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.
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
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was
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