PHILIPPINES
Billiard hall blast kills three
The death toll from a bomb blast in a billiard hall near a crowded town carnival has risen to three, officials said yesterday. The death toll rose overnight after one of the wounded died in hospital, said Captain Jo-ann Petinglay, an army spokeswoman. Another 22 people were wounded in the blast. Mayor Joselito Pinol said two men left the bomb, which was apparently concealed in a bag, at the billiard hall late on Sunday in the town of Mlang in North Corabato province. The two men left hurriedly on a motorcycle before the blast happened. Pinol said bomb shrapnel and flying debris hit people in the billiard hall and at a nearby carnival. The blast damaged the billiard hall. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.
CHINA
Excrement fells building
A cesspool filled with excrement has exploded, injuring 15 people and knocking down a building, state-run media reported. The blast was apparently sparked by a local man burning waste close to the cesspool, igniting methane gas which was emanating from the pit, Xinhua news agency said late on Sunday. The incident in Zhangjiajie, in the central province of Hunan, caused a residential building to collapse and three of the injured had to be hospitalized, Xinhua said. China’s urban infrastructure has often been hastily built with little regard for safety as hundreds of millions of people have moved from the countryside to cities in recent decades. In another excrement-related incident, a man and his mother both died trying to retrieve his wife’s new mobile phone — worth 2,000 yuan (US$320) — from a septic tank, reports said in May. The man jumped in to try to locate the phone, but was overcome by fumes and passed out, according to Dahe, a Web portal run by the provincial government in Henan Province.
FRANCE
WWII bomb wreaks havoc
Three thousand people were evacuated from their homes in the center of Rennes on Sunday while a 250kg British bomb from World War II was being diffused. The bomb was found near the city’s town hall during the building of a new metro line in the capital of the Brittany region, Rennes Mayor Nathalie Appere said. She said it was packed with 70kg of high explosives and police bomb disposal experts faced a very “delicate operation” to disarm it. “They are having to diffuse it manually rather than with one of their radio-controlled devices,” she said. Police evacuated all homes and businesses within 270m of the scene just before 9am, including a fire station and 90 residents of a home for the elderly. Several hundred people were taken to a nearby hall, where volunteers offered them coffee and hot chocolate. Rennes, a major railway junction, was the target of several raids by Britain’s RAF during the war, including a major attack in 1944.
UNITED KINGDOM
Band Aid 30 grab No. 1 spot
Band Aid 30’s reworked version of Do They Know it’s Christmas, a song intended to raise money to fight the spread of Ebola in Africa, went straight to the top of the singles charts on Sunday, Official Charts Co said. The track was inspired by a celebrity song of the same name with different lyrics which was recorded in 1984 and raised millions to fight famine in Africa. The new song has drawn criticism from some Africans, who say it is patronizing and perpetuates unhelpful myths about the continent’s problems. The track’s organizers have strongly rejected those comments, saying it will raise much-needed funds to fight Ebola.
UNITED STATES
Zoo escapee hit by car
A bighorn sheep escaped from the Los Angeles Zoo at Griffith Park on Saturday and dashed around the hills in the park for hours before it ended up on a residential street where it was struck by a car and died, a zoo spokeswoman said. The sheep got free from its enclosure and darted through an area where visitors were gathered. It escaped the zoo, probably by jumping a fence, and scampered around the hills of the park, zoo spokeswoman April Spurlock said. The animal was struck by a car on a residential street near the Greek Theatre, she said. The concert venue is about 3.2km southwest of the zoo. Veterinarians and animal care staff set up a perimeter around the sheep and tranquilized it. The animal died a short time later, Spurlock said, and it appears the sheep succumbed to injuries from being hit by the car but a necropsy is planned to determine the exact cause of death. The car’s driver did not stop after hitting the bighorn.
UNITED STATES
Kitty traveler’s home found
An Albuquerque cat owner can sleep easier now that the kitten that went missing last month will be home for the holidays, despite a mysterious 3,701km side trip to Maine. Patsy Murphy, who runs an animal refuge center in Westbrook, Maine, said the kitten was brought to her shelter on Nov. 11 by a man who found it in a duffel bag while unloading furniture at a Catholic charity. The kitten was found inside the bag with food and kitty litter. Murphy said Maine resident Bob Watterson brought the kitten home on Nov. 5, and cared for it for six days before he turned it over to the animal refuge, which found a microchip in the cat that could identify it. Murphy was shocked when the cat was traced back to New Mexico, and it remained unknown exactly how the cat made its way to Maine. “We immediately contacted the owner to begin working on returning her the kitten,” Murphy said, adding that a Maine businessman offered to pay the cat’s transportation cost home. She said the cat would be sent home after it is treated for a respiratory infection, likely in about a week’s time.
UNITED STATES
Chestnut wins turkey eat
Competitive eater Joey Chestnut has won a turkey-eating contest in Connecticut, setting a record by devouring an entire bird. Ten contestants vied to see who could eat the most of a 9kg turkey in a competition on Saturday at Foxwoods Resort Casino in Mashantucket. Chestnut ate 4.24kg of meat off the bone in 10 minutes. According to Major League Eating, he bested the previous record, which was held by Sonya Thomas, who ate 2.38kg of turkey in November 2011. Chestnut, a San Jose, California, resident who turns 31 tomorrow, is ranked the top competitive eater in the world. Chestnut took home a US$5,000 check.
PERU
Sea lion deaths probed
Authorities are investigating the deaths of about 500 sea lions whose rotting corpses were found on a northern beach. Environmental police on Sunday told the official Andina news agency that the decomposing bodies of adult and juvenile sea lions were found on a beach in Santa Province about 400km north of Lima. Police are investigating a complaint from the governor of Samanco district, who said the sea mammals had been poisoned by marine farmers and fishermen who harvest shellfish. City workers hauled away the corpses, which risked posing a health hazard.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
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
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