CHINA
Orchestra fires rude cellist
The Beijing Symphony Orchestra has fired a Russian cellist who was caught on camera verbally abusing a female passenger on a train, sparking an online outcry over the behavior of foreigners in China. The orchestra said its reputation had been “badly damaged” by the actions of Oleg Vedernikov, who was shown rudely insulting a fellow train passenger who repeatedly asked him to take his feet off the back of her seat. Vedernikov has apologized over the May 14 incident in a video posted online. This has done little to dampen the controversy over his actions, shortly after video footage of a British tourist apparently sexually assaulting a Chinese woman in Beijing was posted on the Internet. Many Web users yesterday welcomed the musician’s dismissal.
JAPAN
World’s tallest tower opens
The world’s tallest tower and the country’s biggest new landmark, the Tokyo Skytree, opened to the public yesterday. Nearly 8,000 visitors were expected to take high-speed elevators up to the observation decks of the 634m tower to mark its opening. Some reportedly waited in line more than a week to get the coveted tickets for a panoramic view, though yesterday ended up being cloudy in Tokyo. Skytree is recognized by Guinness World Records as the tallest tower, beating out the Canton Tower in China, which is 600m. The world’s tallest structure is Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, which stands 828m.
INDIA
Passengers burn to death
A passenger train rammed into a freight train before dawn yesterday in the south, killing at least 15 people in a fiery wreck, officials said. The freight train had been stopped at the station near Penukonda in Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh State when the Hampi Express slammed into it. Four coaches of the passenger train derailed when the driver applied emergency brakes on seeing the freight train on the same track, district official Durga Das said. One of the coaches caught fire, trapping many passengers in the coach. At least eight people burned to death, said Charu Sinha, a top police official in Anantpur.
NEPAL
Everest death toll rises
A mountaineering official in Nepal says climbers have reported seeing another body on Mount Everest, raising the death toll to four for one of the worst days ever on the world’s highest mountain. Nepali mountaineering official Gyanendra Shrestha said yesterday that the body of Chinese climber Ha Wen-yi was spotted not far from where three other climbers died. Ha and the other victims — German doctor Eberhard Schaaf, Nepal-born Canadian Shriya Shah and South Korean mountaineer Song Won-bin — died on Saturday on their way down from the 8,848m summit.
SOUTH KOREA
‘Flight attendants’ in uproar
Airline flight attendants are fuming over nightclubs in the South Korean capital that feature sexy waitresses dressed in skimpy copies of cabin crew uniforms, a newspaper reported yesterday. Outside a subway station in southern Seoul, young women attired like flight attendants handed out leaflets advertising one such “concept” bar, the JoongAng Ilbo daily said on its Web site. “Beautiful flight attendants will provide you with best service,” the leaflets promised. A South Korean airline official said his company had protested to the bars, who promised to stop using such uniforms in future.
UNITED STATES
Activist worried for helpers
The mentor for a blind Chinese activist who arrived in New York over the weekend says he’s very troubled about three people now at the mercy of Chinese authorities for helping him. New York University law professor Jerome Cohen expressed the concerns of Chen Guangcheng (陳光誠) to reporters on Monday. After Chen fled his village, his nephew was arrested and charged with intent to commit homicide — for stabbing and wounding attackers beating up the young man’s parents. Chen is asking Chinese authorities to release the nephew. Cohen told reporters the dissident is “seriously troubled” because he cannot protect others who protected him: a woman who drove his getaway van and an academic who cared for Chen and who Cohen says is now under house arrest.
UNITED STATES
Seagrass stores carbon
Coastal seagrass can store more heat-trapping carbon per square kilometer than forests can, which means these coastal plants could be part of the solution to climate change, scientists said in a new study. Even though seagrasses occupy less than 0.2 percent of the world’s oceans, they can hold up to 83,000 metric tonnes of carbon per square kilometer, a global team of researchers reported on Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience. That is more than twice the 30,000 tonnes of carbon per square kilometer a typical terrestrial forest can store. Earth’s oceans are an important carbon sink — keeping climate-warming carbon dioxide from human-made and natural sources out of the atmosphere — and seagrasses account for more than 10 percent of all the carbon buried in oceans each year, the scientists found.
UNITED STATES
Mom-impersonator booked
A man who dressed up as his mother in a bizarre real-estate fraud that involved doctoring her death certificate and cashing her Social Security retirement checks for six years after she died was sentenced on Monday to more than 13 years behind bars. Thomas Parkin was convicted on May 3 on charges including grand larceny and mortgage fraud. He was sentenced on Monday to between 13-2/3 and 41 years in prison. Prosecutors said the scheme lasted six years and involved Parkin wearing a blond wig, dress and oversized sunglasses. The 51-year-old Parkin said at sentencing that he never hurt anyone or used stolen funds for personal gain or injury. When his mother, Irene Prusik, died in 2003 at age 73, he began impersonating her to cash her Social Security checks and keep her US$2.2 million brownstone home in Park Slope, a leafy neighborhood in the borough of Brooklyn, prosecutors said.
UNITED STATES
Granny charged with murder
A 74-year-old woman has been charged with murder in the shooting death of her 17-year-old grandson. Police said Jonathan Hoffman called police and told an emergency dispatcher that he had been shot in the chest by his grandmother, Sandra Layne, and “was going to die.” By the time officers arrived at the family’s upscale condo in a Detroit suburb, police said at least four more shots from a .40 caliber handgun had been pumped into the high-school senior. A West Bloomfield Township detective told a judge during a Monday court hearing that eight entry and exit wounds were found in Hoffman’s body after the Friday afternoon shooting in the condo he shared with his grandparents northwest of Detroit.
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
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was
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