Hong Kong's The Sun to stop publishing

HONG KONG• • Oriental Press Group will be suspending publication of its Chinese-language daily The Sun from tomorrow, reported the South China Morning Post.

The publishing firm, which will also be folding its free weekly newspaper Good News, cited Hong Kong's "deteriorating business environment" for the closure.

About 300 to 400 staff members from the 17-year-old newspaper, which at one point reportedly had a readership of more than 1.7 million, could be affected and transferred to other jobs internally.

Ex-billionaire Mallya offers debt settlement

MUMBAI• Vijay Mallya, the former Indian billionaire now hounded by creditors, has offered lenders as much as 60 billion rupees (S$1.2 billion) as settlement of debt from the failed airline he founded.

Banks have a week to respond to his offer. The government estimates he owed 90.9 billion rupees as of Nov 30.

Mallya, who took over a liquor business from his father in the 1980s, started Kingfisher Airlines in 2005. It was one of India's leading carriers until it was grounded in 2012 amid mounting debt.

In March 2012, he was ranked the 45th-richest Indian with a net worth of US$1 billion (S$1.3 billion) by Forbes.

BLOOMBERG

Woman dies in freak guard rail accident

XI'AN• • A strange case of a pregnant woman who died after getting her neck caught in a roadside guard rail has triggered discussions over the safety of such facilities.

Pictures and video clips have gone viral. They show the woman kneeling motionless with her neck trapped between the steel bars of a guard rail, while several passers-by try in vain to break the rails.

Police said she might have experienced dizziness and accidentally had her neck trapped when she fainted.

In 2013, a young woman in Beijing died after her neck got trapped in a guard rail.

In 2015, an elderly man died in a similar situation, also in Beijing.

XINHUA