CHINA
US man stabbed to death
A 62-year-old US man was stabbed to death in downtown Beijing and a suspect has been caught, city police said. The Beijing Public Security Bureau said in a statement posted on its official microblog late on Wednesday that Howard Thomas Mills was attacked near the entrance to a narrow alleyway in the city’s Xicheng District. Mills arrived in China on July 3, the statement said. The alleged attacker, a 35-year-old man named An Libo who had arrived in the capital earlier that day by train from his hometown in northeastern China’s Heilongjiang Province, was arrested by police who were patrolling near the scene, the Chinese statement said.
SOUTH KOREA
Booze gets violence warning
The country’s top liquor maker said yesterday it has started labeling bottles with warnings against drunken violence, in a country which is one of the world’s heaviest alcohol consumers. Hite-Jinro said from Tuesday it began labeling soju and beer bottles sold in Seoul with messages reading: “No more drunken violence! Let’s improve wrong drinking culture!” The firm is the nation’s top maker of soju, a distilled liquor popular among Koreans, and the second-largest beer seller. Street brawls, family violence and other crimes involving drinking are common, but courts often give lenient punishments to offenders who acted under the influence.
PAKISTAN
Nine die in Taliban attack
At least half a dozen Taliban gunmen opened fire on a compound housing policemen in the east yesterday, killing nine of them, officials said. The police who were targeted in the city of Lahore were training to become prison guards, said Habibur Rehman, the chief of police in Punjab Province, where Lahore is the capital. Pakistani Taliban spokesman Ahsanullah Ahsan claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was revenge for the police torture of their fighters in prison.
JAPAN
Heavy rains kill three
At least three people have died and 50,000 have been ordered to evacuate their homes as unprecedented rains pounded the southwestern island of Kyushu, officials and media said yesterday. Emergency workers in Kumamoto Prefecture are responding to multiple reports of mudslides swallowing houses and people trapped, with access roads blocked by mud or gushing water, officials said. Troops have been deployed with nearly 500mm of rain falling in the eight hours to 8am yesterday in some parts of the prefecture. “Particularly in Kumamoto and Oita Prefectures, we are seeing the heaviest rain that [the region] has ever experienced,” the Japan Meteorological Agency said.
FRANCE
Avalanche kills at least six
At least six people were killed and eight injured yesterday in an avalanche in the French Alps, mountain police said, with emergency services dispatched to the scene. Local authorities said the avalanche was “the most deadly of recent years.” “There are reportedly people missing,” police said, adding that the avalanche had hit two roped groups of climbers. One of the injured sounded the alert at around 3:25am after the avalanche on Mont Maudit, a mountain in the Mont Blanc massif. Mont Maudit is the massif’s third-highest peak, rising to an altitude of 4,465m.
UNITED STATES
Man held for torturing wife
A West Virginia man has been arrested for torturing his wife, making her a slave and holding her hostage in chains for nearly a decade, authorities said. Jackson County officials have charged Peter Lizon of Leroy with malicious wounding after his wife showed up at a nearby shelter with scars on her wrists and ankles caused by being chained up with metal padlocks, local media reported. Lizon, 37, had also allegedly smashed her feet with farming equipment. He called his wife a “slave” and made her kneel before him whenever he entered the room, according to a criminal complaint filed by a woman who met her at a shelter and was cited by local media.
BRAZIL
Canine ‘love hotel’ to open
With a 32 million strong canine population, second only to the US, a “love hotel” for pets is to be opened in the southeastern city of Belo Horizonte. The economic daily Valor reported that Fabiano Lourdes and his sister Daniela planned this week to inaugurate “Animalle Mundo Pet,” an eight-story building with an entire floor devoted to doggie trysts. Dog owners will have to pay US$50 a day for a room, which comes complete with a heart-shaped mirror on the ceiling, red cushions on the floor and dimmed lighting. The brother and sister told Valor they have invested US$1 million in the venture.
UNITED STATES
Woman kept corpse in chair
A woman said she kept the dead body of her companion in a chair in their southern Michigan house for months because she did not want to be alone. Linda Chase, 72, said she kept the remains of Charles Zigler clean and dressed and talked to the body while watching NASCAR on television. “It’s not that I’m heartless ... I didn’t want to be alone. He was the only guy who was ever nice to me,” Chase told the Jackson Citizen Patriot, Jackson police discovered Zigler’s body in a living room chair last week. Authorities believe he died of natural causes at age 67 in December 2010, although Chase said it was in December last year.
UNITED STATES
Cargo ship sails to Cuba
For the first time in 50 years, a cargo ship left Miami on Wednesday headed directly for Cuba, carrying a load of humanitarian supplies, officials said. The company International Port Corp said it obtained a special permit from the authorities which complies with Washington’s half-century-old trade embargo on Cuba. Company spokesman Leonardo -Sanchez-Adega said the ships are scheduled to leave each Wednesday on the 17-hour trip to Havana, where the 10-member crew will unload its cargo and return, without ever going ashore. Its clients for the weekly shipment include charitable, religious and humanitarian groups, as well as relatives of people living in Cuba, he said.
UNITED STATES
Manhattanhenge celebrated
New Yorkers gathered at dusk to witness “Manhattanhenge” — a rare alignment of the sun with the east-west street grid in which it appears to set between skyscrapers. Dozens of people gathered shortly before 8:30pm on Wednesday at the corner of 14th and Sixth Avenue, to take pictures of the huge red sun at the foot of the urban canyon formed by the buildings. Manhattanhenge occurs twice during the northern hemisphere’s summer — in May and July — and a partial Manhattanhenge was expected yesterday. The phenomenon also occurs in winter, but is often obscured by inclement weather.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion