Compiled by JUNAID IBRAHIM and C. ARUNO

       A PRIMARY schoolteacher was ordered to pay T$200,000 (RM29,688) in damages for humiliating three of her pupils who did poorly in their exams, Sin Chew Daily reported.

       The incident took place between 2015 and 2016 and the teacher would call them the “Stupid Trio”.

       She would often use idioms such as “you can’t make a carving out of a rotten log” or “no chicken eggs, just a lot of chicken poo” to describe the three pupils in class.

       One of them, who is known only as Xiao Qi, gradually became emotionally unstable and only told her mother about the incidents after switching to another class in 2016.

       Furious, Xiao Qi’s mother, who is a tuition teacher, started legal proceedings against her child’s teacher in 2018.

       After hearing multiple witness statements from pupils and from a physical education teacher, the court came to a verdict that the teacher’s actions had affected the normal development of a child and had caused irreparable damage.

       > He was hoping that she would say “yes” to his proposal but instead received a slap in return.

       China Press reported that a man in Shenzhen, China, was rejected by the woman he was pursuing when he proposed on May 20, known as the May Valentine’s Day.

       The man was seen pulling a woman into a line of lights arranged in the shape of a heart on a street.

       He then got down on one knee before presenting a dog and a bouquet of roses and was presumed to be proposing to start a relationship with the woman.

       He could not have expected what was to transpire next.

       The woman grabbed the bouquet and threw it on the ground. She then slapped the man, grabbed the dog and walked away.

       Opinion on Chinese cyberspace was divided on the matter.

       Many speculated the woman’s actions stemmed from frustration after her previous rejections of the man had gone unheard.

       Some Internet users criticised her for overreacting while others praised the woman for being decisive at stopping an unrelenting pursuer.

       > A monkey in China’s Zhejiang province caught the nation’s attention for having a face shaped like the Chinese character Guo (which means country), China Press reported.

       A woman, whose surname was Yang, took a photo of the simian during a visit to the zoo on May 14 before sharing it online.

       She thought the monkey looked special and that it had a squarish face.

       The picture soon went viral online, with many Internet users saying that it was cute and had a face that looked like the character Guo.

       According to the Huji Zoo in Shaoxing, the Internet star was a black-capped capuchin brought to the zoo in 2018.

       “In our zoo, there are three of such monkeys. Only one of them has a squarish face. It only looked like that when it became older,” one of the zookeepers said.

       The black-capped capuchin is known also as the tufted capuchin and is found commonly in South America and the Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Margarita.

       The above articles are compiled from the vernacular newspapers (Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese and Tamil dailies). As such, stories are grouped according to the respective language/medium. Where a paragraph begins with a >, it denotes a separate news item.