Three people died and 31 others were injured in a stampede as shoppers scrambled for cut-price cooking oil at a Carrefour store in China yesterday, Xinhua news agency reported.
The tragedy came during a promotion to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the founding of the store in Shapingba district in southwest China.
People began queuing in the early hours yesterday to buy the cooking oil, said Gao Chang, a spokesman for the Shapingba district government. When the shop opened for business, throngs of people burst in and a mass stampede occurred.
"The outlet has been ordered to suspend operation and the work safety watchdog has started an investigation," Xinhua quoted Gao as saying.
Border French want unity
Most French people in the region bordering Belgium would like to see France re-unite with Belgium's francophone region if the country breaks apart, according to an opinion poll published yesterday.
Talks to form a new government in Belgium have dragged on for some 150 days since elections in June, and the absence of an agreement has prompted speculation that the country might split along linguistic fault lines.
A poll released before today's publication of Le Journal du Dimanche said that 54 per cent of those questioned wanted the mainly French-speaking southern Belgian region of Wallonia incorporated into France if a break-up occurred.
Violinist in transparent box
A Spanish violinist spending a week in a transparent box on a busy Madrid street says she hopes to gain inspiration from living under the gaze of strangers.
"The idea was to talk through my music. It's also a way to promote myself," said Patricia Arguelles before climbing into her sponsored see-through home outside Retiro Park.
The box, like a glass-sided caravan, contains a bed and a table for her laptop, and is in full view of the street. She has privacy only in her toilet and shower.
A crowd watched her as she emerged grinning from the toilet. A few hours later, she lay curled up in bed with a security guard outside her capsule.
Maps found in global hunt
The FBI has returned two 15th century world maps stolen from Madrid's national library this year.
The rare maps were found by an FBI agent working in the New York art world where they can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars in auctions, police said.
They were some of 19 illustrations stolen in August by a Uruguayan man who walked into the national library posing as a researcher and tore pages out of books dating back to 1482.
The two maps handed over to Spain were taken from an edition of Ptolemy's Geographia, a compilation of second century world geography by Greek scholar Claudius Ptolemy.
Cesar Gomez Rivero, the 60-year-old charged with the robbery, surrendered eight stolen maps to police in Argentina via his lawyer. The FBI said he is on the run in South America.
Judge allows skinny-dipping
A Canadian judge said a Vancouver suburb cannot bar nude swimmers from holding a private gathering at a local pool, and chided town officials for being a bit too prudish.
"For those who came of age in the 1960s, skinny-dipping would hardly seem to be a threat to the moral fibre of western civilisation. Not so, however, for some of the good burghers of Surrey," Justice Paul Williamson said in a ruling on Thursday.
The nudist group had rented an indoor town swimming pool in suburban Surrey, British Columbia, in 2002 and 2003 for late-night members-only gatherings, but the permit was cancelled after a newspaper story prompted public complaints.
Surrey argued that nude swimming might be a health hazard, and said it was unfair to make lifeguards protect swimmers "not in suitable bathing attire", since those who objected for personal reasons would lose potential overtime income.