UNITED KINGDOM
Welby to visit Holy Land
The leader of the world’s Anglicans is to make a five-day visit to Egypt, Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Territories from yesterday, Lambeth Palace said. It will be Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby’s, the spiritual leader of the Church of England first visit to the Holy Land since his enthronement in March. The trip comes after Welby visited Rome on June 14 and met with Pope Francis for the first time, amid efforts to reconcile Anglicans and Roman Catholics. “Archbishop Justin is making this trip early in his ministry because of the significance of the region, the importance of the relationships that his office has there, and because he is keenly aware of the particular pressures on the region at the moment — not least the devastating conflict in Syria, and its impact more widely,” Lambeth Palace said in a statement. In Jerusalem, he will visit the Western Wall, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Temple Mount, as well as the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. He will also meet with the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, patriarchs and church leaders. In Cairo, Welby will meet Coptic Pope Tawadros II and Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand imam of Al-Azhar, the top Sunni Muslim authority.
GERMANY
Crane falls, 13 hurt
Police say a crane carrying a panoramic cabin tipped over at a festival in Neuenstadt am Kocher on Saturday afternoon and hit a house, injuring 13 people. The cabin suspended from the crane had been set up for a festival organized by a local school. Police in nearby Heilbronn said in a statement that the cabin collapsed into the roof of a residential building. All eight adults and five children in the cabin were injured; two of the adults suffered serious injuries and were taken to hospitals by helicopter. No one in the house was hurt. It was not immediately clear what caused the crane to tip over.
FRANCE
Escaped pet lynx found
Police on Saturday said they have recovered a pet lynx that escaped from its Russian owners while they were vacationing in the jet-set haven of Saint-Tropez. “There’s a lot of extravagance here and you have to be innovative. Before, it was just a question of beautiful cars,” an officer told reporters. The 18kg feline disappeared from the luxurious rented premises in the residential area of Gassin on Friday. Authorities said the serval could get aggressive after spending a few days in the wild. Police on Saturday questioned its Russian owners to find out just how the lynx had been brought into the region.
SPAIN
Bus crash injures 38
An official says a bus has crashed near the eastern port city of Alicante, injuring 38 people, six of them seriously. The accident happened on a highway circling the city late on Saturday for reasons still under investigation. The official, who is with a regional branch of the Ministry of the Interior, requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record. Six seriously injured passengers were taken to two hospitals in Alicante, news agency Europa Press reported, citing ministry officials. The other 32 were treated at the scene of the accident. Europa Press quoted the Center for Emergency Information and Coordination for the region of Alicante as saying that the bus overturned, but that no other vehicles appear to have been involved.
BOLIVIA
Alcohol truck crash kills 10
Police say a tanker truck carrying alcohol on Friday collided with five cars and caught fire on a highway near the Peruvian border. Ten people are reported dead and 14 injured. Transit Police Colonel Dainer Zurita said the alcohol spilled from the truck and caught fire, burning 11 vehicles. Zurita said the truck driver may not have noticed that cars were stopped ahead of him as traffic was restricted to a single lane because revellers were occupying part of the road for a local holiday celebrating the new year 5,521 of the indigenous Andean calendar.
MEXICO
FBI tracked Carlos Fuentes
FBI documents show that the bureau and the US Department of State for more than two decades kept close track of author Carlos Fuentes, who was considered a communist and sympathizer of former Cuban president Fidel Castro. The documents posted on the FBI’s Web site last week show the US denied Fuentes an entry visa at least twice in the 1960s. In one of the memorandums Fuentes is described as “a leading Mexican communist writer.” The FBI files also show how over time, the bureau changed its views about Fuentes. Early on, the FBI highlighted his leftist tendencies, but in 1985 he is described as a prominent author and was given a visa to teach at Harvard University.
UNITED STATES
Sheriff appeals ruling
Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio is appealing a federal judge’s ruling that his office violated the constitutional rights of Latinos who were stopped during saturation patrols. Lawyers for Arpaio and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office filed a notice of appeal on Friday in a federal court in Phoenix. District Judge G Murray Snow last month said that Arpaio, who calls himself the country’s toughest sheriff, and his deputies had no authority to stop and detain people solely based on the suspicion that they were undocumented immigrants. Arpaio’s department covers Arizona’s biggest county by population, with 3.8 million residents. His tough methods have made him a hero to groups seeking a crackdown on illegal immigration.
UNITED STATES
WTC remains identified
Authorities retesting human remains recovered from the World Trade Center (WTC) site after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks have identified those of a 43-year-old woman. A spokeswoman for the New York City medical examiner’s office said the woman’s name will not be released at her family’s request. About 2,750 people died at the WTC in the attacks. Friday’s announcement brings the number of identified victims up to 1,636. The identification was made from remains collected before May 2002.
UNITED STATES
Kardashian, West name child
Kim Kardashian and Kanye West named their daughter North West, according to their Los Angeles County birth certificate. The baby was born at 5:34am on Saturday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. North is certainly not the first celebrity baby with an unorthodox name, plenty of which have set trends. “Brooklyn” may have seemed exotic when Victoria and David Beckham chose it in 1999, but last year it was the 29th most popular baby name in the country, the Social Security Administration said. Ashlee Simpson and Pete Wentz’s choice of another New York borough, Bronx, is less popular. “North” has not cracked the administration’s top 1,000 baby names over the past century, though “West” ranked 949 for boys in 1913.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At 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
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese