A politician in Sungai Petani, Kedah, died of a heart attack after learning of his brother’s sudden death, Makkal Osai reported.

The Indian Progressive Front’s (IPF) Kedah branch vice-president S. Pannirselvam was apparently returning from a funeral when he was told that his brother S. Gunasekaran had passed away.

Pannirselvam, who was rushing home after hearing the news, suffered a heart attack en route and crashed his car into a guardrail.

His wife and another brother who were in the car were not reported hurt in the accident.

The victim, who was also the Merbok IPF chairman, was rushed to the hospital but died a few hours later.

> The paper also reported that a two-year-old girl in Andra Pradesh, India, died after eating soil due to extreme poverty and hunger.

Labourers Mahesh and Neelaveni, who have four children, ended up taking care of a relative’s child for unknown reasons.

The impoverished couple could not feed the five children in their care. The child, who had been starving for two days, ate soil when she could no longer stand the hunger.

? The above article is 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 this ' >'sign, it denotes a separate news item.