DHAKA [Bangladesh]: Six more deaths caused by dengue have been reported in 24 hours till Sunday morning, raising the number of fatalities from the mosquito-borne disease in Bangladesh to 73 this year, according to Dhaka Tribune.

According to the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), 836 more patients were hospitalized with viral fever during the period, Dhaka Tribune reported.

A total of 2,750 dengue patients, including 1,968 in the capital, are now receiving treatment at different hospitals across the country, as per Dhaka Tribune.

So far, the DGHS has recorded 12,954 dengue cases, and 10,131 recoveries this year.

Moreover, in 2022, the country recorded 281 dengue deaths which mark the highest on record after 179 in 2019. It also recorded 62,423 dengue cases and 61,971 recoveries last year. 

Melbourne: In a horrific act of vengeance, a 21-year-old Indian nursing student in Australia was abducted by her jilted ex-boyfriend from India, driven nearly 650 km and buried alive in South Australia state’s remote Flinders Ranges, a court has heard.

Jasmeen Kaur from Adelaide City was killed by Tarikjot Singh in March 2021, a month after reporting him to the police for stalking.

Kaur was abducted from her workplace on March 5, 2021, and driven more than 400 miles (644 km) while bound with cable ties in the boot of a car Singh had borrowed from his flatmate, news.com.au portal and other websites reported on Wednesday.

He buried Kaur in a shallow grave after making “superficial” cuts to her throat which were not enough to kill her and she was aware of her surroundings when she died at some point on March 6.

Singh pleaded guilty to the murder but the horrific details of his crime came to light during sentencing submissions at the Supreme Court on Wednesday.

Prosecutor Carmen Matteo said the murder was “not efficient” and Kaur was “made to suffer”.

“She had to have been consciously suffering what could only be described as the absolute terror of breathing in and swallowing soil and dying in that way,” Matteo said.

Kaur’s family, including her mother, were in the court to hear the sentencing submissions.

The court heard Singh planned the killing because he was unable to get over the breakdown of their relationship.

“The way in which Kaur was killed involved, really, an uncommon level of cruelty,” Matteo said.

“It’s not known when her throat was cut, it’s not known when or how she got into or was placed into that burial grave, and it’s not known when that was dug, other than the prosecution says it had to have been while she was still alive and in preparation for her burial.

“[It was] a killing that was committed as an act of vengeance or as an act of revenge,” she said.

Singh wrote several messages to Kaur in the lead-up to her death that he never ended up sending.

“Your bad luck that I am still alive, cheap, wait and watch, will get the answer, each and every single one will get the answer,” one message said.

Singh initially denied murder, saying Kaur had committed suicide and that he had buried the body, but pleaded guilty before he was due to stand trial earlier this year.

He took officers to her burial site where they found Kaur’s shoes, glasses, and work name badge in a bin, alongside looped cable ties.

He was caught on CCTV hours before the murder at a Bunnings in Mile End buying gloves, cable ties, and a shovel.

He faces a mandatory life sentence, with the court to impose a non-parole period next month.

His lawyer wants him to be given a more merciful sentence, partly because they labelled it a “crime of passion”.

COLOMBO: As Sri Lankans flocked to a jubilant street party celebrating their president’s ouster, retired accountant Milton Perera sat at home pondering whether his family could afford to eat the next morning.

Before his dramatic toppling last year, Gotabaya Rajapaksa was blamed for an economic crisis that brought food and fuel shortages, blackouts and runaway inflation to the island nation.

But Perera told AFP at the time that with the once-loved leader out of office, the hardships his country had endured to that point would get worse.

A year later, with millions of his compatriots struggling to put enough food on the table, the 75-year-old says his prediction has proved correct.

“Last year we had money, but no goods,” Perera told AFP inside his rundown government flat, a short distance from the seafront protest site where Rajapaksa’s toppling was orchestrated last year.

“Now there are goods, but we don’t have money.”

His home in Slave Island — a working-class pocket of Colombo where the Portuguese housed African slaves during the colonial period — is damp from a leaking water main.

Municipal authorities have not come around to repair it because they no longer have money for maintenance.

With sunken cheeks and veins protruding from his gaunt limbs, Perera wheezes as he moves gingerly around his kitchen, the product of his chronic asthma.

Before the crisis, medication to treat his condition was provided free by public hospitals — a government programme that has now been scrapped.

Two months ago Perera’s welfare payments were stopped as part of other spending cuts, meaning he is no longer able to afford an inhaler to treat his symptoms.

His family’s water and electricity bills have doubled thanks to the removal of government utility subsidies.

The economic crisis had already forced Perera, his wife, his two children and their extended families to regularly skip meals when AFP first visited their home.

A year later, supermarkets are again fully stocked with the kitchen staples that disappeared from the shelves during last year’s chronic shortages — but Perera’s family can’t buy them.

“We can’t afford meat, fish and eggs,” B. M. Pushpalatha, Perera’s wife, told AFP as the couple shared an unadorned meal of rice and lentils. “They are too expensive.”

Sri Lanka defaulted on its $46 billion foreign debt in April 2022 as its economy went into a tailspin unprecedented in its history as an independent nation.

Petrol queues at pumping stations stretched for miles and motorists — several of whom died in queue — spent days waiting to top up their tanks.

Families had no gas to cook food, farm yields fell dramatically due to a ban on fertiliser imports, and hospitals were empty of life-saving pharmaceuticals.

