Singapore - A Singapore court sentenced a 22-year-old man to three years in prison Tuesday for smuggling about 14,000 cartons of duty-unpaid cigarettes and not paying tax on the goods, media reports said.
The weight of the cigarettes reached almost 3,000 kilograms. The unpaid duty amounted to 1 million Singapore dollars (650,000 US dollars); the excise tax reached nearly 92,000 Singapore dollars.
Bangkok - Thai police arrested a female teacher for having sex with a 13-year-old boy whom she was tutoring in her room, media reports said Tuesday.
Police arrested Thanawan Klongsinchai, a 29-year-old English teacher, Monday on charges of molesting a minor, the Khao Sod newspaper said.
Thanawan denied the charge, claiming the sex was consensual.
Parents of the 13-year-old, who was big for his age group, pressed charges against the teacher after the boy told his friends of the affair, the newspaper said.
Wellington - A 36-year-old German woman talked Monday about how she was fooled into visiting New Zealand to meet a man she befriended on the internet who turned out to be quite different from how he portrayed himself online.
The woman, who was identified only as Maja, told the TV3 channel that the man had told her he was 33 and a university student but she realized immediately when he met her at Dunedin International Airport that he had misrepresented himself.
Manila - Three suspected robbers were killed in a shootout with police officers in the Philippine capital on Monday, a police official said.
A bystander was wounded in the firefight in Sikatuna village in the Manila suburban city of Quezon, but was already in safe condition after being rushed to a nearby hospital.
Chief Superintendent Magtanggol Gatdula, a district police director, said gunmen opened fire at police officers who responded to reports of suspicious men in the area.
Beijing - A court in Shanghai has sentenced 20 people to prison after convicting them of running an online sports gambling operation worth nearly 1 billion dollars, state media said on Monday.
The syndicate collected a total of 6.6 billion yuan (966 million dollars) in stakes for overseas gambling websites via a network of local agents, the semi-official China News Service said.
It began operating in 2006 for the football World Cup in Germany, the agency quoted prosecutors at the Shanghai Putuo District People's Court as saying.
"This is possibly the country's biggest online gambling case," the official Xinhua news agency court spokesman Zhang Minxian as saying.
Singapore - A Singapore court sentenced a 22-year-old man to three years in prison Tuesday for smuggling about 14,000 cartons of duty-unpaid cigarettes and not paying tax on the goods, media reports said.
Bangkok - Thai police arrested a female teacher for having sex with a 13-year-old boy whom she was tutoring in her room, media reports said Tuesday.
Wellington - A 36-year-old German woman talked Monday about how she was fooled into visiting New Zealand to meet a man she befriended on the internet who turned out to be quite different from how he portrayed himself online.
Manila - Three suspected robbers were killed in a shootout with police officers in the Philippine capital on Monday, a police official said.
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