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.
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