AFGHANISTAN
Civilians killed in airstrike
Authorities say an airstrike by the US-led NATO coalition has killed eight members of a family in the east. The coalition says it is aware of the allegation and is looking into what happened late Saturday in Paktia Province. Provincial spokesman Rohullah Samon said yesterday that a man, woman and their six children were killed in a coalition airstrike 8pm in Suri Khail village of Gurda Saria district. The Taliban kills more civilians than foreign forces, but the deaths of citizens caught in the crossfire continue to be an irritant in President Hamid Karzai’s relationship with his international partners.
CHINA
Activist’s brother back home
A rights lawyer says the brother of blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng (陳光誠) has returned to his closely guarded village in eastern China. Ding Xikui (丁錫奎) says he received a message from a friend of Chen Guangfu (陳光) that said the elder Chen had returned to Dongshigu village. Chen Guangfu had traveled to Beijing, where he sought legal advice from Ding this past week on how to protect his son from what the family’s supporters call retaliation by local officials. Ding had no further information, and it was unclear if Chen Guangfu returned to the village voluntarily.
JAPAN
Russian consul dies in fall
A Russian consul-general died after falling down a 30m cliff during a ball game at a campsite in the northwest of the country, police said yesterday. Vladimir Pushkov, 55, who was stationed at a consulate general in Niigata Prefecture, was on a camping trip when “he fell down a cliff and hit his head hard when he was chasing after a ball on Saturday,” police said. Russian vice-consul Roman Kolesnik, 41, tried to rescue Pushkov, but was hospitalized after he also fell down the precipice and injured his back, the official said.
JAPAN
Four die in tunnel blast
Four construction workers were confirmed dead yesterday after being recovered from inside a mountain tunnel where they had been trapped since an explosion on Thursday, an official said. The blast occurred inside a 2.8km highway tunnel being built in Minami Uonuma, police and fire department officials said. Rescuers had been unable to enter the tunnel because of dangerously high gas levels for more than two days, but were finally able to bring out the workers early yesterday, a fire department official said. They “sent them to hospitals,” but all “four were confirmed dead there,” the official added. Rescuers detected four different types of gas, the official said. Police are investigating the cause of the accident, officials said.
CHINA
Airport name criticized
A decision to name a southwestern airport after a local liquor brand has provoked widespread derision and controversy, reports said yesterday. Authorities in Yibin, Sichuan Province, said their move to name the new airport “Wuliangye” after a local liquor would have a positive impact on the city and the company. Various experts said that christening an airport with a trademark ignored both the law and custom that airport names should refer to their locations. Internet users derided the move. “Ha, ha, another new example of the collusion between the government and the business world,” Wu Yupeng mocked on his Weibo microblog.
MEXICO
PRI suspends ex-governor
The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has suspended the membership of a former governor accused of accepting millions of US dollars in bribes from drug cartels. Former Tamaulipas state governor Tomas Yarrington would be suspended until the accusations are cleared up, the party said in a statement on Saturday. PRI leader Joaquin Coldwell urged Yarrington to cooperate with authorities so that the probe does not affect upcoming elections. Yarrington was governor of Tamaulipas, the home base of the Gulf drug cartel, from 1999 to 2004. Last week, US federal prosecutors filed two civil forfeiture cases seeking to seize more than US$7 million in properties Yarrington or his associates allegedly bought in Texas with drug money.
UNITED STATES
Ghost town evacuated
Residents near a privately owned New Mexico ghost town were ordered on Saturday to evacuate as a blaze in the Gila National Forest continued to burn erratically. Fire officials in New Mexico said on Saturday that the -Whitewater--Baldy Complex fire has shrunk slightly to 33,185 hectares, but is still zero percent contained because of weather conditions. The evacuation of Mogollon, a privately owned ghost town, was ordered due to extreme wind around the southwestern New Mexico fire. Four helicopters and more than 500 firefighters from around the state are on hand to fight the blaze, but have had to contend with “extreme conditions.” Cities as far away as Albuquerque remained under a health alert until yesterday afternoon because of smoke from the fire, which has spread across the state. State officials warned residents to limit outdoor activities during the Memorial Day holiday weekend.
BOLIVIA
Policeman killed by mob
An angry crowd in a poor neighborhood in the capital, La Paz, mistook a drunken off-duty policeman for a thief and beat him to death, the victim’s sister told ATB television on Saturday. “The neighbors confused him with a pickpocket and they lynched him. They killed him, and I want justice,” said a sobbing Rosmery Guarachi, the sister of 33-year-old Rolando Guarachi. Guarachi, a sergeant with the customs police, was dressed as a civilian and inebriated when he mistook a school for his house, which prompted the civil guard to issue a warning to residents that there was a thief in the neighborhood, his sister said. She said he was beaten for two hours on Friday in a public square in the Achacicala neighborhood. Police detained four suspects.
YEMEN
Militants killed in clashes
At least 22 Islamist militants were killed in overnight clashes and an airstrike in the south, where government troops are fighting rebels linked to al-Qaeda, a local official and residents said yesterday. About 15 of the dead were killed in fighting north of the militant stronghold of Jaar, a town in Abyan Province that has been controlled by the militants since last year. The al-Qaeda-linked Ansar al-Sharia (Partisans of Islamic Law) exploited last year’s popular protests against former president Ali Abdullah Saleh to capture swathes of territory in Abyan, including the provincial capital Zinjibar. The expansion of the militants’ area of control has unsettled the US and Saudi Arabia, both targets of failed attacks by al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP), which last week claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in the capital Sana’a that killed more than 100 soldiers.
SEEKING CHANGE: A hospital worker said she did not vote in previous elections, but ‘now I can see that maybe my vote can change the system and the country’ Voting closed yesterday across the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific nation’s first general election since the government switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing and struck a secret security pact that has raised fears of the Chinese navy gaining a foothold in the region. The Solomon Islands’ closer relationship with China and a troubled domestic economy weighed on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots. As many as 420,000 registered voters had their say across 50 national seats. For the first time, the national vote also coincided with elections for eight of the 10 local governments. Esther Maeluma cast her vote in 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
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