JAPAN
Man falls from balloon
An elderly man plunged to his death in a lake after falling out of a hot air balloon, police said yesterday. Takuo Hayasaka, 70, was thrown from the basket when the balloon suddenly lost altitude over Lake Yanaka on Sunday morning. Two other people aboard, a 46-year-old woman and a 68-year-old man, were uninjured. The survivors told police their balloon briefly touched the surface of the lake before regaining altitude. They said their companion had tipped out of the basket before it started ascending again, a police officer said. All three were licensed balloon pilots, but none was wearing a life jacket, Jiji Press reported. The man’s body was found in the lake five hours later. The cause of his death was not immediately known.
NORTH KOREA
Fortress on UNESCO list
The remains of a fortress that once surrounded Kaesong, the ancient capital of the Koryo Dynasty, are among sites that made it onto UNESCO’s World Heritage list on Sunday. Pyongyang’s bid to have the sites added to the list was approved at a UNESCO meeting in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Twelve sites in the North that were added include the ruins of the Manwoldae Palace; a 1,000-year-old academy that was the top school during that era; relics housed at a museum at the school; and the mausoleum of King Kongmin.
AUSTRALIA
Fugitive caught after 15 years
A British man who killed his aunt by stabbing her 70 times and who has been on the run for 15 years after escaping from prison in England has been arrested, reports said yesterday. Simon Hennessey spent 20 years in jail for brutally killing his elderly aunt, but walked out of a low-security jail in December 1998. At the time, he was serving a life sentence for killing the woman in her home in Plymouth when he was 14. Queensland State police told the Sunshine Coast Daily that the 49-year-old was picked up by chance in the town of Tewantin and at first had given them a false name. They were stunned to discover their mystery prisoner was Hennessey. “We believe he has moved between Thailand, New Zealand and Australia. It looks like he has been coming and going from Australia since about 2003,” Detective Senior Sergeant Daren Edwards told the newspaper. Queensland police have now charged the 49-year-old with a string of 75 fraud charges, including two counts of falsely representing himself as someone else, 38 counts of obtaining the property of another and seven counts of forging documents.
MALAYSIA
Protesters detained
Police yesterday detained at least two dozen people protesting alleged election fraud as parliament convened for the first time since divisive polls last month. About 300 people, clad mostly in the black color of a post-election protest campaign, demonstrated on a road leading to parliament in Kuala Lumpur, calling for a reballoting. Police, backed up by a dozen riot officers armed with shields, batons and tear gas, moved in after several hours.
FIJI
Airline restricts shark fins
National carrier Air Pacific announced yesterday it will no longer carry shark fins that come from unsustainable or unverified sources. The airline said it had carried out a month-long review of its freight policies and decided to only accept shark products from sustainable sources that did not involve threatened species.
SPAIN
Baby rescued from pipe
A woman has been arrested for attempted murder after her two-day old baby was discovered inside a building’s drains in Alicante and painstakingly rescued by firefighters, police said on Sunday. “A neighbor alerted the fire service that they could hear meowing coming from a waste water pipe, thinking that it was a cat that had become trapped,” police in Alicante said in a statement. However the firefighters and police discovered instead “the cries of a new born-baby and immediately proceeded to dislodge and save the child ... who still had the umbilical cord attached” and was wrapped in plastic bags, police said. The baby, a boy weighing 2.1kg, was taken to a local hospital in serious condition, but his life is not in danger,” the statement said. After saving the boy, police arrested a 26-year-old woman, who lives in the building, for attempted murder.
QATAR
Emir to meet with royals
The emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, was expected to meet members of the royal family yesterday, with officials and diplomats saying a transfer of power to his son, Crown Prince Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, is imminent. Diplomats and officials agree that the emir is preparing to hand over control of the oil-rich emirate, which plays a key role in the Arab world. The 61-year-old emir came to power in 1995 in a palace coup against his father.
ALBANIA
Shootout clouds elections
A shootout that killed an opposition activist cast a shadow over the nation’s crucial general election on Sunday, with both sides claiming victory in a vote that could determine whether one of Europe’s poorest countries has a chance of joining the EU. In the absence of preliminary results, the ruling coalition of outgoing Prime Minister Sali Berisha and his rival Socialist leader Edi Rama both told supporters they had won. The Socialists based their claims on the exit poll released by a private TV station which said that Rama’s coalition was leading the vote. Fears of violence were high after a 53-year-old activist in Rama’s coalition was killed in a shootout in the northern town of Lac.
URUGUAY
Abortion referendum aborted
A national vote on whether to call a referendum to repeal a law legalizing abortion failed to garner enough support, according to results on Sunday. With more than 95 percent of precincts counted, just 8.65 percent of the total eligible to vote, or 226,653 people, were in favor of holding the mooted referendum, the electoral court reported. In October last year, President Jose Mugica signed a bill making his country only the second in mainly Catholic South America to legalize abortion.
LEBANON
Soldiers killed in clashes
At least 12 soldiers have been killed in less than 24 hours of clashes with supporters of a radical Sunni cleric in the southern city of Sidon, a military spokesman said yesterday. The fighting intensified yesterday, witnesses and the National News Agency reported, a day after the violence began, when supporters of Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir opened fire on an army checkpoint. The clashes are linked to the ongoing violence in Syria. Witnesses said gunfire and the sound of shelling had increased in the early hours of yesterday morning in the Abra neighborhood on the eastern outskirts of Sidon, where the fighting is now concentrated.
‘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