active in the forested and resource-rich areas of Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand and Maharashtra.

Government critics say attempts to end the revolt through tough security offensives are doomed to fail, and the real solution is better governance and development of the region.