SOUTH KOREA
Man on stabbing spree
A man wielding a box-cutter stabbed or cut eight people at a subway station just outside of Seoul after a teenager confronted him for spitting at him, police said yesterday. Police arrested a man running away from the station in Uijeongbu, which is home to US and South Korean military bases, the officers said. Such attacks are rare in the country. Police identified the suspect as a 39-year-old man surnamed Yoo. He began wielding a box cutter at an 18-year-old man surnamed Park inside the train when the victim confronted Yoo for spitting at him, police said.
INDONESIA
Earthquake kills three
A powerful 6.3 magnitude earthquake that shook the eastern island of Sulawesi has killed at least three people and seriously injured a dozen others, an official said yesterday. The quake struck on Saturday evening near the mountainous districts of Parigi Moutong and Sigi in Central Sulawesi province, where panicked residents ran from their homes into the streets as the ground shook violently for around 15 seconds. The US Geological Survey said the quake struck at a depth of around 20km, 56km southeast of the provincial capital Palu, where residents also felt the tremor and ran from their homes.
CHINA
Local crowned Miss World
A 23-year-old music lover who wants to work with the poor, was crowned Miss World 2012 at a ceremony in Inner Mongolia, pageant organizers said on Saturday. Wearing a sparkling blue gown, Yu Wenxia waved to the audience in the Dongsheng Stadium in Ordos, located in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Organizers said Yu beat out 115 contestants, a record, in the highly publicized annual international beauty pageant. China also won the Miss World title in 2007, when model Zhang Zilin took the crown. Sophie Moulds, a 19-year-old business student from Wales, took second place. Jessica Kahawaty, 23, a law student from Australia, was third.
PAKISTAN
US planes fire missiles
Intelligence officials say missiles fired from unmanned US spy planes have hit two vehicles near the Afghan border, killing at least seven militants. Three intelligence officials said the strike yesterday came in the Mana area of North Waziristan. The officials say the area is dominated by Hafiz Gul Bahadur, a commander whose forces often target US troops in Afghanistan, but they did not know whether his men were targeted.
JAPAN
Bacteria kills six people
Six people have died after eating pickles contaminated with E. coli bacteria, officials said yesterday. A total of 103 others have been made ill after eating the same lightly pickled Chinese cabbage produced last month by a company in the city of Sapporo, according to health bulletins issued by the local government. Of the dead, five were elderly people who ate the pickles at nursing homes in Sapporo and in another city on Hokkaido Island. A four-year-old girl died on Aug. 11, five days after developing symptoms of E. coli poisoning, an official at Sapporo’s public health center said. Two women in their 90s died on Thursday in the city of Ebetsu, about 10 days after they were hospitalized with symptoms of food poisoning after eating the pickles at nursing homes.
SWEDEN
Jews march against hate
Several hundred Jews and their supporters marched in the southern city of Malmo on Saturday to bring attention to intolerance and anti-Semitic attacks in the Nordic country. Malmo, which has a large immigrant Muslim community, saw a surge in hate crimes against Jews after Israel’s invasion of Gaza in 2009. Some of those participating in the Saturday walk wore the traditional kippa cap that Jewish men traditionally wear. The march passed without incident, and Willy Silberstein of the Swedish Committee Against Anti-Semitism, which organized the event, described it as a success. “It was impressive. There was much more people than we expected,” he said, adding that most of the participants were not Jewish.
MAURITANIA
Man kills kids to save money
A man has slit the throats of his four children to avoid the expense of buying them new clothes for the Muslim holiday Eid-al-fitr, sources close to the family said on Friday. The murders took place in Arafat, a suburb of the capital, Nouakchott, where the man, a public sector nurse in his forties, lived with his family. Sources close to the family, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the man had waited for his wife to leave their home on Thursday night, before slitting the throats of his two sons and two daughters. The eldest was 12 and the youngest less than a year old. One of the sources said that upon her return, the mother found her husband smiling and he said to her: “I have gotten rid of your concerns about buying clothes for the children for the holiday.”
