VANUATU
Cyclone kills at least three
Three people were killed and six missing after a cyclone hit the Pacific island, officials said yesterday. Tropical Cyclone Lusi swept across the country this week and damage assessments were still coming in from remote areas, the National Disaster Management Office said. Office director Shadrack Welegtabit said three deaths had been confirmed and a search was underway for six missing women and children. “A search and rescue team was deployed yesterday [on Thursday] and we are now waiting to hear from them,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. Lusi has since traveled south and was losing intensity yesterday as it approached New Zealand.
SRI LANKA
Aussies denied hangman job
Two Australians have applied in vain for the nation’s hangman job after the island nation’s last official executioner got upset on seeing the gallows for the first time and quit. “Two Australians have sent e-mails to one of our departments saying that they are interested,” commissioner general of prisons Chandrarathna Pallegama said on Thursday. “One is a system administrator and the other had not mentioned the job he is doing,” he said. “We have not called the applications, moreover we do not have any provisions to recruit foreigners.” Pallegama said on Tuesday the last hangman, who was third most qualified among 176 applicants for the job, quit after getting upset at seeing the gallows. Two hangmen chosen late last year failed to show up for work.
JAPAN
Police arrest ‘diary vandal’
A man was arrested yesterday on suspicion of vandalizing copies of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl in Tokyo libraries, police said. More than 300 copies of the diary, or publications containing biographies of Anne Frank, Nazi persecution of Jews and related material had been torn at many public libraries. Police yesterday did not identify the suspect, whom they said has admitted to the vandalism. Authorities often refrain from naming a suspect when there are questions over the individual’s mental competence. “The suspect is a 36-year-old unemployed man who lives in Tokyo,” the Tokyo metropolitan police department said.
JAPAN
Earthquake injures 17
A strong magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck off the southern coast early yesterday, injuring 17 people, reports said, as officials warned residents to be alert to the danger of landslides. There was no tsunami warning or reports of major damage. Public broadcaster NHK said 17 people were injured. None of the injuries seemed to be life-threatening. The epicenter of the quake — which struck at 2:06am — was located 13km north of the city of Kunisaki, the US Geological Survey said. The quake hit at a depth of 82km.
ISRAEL
Gaza truce holding
A truce declared by Gaza militants appeared to be holding yesterday with the military reporting no fresh rocket fire during the night after two days of tit-for-tat violence. “It’s all quiet, there has been no fire overnight,” an army spokesman said at 8am. The radical Islamic Jihad group announced on Thursday that an Egyptian-brokered truce on the Israel-Gaza border had been restored after warplanes pounded the territory in response to a barrage of rocket fire by its militants.
UNITED STATES
NYC death toll rises to eight
Rescuers scouring the rubble of two Manhattan apartment buildings leveled in a gas explosion found the body of an eighth victim on Thursday, nearly 36 hours after the disaster. An unspecified number of people remain missing after Wednesday’s building collapse in East Harlem. The New York Police Department said that five women and three men were killed, and 68 others injured in the incident.
UNITED STATES
Man dies — for real
A coroner says a 78-year-old Mississippi man has died two weeks after he woke up in a body bag at a funeral home after being mistakenly pronounced dead. Coroner Dexter Howard says Walter Williams died at his home early on Thursday. The cause was not released. Williams was first pronounced dead on Feb. 26 at a hospice. Workers at Porter and Sons Funeral Home in Lexington were getting ready to embalm him when Williams started to move. He was rushed to a hospital and he was released a few days later. Williams, a father of 11 with six great-grandchildren, said he had merely fallen into a deep sleep, but family members felt God had given him extra time for a reason. “Well, they came and got him again around 4:15am,” said Williams’ nephew, Eddie Hester, quoted by Jackson television station WAPT, on Thursday. “I think he’s gone this time.”
MEXICO
Militia leader indicted
One of the main leaders of the civilian armed movement that formed to drive a drug cartel out of Michoacan state was charged on Thursday with the murder of two members of a rival vigilante group. State prosecutor Jose Martin Godoy said investigators had found enough evidence to link Hipolito Mora to the killings of two men whose bodies were discovered in the back of a burned pickup truck last weekend. The “self-defense” groups had a falling out and fractured into two factions in the town of La Ruana when Mora had a dispute over leadership with Luis Antonio Torres Gonzalez, another vigilante leader. The two dead men were allies of Torres Gonzalez. Prosecutors said witnesses testified that Mora had threatened to kill one of the men for opposing the way he wanted to collect money to run the vigilante uprising.
ITALY
Ex-Berlusconi aide arrested
Police on Thursday arrested Federica Gagliardi, a woman who acted as former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s secretary at two international summits in Canada in 2010, on suspicion of smuggling 24kg of cocaine on a flight from Venezuela. Gagliardi, who is in her early 30s, was taken into custody at Fiumicino-Leonardo da Vinci International Airport in Rome shortly after arriving on a flight from Caracas after police found the drugs in her carry-on luggage, a finance police spokesman said. Officials provided no further details.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
‘DELUSIONAL’: Targeting the families of Hamas’ leaders would not push the group to change its position or to give up its demands for Palestinians, Ismail Haniyeh said Israeli aircraft on Wednesday killed three sons of Hamas’ top political leader in the Gaza Strip, striking high-stakes targets at a time when Israel is holding delicate ceasefire negotiations with the militant group. Hamas said four of the leader’s grandchildren were also killed. Ismail Haniyeh’s sons are among the highest-profile figures to be killed in the war so far. Israel said they were Hamas operatives, and Haniyeh accused Israel of acting in “the spirit of revenge and murder.” The deaths threatened to strain the internationally mediated ceasefire talks, which appeared to gain steam in recent days even as the sides remain far
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The