■China
Floods worsen in Anhui
More than a million people in eastern China were isolated due to floods and rain-fed landslides which have already claimed over 200 lives nationwide since early last month, and more heavy rain was forecast, officials and state media said yesterday. More deaths were reported
in eastern Anhui province. Along the Huai River, rising floodwaters and mudslides have killed 16 people and stranded more than a million, said Wang Xintao, a disaster relief official at the provincial Civil Affairs Bureau. Heavy rain was also on tap for a wide stretch of south-central China along the flood-prone Yangtze River, Xinhua said, citing area meteorologists.
■ Thailand
Man gets revenge on dogs
A Thai street vendor who confessed to fatally poisoning 48 dogs living in a Buddhist temple because they stole his lunch has been fined US$20, a Thai newspaper reported yesterday. Warayuth Songslip, a vegetable seller at a Bangkok market, told police he left five bowls of poisoned chicken for the dogs after six of them tried to steal barbecued chicken he had bought for lunch and bit him in the ensuing struggle, the Nation newspaper reported. Warayuth, who was charged with cruelty to animals, was further angered when Buddhist monks said they would not be held responsible because the temple was only sheltering the dogs and did not own them.
■ Hong Kong
Double-decker deaths probed
Investigators suspect panicky passengers might have caused a double-decker bus to topple and plunge off a bridge after it collided with a container truck, killing 21 people and injuring 20, a newspaper reported yesterday. The bus, which was traveling in a slow lane, teetered for a moment on the edge of the bridge after colliding with the truck traveling in the same direction, the South China Morning Post reported. Some passengers were thrown out of the bus and others were trapped inside the wreckage as it then fell. ``The bus seesawed for a second. Passengers might have panicked and moved to the front so they could get out. It might be that was why it plunged,'' an unidentified government source was quoted as telling the Post.
■ Hong Kong
Politician apologizes
A pro-government politician has apologized for making an obscene gesture at protesters who gathered around Hong Kong's legislature, a news report said yesterday. Philip Wong was photographed sticking his middle finger up and grinning as he was driven through a 50,000-strong crowd protesting against a proposed national security law outside Hong Kong's legislative council building on Wednesday evening. Wong, quoted by yesterday's South China Morning Post, apologized for the gesture which he said was in response to a young person in the crowd outside the minibus he was traveling in raising his middle finger at him.
■ Singapore
Bra record stretched
A chain of 79,001 used and unwanted bras stretching over 60km has made it into the Guinness Book of World Records, it was reported yesterday. The bras were pinned together and laid out at a parking lot on Singapore's resort island of Sentosa last December. Organizers of
the event told the newspaper Today that their effort had been accepted by Guinness as a new record. Named
"Bras for a Cause," the attempt was partly organized by the Breast Cancer Foundation "to raise awareness for breast cancer as well as funds."
■Europe
HIV/AIDS epidemic looms
An HIV/AIDS epidemic threatens to hit southeastern Europe, the World Bank warned in a report focussing on Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania on Thursday. A rapid increase in HIV-infection was driven by rising poverty, unemployment and social change, worsening health and educational services and increased drug use and prostitution, the report said. Romania has reported 12,559 HIV infections by the middle of last year. Bulgaria has recorded just 366 HIV cases since 1987, and Croatia's official figure was 341 in late 2001.
■ United States
Wrong house demolished
Jenny Lopez's home in Phoenix is a pile of rubble after a demolition crew mistakenly tore down the wrong house. The house that was supposed to be demolished Wednesday was across the street from Lopez's, where she had lived for 30 years. It was vacant, boarded up and fenced in. One of Lopez's old neighbors spotted the heavy construction equipment in her yard and alerted family members. But when they arrived, the house had already been torn down. Demolition man David Gomez declined to comment about the incident but told a television station that he would probably lose his job.
■ Peru
Brain surgery with pliers
Lacking the proper instruments, a Peruvian doctor at a state hospital in the Andean highlands used a drill and pliers to perform brain surgery on a man who had been injured in a fight, the doctor said on Thursday. "We have no [neurosurgical] instruments at the hospital. He was dying, so I had no choice but to run to a hardware store to buy a drill and use the pliers that I fix my car with, of course after sterilizing them," Cesar Venero said in a telephone interview. The patient, Centeno Quispe, 47, had arrived at the hospital in Andahuaylas, 400km southeast of Lima, after being hit in the head with a metal object in a street fight, Venero said.
■ Germany
Brothel for jobless woman
A Berlin job center unwittingly offered an unemployed woman work in a brothel. "The advert just said they were looking for someone to work in a massage parlour, we weren't to know it was a brothel," said a spokesman for the government-run agency in Berlin's central Mitte district on Thursday. Rage, rather than embarrassment was the response of the 25-year-old woman to the offer, who has been looking for work without success since April in Germany's cash-strapped capital. "It really is a bit much if the job center assumes that the best thing is for you to try your luck in a whorehouse," she told Tageszeitung newspaper.
■ The Netherlands
Python slithers out of toilet
A pet python missing over the last two months made its reappearance by scaring a Dutch woman when it slithered out of her toilet bowl. The constrictor snake, which kills its prey by coiling around it and squeezing, had been on the loose for more than two months after breaking out of its terrarium in a town near the port city of Rotterdam, Dutch news agency ANP said on Thursday. As police and vets came to catch the two-metre long fugitive python, it slid under a bathtub that they had to demolish to capture it. The snake was returned to its owner.
Agencies
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
‘DELUSIONAL’: Targeting the families of Hamas’ leaders would not push the group to change its position or to give up its demands for Palestinians, Ismail Haniyeh said Israeli aircraft on Wednesday killed three sons of Hamas’ top political leader in the Gaza Strip, striking high-stakes targets at a time when Israel is holding delicate ceasefire negotiations with the militant group. Hamas said four of the leader’s grandchildren were also killed. Ismail Haniyeh’s sons are among the highest-profile figures to be killed in the war so far. Israel said they were Hamas operatives, and Haniyeh accused Israel of acting in “the spirit of revenge and murder.” The deaths threatened to strain the internationally mediated ceasefire talks, which appeared to gain steam in recent days even as the sides remain far
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The