FINLAND
Offbeat contests held
A teenager won a mobile phone throwing contest on Saturday by hurling his old Nokia phone 101.46m. The annual contest is one of many offbeat events, such as wife-carrying, that are held in the summer, when normally reserved Finns like to celebrate the warmer weather with silliness and outdoor sport. Ere Karjalainen, who beat about 50 contestants, including some who had traveled from England and India, said he had practiced only once and prepared mainly “by drinking.”
GERMANY
Rightists mock Mohammed
Members of a small far-right group have displayed caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed during demonstrations outside mosques in Berlin, but officials say their protests have gone peacefully. Saturday’s demonstrations by the Pro Deutschland group — held under the slogan “Islam does not belong in Germany — stop Islamization” — followed a failed attempt by three mosques to get display of the caricatures prohibited. A court ruled they were protected by laws allowing artistic free expression. Police said a group of up to 70 supporters of Pro Deutschland took part, while several hundred counter-demonstrators protested against them.
RUSSIA
Bomb kills six police
Six policemen died in the volatile Caucasus region of Ingushetia early yesterday after a bomb went off at the funeral of their colleague, news agencies reported. “As the policemen entered the yard of the house where the funeral was taking place, a powerful blast went off. As a result of the explosion, six policemen died on the spot and there are many wounded,” a spokesman for the regional Investigative Committee told the Interfax news agency.
BRAZIL
Man survives impalement
A 24-year-old construction worker survived a 1.8m metal bar falling from above and piercing his head, doctors said on Friday. Luiz Alexandre Essinger, chief of staff at Rio de Janeiro’s Miguel Couto Hospital, said doctors successfully withdrew the iron bar from Eduardo Leite’s skull during a five-hour surgery. He said Leite was conscious when he arrived at the hospital and told him what had happened. He said Leite was lucid and showed no negative consequences after the operation. The bar fell from the fifth floor of a building under construction, went through Leite’s hard hat, entered the back of his skull and exited between his eyes, Essinger said, adding: “It really was a miracle” that Leite survived. Ruy Monteiro, the hospital’s head of neurosurgery, told the Globo TV network that Leite escaped by just a few centimeters from losing one eye and becoming paralyzed on the left side of his body. He said the bar entered a “non-eloquent” area of the brain — an area that does not have a specific, major known function.
LIBYA
Bombs mar end of Ramadan
Twin car bomb blasts killed two people at dawn yesterday in the capital, security officials said, blaming loyalists of former leader Muammar Qaddafi for the attacks. Tripoli security chief Colonel Mahmud al-Sherif told media the bombs were detonated by remote control and struck near a military academy and the Ministry of the Interior. “They were two car bombs detonated by remote control,” Sherif said, adding that four people were also wounded. The attacks struck on the first day of the Muslim Eid al-Fitr festival that ends the fasting month of Ramadan. The first car bomb blew up at 6am near a military academy on Omar al-Mokhtar Avenue — a main Tripoli thoroughfare that was closed briefly to traffic — and the second near the interior ministry.
UNITED STATES
Obamas to visit Sikh victims
First Lady Michelle Obama will visit relatives of the victims of the Sikh temple shooting in Wisconsin on Thursday, a White House official said. Police blame the Aug. 5 shooting, which killed six people and wounded three, on Wade Michael Page, a 40-year-old former US Army specialist. Page, who killed himself with a gunshot wound to the head, was associated with neo-Nazi groups and the authorities are treating the incident as a case of domestic terrorism. President Barack Obama will visit the Milwaukee suburb of Oak Creek to “meet with immediate family of victims and immediate family of the seriously injured,” a White House official told media on Saturday. US investigators are yet to establish a motive for the killings, but they are looking into Page’s links with white supremacist groups.
UNITED STATES
New spider family found
A team of amateur cave explorers and arachnologists has found a new family of spiders in caves and old-growth redwood forests in Oregon and California, researchers said on Friday. Entomologists at the California Academy of Sciences said the spider, named Trogloaptor — or “cave robber” — for its lethal front claws, had such unique evolutionary features that it represented not just a new genus or species, but also a new family of spiders. The study, published in the journal ZooKeys, noted that finding a new, previously unknown family was rare. “If such a large and bizarre spider could have gone undetected for so long, who knows what else may lurk undiscovered in this remarkable part of the world,” the study added.
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