Months of angry protests culminated in the July 9 storming of Rajapaksa’s presidential palace, a short walk from Perera’s home, with its occupant forced into a brief but humiliating exile.

Rajapaksa’s departure did not conclude Sri Lanka’s economic woes, with inflation peaking at 70 percent in September. Petrol rationing also remains in force.

His successor Ranil Wickremesinghe secured a $2.9 billion IMF bailout in March by agreeing on a tough austerity regimen to plug the country’s black hole of debt.

“Many of the decisions I have been compelled to take since assuming the presidency have been unpopular,” Wickremesinghe said in a February address to the nation.

“However, because of those decisions, today no citizen of this country will die of dehydration in oil queues. You won’t starve without gas or fertiliser.”

But the steep cuts to government spending and welfare programmes have exacerbated hardship across the country.

An additional four million Sri Lankans had fallen below the poverty line since the crisis began, said Dhananath Fernando, chief executive of the Colombo-based Advocata Institute think-tank.

“That means about seven million people in a country of 22 million are earning less than 14,000 rupees ($46) a month,” he told AFP.

Of those, nearly four million Sri Lankans did not have the means to adequately feed themselves, the United Nations said in June.

Fernando said the figures showed a sharp deterioration in living standards across the country in the past year with no prospect of a quick recovery.

Unless the austerity measures began to bear fruit, the island risked a return to the sustained social unrest that broke out last year, he added.

“If we really fail to take Sri Lanka to a growth trajectory in the future, I’m not completely ruling it out,” Fernando said.

MANILA:  A magnitude 6.2 earthquake struck the Philippines on Thursday, the US Geological Survey said, as local authorities warned of aftershocks and possible damage.

The earthquake struck at a depth of 124 kilometres (77 miles) at around 10:00 am (0200 GMT) in waters about three hours’ drive from the capital Manila.

Calatagan municipality police chief Emil Mendoza said he and his staff rushed outside following the tremor, which was also felt over the country’s heavily populated heartland, including Manila

“It was a bit strong. We had to run outside

There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage, but disaster authorities have been deployed to assess the impact of the tremor, Mendoza said.

Calatagan disaster officer Ronald Torres said the quake lasted between 30 seconds and a minute.

The earthquake sent people rushing out of buildings in the capital.

Diego Mariano, information officer at the civil defence office, said authorities were assessing the impact of the quake.

“As of now, no major damage or casualties as of reporting time. Assessment is still ongoing,” Mariano told reporters in a message.

Quakes are a daily occurrence in the Philippines, which sits along the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, an arc of intense seismic as well as volcanic activity that stretches from Japan through Southeast Asia and across the Pacific basin.

In October 2013, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck Bohol Island in the central Philippines, triggering landslides and killing more than 200 people.

Old churches in the birthplace of Catholicism in the Philippines were badly damaged. Nearly 400,000 were displaced and tens of thousands of houses were damaged due to the quake.

TOKYO: Japan’s age of consent was raised from 13, among the world’s lowest, to 16 years old on Friday as lawmakers passed key reforms to sex crime legislation.

The reforms, which also clarify rape prosecution requirements and criminalise voyeurism, cleared parliament’s upper house in a unanimous vote.

Campaigners welcomed the reforms, with the Tokyo-based group Human Rights Now calling them “a big step forward”.

The lifting of the age of consent in particular will “send a message to society that sexual violence by adults against children is unacceptable”, the group said in a statement.

The age of consent — below which sexual activity is considered statutory rape — is 16 in Britain, 15 in France, and 14 in Germany and China.

Japan’s had been unchanged since 1907, with children aged 13 and above deemed capable of consent.

In practice however, across many parts of the country regional ordinances banning “lewd” acts with minors were sometimes seen as effectively raising the age of consent to 18.

Under the new law, teen couples no more than five years apart in age will be exempt from prosecution if both partners are over 13.

Japan last revised its criminal code on sexual offences in 2017, for the first time in more than a century, but campaigners said the reforms were insufficient.

And in 2019, a string of acquittals in rape cases triggered nationwide rallies.

Under the previous law, prosecutors had to prove victims were incapacitated due to violence and intimidation.

Critics argued that requirement effectively blamed victims for not resisting enough.

Criminalising voyeurism

The bill that passed Friday contains a list of examples under which rape prosecutions can be made.

These include victims being under the influence of alcohol or drugs, being frightened and perpetrators taking advantage of social status.

A justice ministry official told AFP earlier this year that the clarifications were not “meant to make it easier or harder” to secure rape convictions, but “will hopefully make court verdicts more consistent”.

The bill also contains a new “visitation request offence”, according to the justice ministry.

It means that people who use intimidation, seduction or money to coerce children under 16 to meet for sexual purposes will face a prison sentence of up to a year or a fine of 500,000 yen ($3,500).

The reforms also include language that for the first time criminalises voyeurism, which had only been regulated by regional ordinances before.

A penalty of up to three years’ imprisonment or a fine of up to three million yen will be imposed for secretly filming private body parts, underwear or indecent acts without a justifiable reason.

Tokyo resident Sohei Ikeda, 39, welcomed the reforms but said he felt “Japan is quite late”.

But Natsuki Sunaga, a 22-year-old student, said she was skeptical that the reforms would stop people secretly filming others.

“I wonder even with a law against voyeurism whether it will end,” she said.