BEIJING — A woman in eastern China was allegedly beaten to death by five employees of a Wal-Mart store who accused her of shoplifting, a police report and state media said Tuesday. Police have arrested two employees from the store in Jiangxi province, while three others are being investigated, Jingdezhen city police said in a report on their website.

According to the report, the woman was beaten outside her home near the Wal-Mart on August 30 and died in a city hospital on Wednesday last week from injuries suffered during the beating. Police said the five Wal-Mart employees had stopped the woman in the street and demanded to see her receipt, but she refused because she could not verify their identities, it said.

Following an argument, the five Wal-Mart employees began beating her, it said. The English-language China Daily on Tuesday identified the victim as Yu Xiaochun, 37.

“They started to hit her because she didn’t do what they said,” the paper quoted her husband Chen Baolin as saying. “I got there and tried to stop them but they kept beating her.” It was not immediately known if the woman had shoplifted, the paper said.

The beating intensified as she tried to telephone for help using her mobile phone, it added.

Wal Mart greeters…taking the job a little too seriously?

The disgraced financier Bernie Madoff has received a $13,800 (£8,500) tax rebate, angering clients who lost billions in the biggest Ponzi scheme in Wall Street history.

The jailed fraudster was sent the money after overpaying the property taxes on his waterfront mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, which his wife still owns despite other assets being seized by investigators who unravelled his $65bn investment scam.

The rebate cheque was issued last month and made payable to Ruth and Bernard Madoff. Ruth Madoff sent the cheque back to the tax office asking that it be reissued with her husband’s name removed.

Via Kerry Lutz.

Larry, Moe and Curly

Airline terror trial: The bomb plot to kill 10,000 people – Telegraph — These three slackjaws, look too stupid to plot much of anything. This entire story is quite interesting and has a lot of PR earmarks.

The al-Qaeda cell plotted to cause mass murder by detonating home-made liquid explosives on board at least seven passenger flights bound for the US and Canada. The plot had the potential to be three times as deadly as the 9/11 attacks of 2001.

The convictions followed Britain’s largest counter-terrorism operation and two criminal trials which, in total, cost an estimated £60million.

All three men convicted on Monday had been found guilty at an earlier trial last year of conspiracy to murder, but prosecutors said it was vital to secure a conviction on another charge of conspiring to blow up the aircraft in order to prove that the threat to air traffic was genuine.

Their arrests in 2006 resulted in immediate worldwide restrictions on passengers carrying liquids in their hand luggage. A ban on containers larger than 100ml is still in place.