CHINA
Jilin bus fire kills 10
A fire on a crowded passenger bus in the northeastern city of Jilin yesterday killed at least 10 people and injured 17, the provincial government said on its microblog. The fire broke out early in the morning as the vehicle neared a highway entrance, it said. Reports said 43 people were aboard the bus. There was no immediate word on the cause of the fire.
INDONESIA
Arms depot blast kills one
One naval serviceman was killed and 87 people were injured yesterday when an explosion shattered a naval warehouse on a small island near Jakarta, military spokesman Iskandar Sitompul said. The blast was believed to have followed an electrical short-circuit in the building, which housed light ammunition, he said. The explosion blew apart the warehouse belonging to an elite naval combat force, spraying victims with shrapnel and pieces of wood and glass.
PAKISTAN
Lawyers threatened
Lawyers representing former president Pervez Musharraf in a treason case yesterday said they had been threatened with beheading and called for a new venue for the trial. Lawyer Ahmad Raza Kasuri said the defense team feared for its safety, after a suicide attack on a lower court complex in Islamabad on Monday left 11 dead. “We cannot go ahead with this case in these conditions,” he said, before reading aloud from a threatening letter he said the team had received. The handwritten letter said: “Dear Sirs, we request that the three of you stop representing Musharraf otherwise we will destroy your children and behead all of you... He is an infidel, hypocrite and you should stop representing him or be prepared for war.” It was signed by the “people of South and North Waziristan.”
AUSTRALIA
Extensions for Ukrainians
The government has offered temporary refuge to visiting Ukrainians due to soon return to their country. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop yesterday told parliament that Ukrainians could apply for visa extensions to stay temporarily “while their nation is under threat.” The government did not say how long visas would be extended, nor did it immediately provide figures on how many Ukrainians might be eligible to extend their stays.
AUSTRALIA
Warship rescues Iranians
A warship has rescued 13 Iranians shipwrecked off Pakistan on its way to the Middle East to join an international force conducting counter-terrorist and anti-piracy operations, officials said yesterday. HMAS Darwin came across the men, some elderly, on Saturday in calm seas after their boat was reportedly struck by an unknown vessel and sank. They claimed to have been adrift for five days. Images showed six of them crowded into a small blue dingy while three were perched on debris and the other four sitting inside large plastic containers that would have been swamped in rough conditions. It was not clear if they were taken aboard the Darwin, with defense officials saying only that the ship stayed with the fishermen until a Pakistani vessel, MSS Nusrat, arrived and took them to shore.
VATICAN CITY
Pope offended by hype
Pope Francis says he finds the hype that is increasingly surrounding him “offensive.” In an interview with Italian daily Corriere della Sera, Francis said he does not appreciate the myth-making that has seen him depicted as a “Superpope” who sneaks out at night to feed the poor.
TURKEY
President announces probe
President Abdullah Gul on Tuesday ordered a probe into wiretapping and the government’s ability to fight corruption amid a widening graft scandal that has rocked Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s administration. Gul ordered the top auditing body, the State Auditing Board, to investigate rules surrounding the wiretapping of communications to “assess their compliance with the law.” The move comes after audio tapes emerged last week of Erdogan and his son allegedly discussing how to hide large sums of money on Dec. 17. Erdogan has dismissed the recordings as a “vile montage” by his rivals and accused prosecutors and police of spying for another country.
UNITED STATES
Gas blast kills one
A gas leak and explosion in a New Jersey neighborhood killed one person and injured seven workers on Tuesday while destroying 10 homes and damaging 45 others, authorities said. The body of a woman was found on a car near the site of an explosion in a housing development. Police were waiting for the results of an autopsy for positive identification of the person, Lieutenant Ron Lunetta said. Officials did not know whether the woman lived at the development. Police said the blast happened on Tuesday after a gas line was damaged by contractors who were digging in the area. At least 10 town homes were destroyed in the Trenton suburb of Ewing and 45 others damaged.
UNITED STATES
‘Times’ prints correction
The New York Times has printed a correction for misspelling 161 years ago the name of a black man who was sold into slavery and whose memoirs were turned into the Oscar-winning movie 12 Years a Slave.” In a Jan. 20, 1853, article, the Times misspelled Solomon Northup’s surname as Northrop and as Northrup. The Times corrected Northup’s name on Tuesday, after the errors were pointed out by someone looking at its archives. The correction said the article about Northup had “misspelled his surname as Northrop. And the headline misspelled it as Northrup.”
CANADA
Payment prompts apology
Defence Minister Rob Nicholson apologized on Tuesday after the mother of a soldier who committed suicide in 2011 received a C$0.01 (US$0.01) check for “release pay” — three years after her son’s death. He blamed an “insensitive bureaucratic screw up” for the “absolutely ridiculous” decision to send the payment to the family of 22-year-old Justin Stark. “I will take steps immediately to ensure that something like this should never happen again,” Nicholson said. Stark took his own life in 2011 after returning to Canada following a seven-month deployment to Afghanistan.
UNITED KINGDOM
Parliament to be film set
Britain’s House of Commons is to open its doors to a commercial film crew for the first time next month in a bid to raise cash, welcoming Meryl Streep for a movie about the suffragettes, officials said on Tuesday. The Oscar-winning actress is to appear alongside Carey Mulligan and Helena Bonham Carter in the British film Suffragette, the fictional tale of one woman’s fight for the right to vote. Parliamentary authorities decided last year to try to boost their coffers by renting out parts of the Palace of Westminster when lawmakers are not sitting, although crews will not be allowed to film in the debating chamber.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of