SOLOMON ISLANDS
Flash floods claim 23 lives
The death toll from flash floods climbed to 23 yesterday, officials said, as aid agencies scrambled to distribute supplies to thousands left homeless by the disaster. Health kits were being handed out to 10,000 people sheltering in evacuation centers in the capital, Honiara, in a bid to prevent disease outbreaks, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said. As many as 40 people are still missing in the Pacific island city after the Matanikau burst its banks on Thursday last week following days of heavy rain, creating a torrent of water that swept away entire communities. Three military cargo planes filled with humanitarian supplies have arrived from New Zealand and Australia this week and OCHA said more aid was beginning to arrive now that Honiara’s main airport had reopened. New Zealand Foreign Minister Murray McCully announced a further NZ$1.2 million (US$1 million) in aid funding, bringing the country’s total contribution to NZ$1.5 million.
KENYA
Diplomat appears in court
A Venezuelan diplomat reappeared briefly in court on Monday on charges of killing his country’s ambassador in July 2012, although the case was adjourned until early June. Former Venezuelan former first secretary to Kenya Dwight Sagaray is charged alongside several other accused. Proceedings have been delayed because not all of the co-accused had lawyers, although a High Court judge ruled the trial would get under way from June 3 now that all of the accused had lawyers. Then-acting Venezuelan ambassador Olga Fonseca, 57, was strangled to death at her residence on July 26, 2012, less than two weeks after arriving in the country to head the diplomatic mission. Local media said her hands and feet had been tied. The motives for Fonseca’s killing remain mysterious, but a former embassy guard testified in December last year that the mission smuggled drugs through its diplomatic pouch.
GERMANY
Oldest message delivered
A message in a bottle tossed in the sea in Germany 101 years ago, believed to be the world’s oldest, has been presented to the sender’s granddaughter, a museum said on Monday. A fisherman pulled the beer bottle with the scribbled message out of the Baltic off the northern city of Kiel last month, Holger von Neuhoff of the International Maritime Museum in Hamburg said. “This is certainly the first time such an old message in a bottle has been found, particularly with the bottle intact,” he said. Researchers then set to work identifying the author and managed to track down his 62-year-old granddaughter, Angela Erdmann, who lives in Berlin. “It was almost unbelievable,” Erdmann told German news agency DPA. She was first able to hold the bottle last week. Inside was a message on a postcard requesting the finder to return it to his home address in Berlin. “That was a pretty moving moment,” Erdmann said. “Tears rolled down my cheeks.”
UNITED KINGDOM
Peaches Geldof dies at 25
Model and media personality Peaches Geldof, the second daughter of Irish singer Bob Geldof and the member of a talented, troubled family who grew up in the glare of Britain’s tabloid press, was found dead on Monday aged 25. There was no immediate word on the cause of Geldof’s death at her home in Wrotham, southeast England, but police called it “unexplained and sudden.” In a family statement, Bob Geldof said: “Peaches has died. We are beyond pain.”
UNITED STATES
FTC seeks to bar Jerk site
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) says the operators of a Web site called Jerk.com are the ones behaving badly. The commission on Monday said the Web site harvested personal information from Facebook to create profiles labeling people a “Jerk” or “not a Jerk.” Jerk allegedly charged consumers US$25 to e-mail its customer service department. Consumers were then told they could pay US$30 to revise the online profile, but got nothing in return. The site also made consumers believe the content had been created by other users, not the company. The commission estimates that Jerk LLC, the Boston-area-based parent company behind the site, and John Fanning, its operator, created profiles for more than 73 million people — including children — between 2009 and last year. Attempts to contact Fanning were unsuccessful, and his attorney could not be reached for comment on Monday. The commission is seeking an order that would bar the company from such deceptive practices, prohibit it from using improperly obtained personal information and require it to delete the information. A hearing is scheduled to begin in January next year. Facebook could not be reached immediately for comment on the site.
HONDURAS
Cruise ship worker killed
A Filipino crewman of a cruise ship was shot to death on Sunday during a port call at the Caribbean resort island of Roatan, the government said on Monday. The victim was identified as Gavan Yaycob, 27, the Tourism Institute said. It said Yaycob was from a cruise ship that had tied up on Sunday. It did not identify the ship or detail the circumstances surrounding the murder.
COLOMBIA
Acid attacks spark ban
The government plans to regulate the sale of acids following a spate of recent attacks that have shocked the country. “We have to analyze how to control the sale of such substances so that citizens aren’t exposed to irrational and reckless individuals,” Minister of Defense Juan Carlos Pinzon said in a statement. Earlier this month, a 23-year-old woman was hit in the face during an acid attack. On Sunday, another woman was admitted to a hospital in Bogota with burns to the neck, back, buttocks and legs. Also on Sunday, suspects in yet another attack — captured on a surveillance camera — were detained and face up to 18 years in prison if convicted. President Juan Manuel Santos has denounced the attacks — which have seriously burned and disfigured victims — as “a truly atrocious and deplorable crime.” Raising the penalties for such offenses is also on the table. Since 2004, authorities have recorded more than 1,000 acid attacks, according to the medical examiner’s office.
CHILE
Woman kills, cooks partner
A woman killed her partner before dismembering his body and cooking the remains after she accused him of stealing about US$9,000 from her, police said on Monday. Roxana Valdes, 39, shot Carlos Ramirez, 44, in the chest after a heated argument at their home in Molina, about 200km south of Santiago, on Saturday. In an attempt to conceal the killing, she chopped up her partner’s body with a kitchen knife and cooked the pieces in a pot before dumping the remains in nylon bags at a public landfill in Molina, authorities said. Valdes turned herself in to the police and confessed to the crime.
‘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