China
Acid leak kills at least three
A sulphuric acid leak at a warehouse in the northeast has killed at least three people. Xinhua news agency said yesterday that the leak spread into areas surrounding Fangshen village in Liao-ning Province, preventing rescuers from approaching the area. It was not exactly clear when the leak occurred, and Xinhua said authorities were still trying to verify the number of dead. Xinhua said the 2,000m3 of sulphuric acid leaked from a storehouse used by a family business. It did not give a cause for the accident, and local government officials reached by phone said they had no information.
United States
Disappearances investigated
The government said it is looking into reports that three Laotian-Americans have gone missing in southern Laos. According to relatives, the Minnesota residents went missing in early January in Savannakhet Province on their way to a funeral. The State Department said the embassy in Vientiane had contacted the Laotian government for further information. Three bodies were recently found in a burned van in the province, and Khammanh Kongdaravong, the wife of one of the missing men, said relatives in Laos have identified her husband, Souli, as one of the dead. The circumstances in which the van caught fire are unclear.
Australia
Gay pride celebrates past
Up to 300,000 spectators were yesterday expected to brave the rain to watch the annual Mardi Gras gay pride parade, with an emphasis on the political as the nation prepares for elections. The event, which bills itself as the world’s biggest night parade, is celebrating the theme “Generations of Love,” focused on its origins in 1978 as a gay rights protest march that ended with violence and arrests. Some of the original activists, known as the “78ers,” will take pride of place at the beginning of the parade, behind the traditional “Dykes on Bikes” motorcade which officially starts the colorful, often irreverent march. About 10,000 revellers on 115 individual floats will make the journey down Oxford Street, hub of Sydney’s gay and lesbian nightlife, in a vibrant show featuring drag queens, political parodies and plenty of sparkle.
UNITED NATIONS
War crimes film debuts
A documentary purporting to show the execution of civilians and other war crimes committed by the Sri Lankan army had its first public screening on Friday, but was swiftly rejected by the Sri Lankan government as part of an “orchestrated campaign” against it. The documentary No Fire Zone: The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka is the third by British journalist and director Callum Macrae about the final stages of the nearly 30-year civil war. “We see it as a film of record, but also a call to action,” Macrae told a news briefing. Tens of thousands of civilians were killed in 2009 in the final months the war, a UN panel has said, as government troops advanced on the northern tip of the island controlled by Tamil rebels fighting for an independent homeland. The film depicts scenes from the territory held by the Tamil Tiger rebels just before their defeat in May 2009. In the so-called “No Fire Zone” declared by the army, rights groups say soldiers killed thousands of Tamil civilians by heavy shelling and massacres yet perpetrators have gone unpunished. Sri Lanka’s government last week formally protested against the film’s screening on UN premises on the sidelines of the Human Rights Council.
UNITED STATES
Argentina told to clarify offer
A US appeals court in New York has told Argentina to spell out its offer to settle a suit by holders of defaulted bonds that Buenos Aires brands “vultures,” court documents showed on Friday. However, Argentine President Cristina Fernandez insisted that while the country was willing to repay its debts, it would not grant the funds better terms than those agreed upon in past restructurings. Argentina’s lawyer suggested in a hearing on Wednesday that the government was willing to repay the debt via an unstated formula different from what the bondholders were demanding. The court therefore ordered Argentina to submit in writing the “precise terms of any alternative payment formula and schedule to which [the country] is prepared to commit” by March 29. Argentina defaulted on some US$100 billion in debt in 2001, and has since restructured its debt twice, covering around 75 percent of the nominal value of the bonds.
UNITED STATES
Detroit faces takover
Michigan Governor Rick Snyder prepared for a state takeover of Detroit, an epitome of urban decay, by declaring the Motor City in a state of financial emergency on Friday. “Detroit can’t wait,” Snyder said at a televised town hall meeting. “We need to solve real issues here today because citizens are not getting the services they need and we have a financial crisis.” The move by a white, Republican governor to take control of a predominantly black and Democratic city has drawn intense criticism and charges of racism. Detroit needs a partner, not an “overseer,” Reverend Wendell Anthony, who heads the Detroit chapter of civil rights group NAACP, said this week. Several city council members have vowed to block the move, but supporters of the takeover say it is the only way to tackle Detroit’s seemingly intractable problems.
UNITED STATES
Dog’s death unexplained
The owner of a fluffy white contestant in New York’s prestigious Westminster Dog Show is claiming foul play in the poisoning death of her beloved pooch. The three-year-old Samoyed named Cruz died from possible rat poison four days after competing in his first Westminster show, the notoriously competitive canine beauty contest held each February in Manhattan. “We full-heartedly believe that he was intentionally poisoned,” handler Robert Chaffin said on ABC television on Friday. Owner Lynette Blue, a veteran of dog contests, told ABC that animal rights activists — who say the Westminster show encourages cruel beauty treatments for the animals — may have slipped him poison. Either that, or someone within the competition. “It’s always possible — he was a top-winning dog, so it’s always possible, those things have happened — that other people in the dog show world try to knock out top competition ... You just don’t know,” Blue told ABC.
UNITED STATES
Fat cat seeks home
At 16kg, Biscuit the cat is about the right weight for a four-year-old — human, that is. A US animal shelter is trying to find him a new home. Biscuit’s first owner was a disabled woman who fed him lots of treats. Now he is roughly three times the weight of a healthy adult cat and is restricted to about a cup of diet food per day. His owner brought him in about a year ago because she could no longer care for him, Teresa Gilley, the shelter’s lead animal control officer, told the St Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper. “She didn’t mean the cat any harm,” Gilley said. “I just think she didn’t know any better.”
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