UNITED KINGDOM
Embassies cough up fines
The embassies of Kazakhstan and Nigeria in London have paid parking fines of £40,000 (US$65,000) ahead of a government report naming and shaming foreign missions for unpaid penalties, a council said on Wednesday. Westminster City Council said it was writing to the heads of state of countries who still have not paid up, including US President Barack Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The Kazakh embassy was the worst offender on the council’s list, but it has now coughed up £37,160 for 627 parking tickets built up from 2007 to last year, the council said in a statement. The Nigerian embassy, meanwhile, paid £3,450 for clocking up 78 parking tickets. The worst remaining offenders are the embassies of China, Turkey, Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates and Cyprus, who collectively owe £72,880. Foreign embassies in London still owe the council a total of £1.1 million. “Citing ‘diplomatic immunity’ as an excuse for not paying tickets is clearly unacceptable,” said Lee Rowley, the council’s Cabinet member for parking. “It’s time these diplomats started to respect the rules of the road in the UK and stopped thinking they can do what they like at the expense of our taxpayers.”
GERMANY
Elephants surprise passersby
Two runaway circus elephants surprised passersby and police by showing up at a bus stop during a brief bid for freedom, officials in Hannover said. Dunia, a 40-year-old Indian elephant, and her counterpart Daela, a 25-year-old African elephant, were apprehended by police near the western city of Hannover last weekend nonchalantly munching on tree leaves and looking for all the world as if they were waiting for a bus. The pair had escaped from their enclosure at a nearby traveling circus and walked about 50m to the bus stop, police said. “It was simply an unlucky situation for the circus,” Hannover police spokesman Heiko Steiner said. “The two elephants were quite cooperative and peaceful. Everyone was amused.” If the two were trying to make an escape, they were not going far, Steiner said. The police station is only a stone’s throw from the bus stop, which is out of use during the summer school holidays.
SPAIN
Body found in undercarriage
Authorities at Madrid’s airport found the body of a Cuban man in the undercarriage of a plane that arrived from Havana on Wednesday, police said. The man “probably died from being crushed” after apparently hiding in the rear landing gear of the Iberia flight before it left Cuba, but an autopsy would determine the exact cause of death, a source in the Civil Guard police force said. Spanish media said the man had injuries to his head and chest.
KENYA
Stinky feet help fight malaria
The smell of stinky feet may help scientists fight malaria-causing mosquitoes. Bed nets and indoor spraying have already substantially reduced the number of fatal malaria cases, but so far scientists have not come up with a good way to help combat mosquitoes outdoors. Fredros Okumu, the head of a research project at Tanzania’s Ifakara Health Institute, says that traps scented with the odor of human feet may be the answer as they attract four times as many mosquitoes as a human volunteer. The mosquitoes who fly into the trap are then poisoned. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Grand Challenges Canada said on Wednesday they are giving Okumu US$775,000 to create an affordable trap that could be used outside homes.
UNITED STATES
Stepmom pleads not guilty
A California woman pleaded not guilty on Wednesday to a child endangerment charge in the case of her 10-year-old stepson, who is accused of fatally shooting his white supremacist father. Krista McCary also pleaded not guilty to four counts of criminal storage of a gun, said John Hall, a spokesman for the Riverside County district attorney’s office. McCary was charged after her neo-Nazi husband Jeff Hall was shot to death in their home on May 1. Authorities say the eldest of Hall’s five children took his parents’ gun off a shelf and shot him in the ear while he was sleeping. According to a police declaration filed in the case, McCary told investigators that Hall hit, kicked and yelled at his son to punish him, had been violent against her and pushed and spanked the boy’s younger sisters. The boy was due to appear in juvenile court July 22.
UNITED STATES
Intervene on obesity: doctors
The government should have the right to remove severely obese children from their parents’ home and place them in foster care, two doctors argued in a controversial editorial published on Wednesday. “State intervention may serve the best interests of many children with life-threatening obesity, comprising the only realistic way to control harmful behaviors,” wrote Lindsey Murtagh of the Harvard School of Public Health and David Ludwig of Children’s Hospital in Boston. “In severe instances of childhood obesity, removal from the home may be justifiable from a legal standpoint because of imminent health risks and the parents’ chronic failure to address medical problems.”
UNITED STATES
Inmate allowed child porn
A legal loophole is allowing a Washington state man accused of child sex crimes to view child pornography in jail. Weldon Marc Gilbert is acting as his own lawyer in the case, and that means he is entitled to review the evidence. The evidence in the case includes more than 100 videos seized from Gilbert’s Lake Tapps home after his 2007 arrest. Authorities say some of the footage was shot by Gilbert. The materials normally would be contraband at the Pierce County Jail, but restricting Gilbert’s access to the videos could result in a mistrial, the station reported on Wednesday. Gilbert worked as a pilot and is accused of using offers of flying lessons, money and alcohol to lure more than a dozen boys to his home, where police say he then molested them.
UNITED STATES
Mother’s grave misplaced
Evelyn and Hortense Edwards spent two decades visiting what they thought was their mother’s grave only to discover it contained the remains of a stranger. Now, the sisters are seeking US$25 million in damages from the Rosehill Cemetery in Linden, New Jersey, for emotional distress caused when they learned that their mother, Beatrice Williams, had been buried in the wrong plot. “It was devastating for them,” Mark Crawford, the sisters’ attorney, said in a telephone interview. He said they only discovered the mix-up after they complained to the cemetery about their mother’s grave falling into disrepair. An employee looked up the plot in question. “She said, ‘There’s a man buried there,’ and they said, ‘What do you mean there’s a man buried there?’” Crawford said. The complaint says the cemetery has acknowledged that the plot location in the sisters’ paperwork was incorrect. In a letter sent to the sisters last July, the cemetery said it believed their mother was in fact buried in another section, the complaint said.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese