An Indian "witch doctor" who beheaded an 11-year-old boy and offered the head as a sacrifice to a goddess to improve his fortunes has been sentenced to death, police said Tuesday.

A local court in impoverished Chhattisgarh state in central India convicted 32-year-old Dilip Rathia on Monday of murder and sentenced him to hang for beheading the boy, police said.

After scaling the charts with his ode to cut-price produce, Pakistan's "One Pound Fish" singer is to enter the slippery world of politics with an election song for the country's main opposition party.

Muhammad Shahid Nazir said his family had a long association with the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PMLN) of Nawaz Sharif and he was working on tunes for the former prime minister as he campaigns for the May 11 general election.

A U.S. judge whose smartphone disrupted a hearing in his own courtroom has held himself in contempt and paid $25 for the infraction.

Judge Raymond Voet has a posted policy stating that electronic devices causing a disturbance during court sessions will result in the owner being cited with contempt, the Sentinel-Standard of Ionia and MLive.com reported.

Singapore on Tuesday unveiled plans to offer free train rides during morning peak-hours to ease severe congestion on its metro rail network.

The Land Transport Authority (LTA) said it would launch a one-year trial on June 24 to provide free travel to commuters who arrive at 16 designated metro stations in the city center before 7:45 am on weekdays.

Around 40 protesters took to the streets of New York on Saturday to demonstrate against a U.S. ban on mimolette that has angered lovers of the distinctive French cheese.

Since March, several hundred pounds of the bright orange cheese have been held up by U.S. customs because of a warning by the Food and Drug Administration that it contained microscopic cheese mites.

Japanese exhibitionists took the Harlem Shake into a bathhouse and a centuries old shrine on Sunday as they brought the YouTube phenomenon to Tokyo.

Even as the meme appeared to be all but played out elsewhere on the Internet, dozens of people came to show off their gyrating and humping.

Indian security forces have found a dead falcon fitted with a small camera which has sparked alarm near the country's highly militarized border with Pakistan, an official said Monday.

The carcass was discovered near the ancient fort city of Jaisalmer in the far west of the desert state of Rajasthan where the Indian armed forces regularly conduct drills and war games.

Hong Kong's highest court on Monday began hearing the final appeal of a transsexual woman who is seeking to wed her boyfriend, in a potentially groundbreaking case for the Chinese city.

A Belgian ex-policeman masquerading as a doctor in France was charged and jailed Friday for allegedly sexually assaulting at least eight female patients, prosecutors said.

The 57-year-old man, who was not named pending trial, was also charged with illegally practicing medicine as an alternative "energy therapist" without a licence, the head prosecutor in the northeastern town of Verdun, Yves Le Clair, told Agence France Presse.

A Japanese official mistakenly announced the launch of a North Korean missile instead of sending an alert about a strong earthquake that hit western Japan on Saturday morning.

An official at the transport ministry's western Osaka aviation bureau mistakenly e-mailed 87 airport offices that a North Korean missile had been launched, the ministry said.