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Thailand: Twelve missing Thai boys and their football coach were finally rescued after being stranded in a cave for over two weeks.

The children, ages 11 to 16, have been missing since last month. They were trapped in the Tham Luang cave complex in Northern Thailand when their exit was flooded by a sudden deluge of rain.

Two British rescue divers Rick Stanton and John Volanthen were able to locate the group, who were approximately 4 kilometres from the cave mouth.

Despite efforts to drain the water by hundreds of industrial pumps, the exit remained flooded and rescuers raced against time.

One of the rescuers, Petty Officer Saman Gunan, a former Thai navy diver, died on Friday (July 6) as he ran out of oxygen. He was returning from delivering air tanks to the children and their coach.

For more we go to CBC News:

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Malaysia: Ousted former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak was arrested for corruption-related offences on Tuesday (July 3).

Held at the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission headquarters in Putrajaya, Najib was charged with three counts of criminal breach of trust and one count of corruption in connection with the investment fund scandal.

Najib had governed Malaysia since 2008, but he lost in an election two months ago to Mahathir Mohamad, who campaigned on bringing Najib to justice.

Najib was alleged to have siphoned US$731 million from 1Malaysia Development Berhad, the state investment fund, to his personal account.

The 64-year-old ousted leader denied the charges and called the arrest “politically motivated and the result of political vengeance” by the opposition.

For more we go to CNBC Life:

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Japan: Aum Supreme Truth cult leader Shoko Asahara, who killed 13  people and injured more than 6,000 passengers in a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995, was executed on Friday (July 6).

The 63-year old cult leader was hanged in a detention centre with six other senior members. Six more members of the cult will be executed later.

Asahara founded Aum Shinrikyo (Supreme Truth) in 1987, and had 10,000 followers in Japan at its peak. The cult was a mix of Buddhist and Hindu meditation along with Christian and apocalyptic teachings, yoga and the occult.

Asahara declared himself to be both Christ and the first “enlightened one” since Buddha. He has also claimed to be a reincarnation of the Hindu god Shiva.

Cult members were led to believe that the world will end in a global Armageddon, and they must “elevate the doomed souls of this world to a higher spiritual stage” by killing them.

The cult members developed sarin, a nerve agent invented by the Nazis, at the cult’s compound in the foothills of Mount Fuji, and released the liquid nerve agent on Tokyo’s train lines on 20 March 1995.

Asahara was arrested two months after the attack and was sentenced to death in 2004. He had exhausted all channels of appeal.

For more we go to TIME magazine:

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Image (“Wow Woman”) Courtesy of Chinch / Shutterstock.com