CHINA
Crash rumors denied
China’s Xinhua news agency has denied widespread rumors that railway authorities tried to conceal evidence by burying carriages damaged during a high-speed rail crash that killed at least 40 people last weekend. Citing an unnamed official with the Ministry of Railways, Xinhua said late on Friday that “the problem of burying rail carriages and ‘destroying evidence’ does not exist during the handling of the whole of the accident.” The report said that only the damaged parts of some carriages were buried at the site in order to facilitate clean-up and rescue operations. A high-speed train rammed into the back of another in Wenzhou on July 23. A Chinese railway research institute has already taken responsibility for the accident, blaming faulty signaling equipment.
AUSTRALIA
Blackout halts air travel
The travel plans of thousands of Australians were disrupted yesterday by a power outage at Sydney’s international airport. Australia’s busiest air terminal was blacked out for an hour and a half, crippling security screening and check-in and delaying “thousands” of passengers, a Sydney Airport spokesman said. “The cause of the failure is under investigation,” he said, estimating that it would take “several hours” to get back on schedule. Back-up generators also took “some time” to come on, he added, compounding the problem. The reason for the generator problems was also being investigated, he said. Passengers said the outage brought customs and security to “a standstill” and there was “chaos” in the terminal, with huge lines as people were manually processed. “Madness at Sydney Airport! Nobody going anywhere!” one passenger wrote on Twitter.
THAILAND
Sex traffic women freed
Thai authorities freed 71 women and girls who had been lured into selling sex in massage parlors and karaoke bars, police said yesterday, after a crackdown on human trafficking on the Malaysian border. Thirteen of those were under the age of 18, said Lieutenant Colonel Noppadon Petsut, deputy commander of police in Sadao district of Songkhla province, where the operation was carried out on Friday. “The operation followed complaints by the Laotian embassy in Bangkok,” he said, adding that 70 of the young women were Laotian and one was from Myanmar. A Singaporean man, a Malaysian man and a Thai woman were charged with human trafficking and illegally procuring sex, Noppadon said. “Charges of human trafficking are very serious and carry a maximum sentence of the death penalty,” he said. Police freed 59 women from a karaoke bar and another 12 from a spa near a Thai--Malaysian border checkpoint. Another officer said it was believed that the women and girls were sold to the suspects by brokers and forced to work as prostitutes.
VIETNAM
Thousands flee Nock-ten
Vietnam is evacuating nearly 300,000 people from northern coastal areas as Tropical Storm Nock-ten approaches after leaving a path of destruction in the Philippines. Disaster official Nguyen Xuan Hung of central Nghe An Province says provincial authorities have begun evacuating 13,500 people from coastal villages, while more than 30,000 are being moved in neighboring Thanh Hoa Province. Weather forecasters said the storm was expected to hit northern Vietnam yesterday evening packed with sustained winds of up to 102km per hour. Nock-ten left 41 people dead and 26 missing when it hit the Philippines earlier this week.
UNITED STATES
Gaga’s meat dress preserved
A California taxidermist has earned a rare place in pop history. Sergio Vigalato preserved Lady Gaga’s now-famous raw-meat dress for display in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. The project has prompted a swarm of media interest in the 66-year-old former Southeast Alaska charter boat skipper, who is originally from Brazil. Vigalato operates American Taxidermy in Burbank, California. That is where he was contacted by the museum about preserving the dress that Lady Gaga wore at last year’s MTV Video Music Awards. The ensemble, which Lady Gaga said was a statement about equality, arrived at his shop frozen and decomposing. He restored it over the next three-and-a-half months, and the dress went on display last month.
AUSTRIA
Pot plants found in Vienna
Vienna police have shut down an unusual cannabis “ring” — hemp growing along busy Ring Street encircling the city’s center. Alerted by a news article about the illegal crop, police officers on Friday plucked a 200m stretch of green space along the three-lane street clean of the offending plants. They acted after a Viennese biology student walking along the Ringstrasse identified the green sprouts poking through bark mulch beneath the stately trees seaming the street and told TV news show Heute about his discovery.
MEXICO
Murder rate doubles
The number of homicides in the country has more than doubled in the past five years, according to the country’s statistics institute, as the drug war claimed more victims across the country. The National Institute of Statistics and Geography recorded 24,374 homicides last year, compared with 9,921 in 2005, according to a report late on Thursday. The number of deaths blamed on organized crime has risen since President Felipe Calderon launched a military crackdown on criminal gangs at the end of 2006. Calderon’s office blamed organized crime for more than 15,000 murders last year. There were 22 killings for every 100,000 residents in Mexico last year, according to the report, which is still relatively low for the region. Honduras recorded 58 murders per 100,000 inhabitants last year, according to a report from the Organization of American States (OAS), followed by El Salvador with 52, Guatemala with 48 and Venezuela with 47.
UNITED STATES
Clark Gable arrested
Clark Gable, a grandson of the late movie legend, was arrested in Hollywood on Friday for allegedly pointing a laser device at a police helicopter. The 22-year-old was detained with a friend after a patrolling police pilot reported a “bright green laser light” had illuminated his cockpit over Sunset Boulevard. Officers on the ground traced the source of the light to a car, inside which were Clark James Gable and a friend, Maximilian Anderson, 23. They were booked for a felony and held on US$250,000 bail. Gable was released later in the day.
SPAIN
Early elections called
Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero on Friday called general elections for Nov. 20, four months early, insisting the country’s battered economy was on the road to recovery. Zapatero announced in April that he would not seek a third term as Socialist leader in the next elections. The party chose Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba, then interior minister and a party heavyweight, to replace him.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not