CHINA
Eight die in elevator incident
Eight people were killed when the construction elevator they were in plummeted from an apartment building, a local government said yesterday. The Longkou city government in Shandong Province said on its official microblog that the elevator fell from the 18th story of the building under construction. Eight people who were in the elevator when it fell on Friday were immediately taken to hospitals, but none survived, the government said. Despite improvements in recent years, work safety remains a problem in the nation, where regulations are routinely ignored and cost-cutting by management often leads to accidents.
INDIA
Moonshine kills 17 workers
Seventeen laborers died and about a dozen are fighting for their lives after drinking toxic homemade liquor, police said yesterday, in the nation’s latest incident of alcohol poisoning. Police in Uttar Pradesh state’s Etah District said the victims started to vomit and fall sick, complaining of severe stomach aches and blurred vision, after consuming the moonshine late on Friday. “Seventeen people have died since [Friday] night and about 12 are still in the hospital, very ill,” a local police officer told reporters on the condition of anonymity. The officer said a local vendor was arrested late on Saturday after police registered a formal case against him for culpable homicide. “The vendor obviously mixed some chemical in the last batch ... police are investigating the matter,” he added. Hundreds of poor people die every year in the country due to alcohol poisoning, mostly from consuming cheap hooch.
JAPAN
Alleged refugee in custody
A man claiming to have escaped North Korea was being held under police protection after he was found wandering in a western city, local media reported yesterday. The man told police that he left North Korea by ship last week, public broadcaster NHK and the Asahi Shimbun said, without clarifying why he was on board. He then jumped off the boat and swam ashore in Yamaguchi Prefecture by holding onto a floating plastic container, the news reports said. The man, whose name was withheld, was found wandering in Nagato on Saturday morning and taken in by police, they added. Kyodo news agency quoted the man, wearing a black T-shirt and trousers, as saying he was born in 1990, but did not have anything to prove his identity. After questioning, police are to hand him over to immigration authorities to determine whether he is a North Korean defector who needs protection and assistance, Kyodo said.
SUDAN
Floods kill nine in Darfur
Heavy rains and flash floods in the war-torn region of Darfur on Saturday killed nine people, the official SUNA news agency reported. The deaths occurred in the town of al-Fashir, the capital of the state of North Darfur. “Heavy rains lashed the north and east parts of al-Fashir, causing floods in two rivers,” al-Fashir municipal commissioner Eltijani Abdullah Salah told SUNA. Salah said nine people drowned in the floods, including two from a camp for internally displaced people. UN aid agencies had warned of flooding in Sudan between this month and November. Darfur has seen violence since 2003, when ethnic minority rebels rose up against President Omar al-Bashir, accusing his Arab-dominated government of marginalizing the region, after which al-Bashir mounted a brutal counterinsurgency campaign.
COLOMBIA
Drug trafficker detained
Authorities, backed by Interpol, have captured a suspected leader of a major international drug-trafficking group who is sought by Brazil, police said on Saturday. Jose Esteyman Poveda, also known as “Provenzano,” was part of the so-called Gulf Clan, the criminal organization of Daniel Barrera, or “El Loco Barrera,” who was extradited to the US in 2013, they said. Members of a specialized national anti-narcotics unit carried out the operation with support from Interpol in the densely populated Lijaca neighborhood on the northern edge of Bogota. Poveda would be charged with narco-trafficking activities “as well as with international alliances [to traffickers] in Bolivia and Brazil and the control of cocaine-smuggling routes,” police said.
ISRAEL
Man nabbed with bombs
A Palestinian carrying pipe bombs in his bag was arrested yesterday and the explosives disarmed near a light rail tram station in downtown Jerusalem, police said. The suspect, a resident of Beit Ula near Hebron in the occupied West Bank, was standing behind a station carrying a bag when he raised the suspicion of a tram guard, police said. The guard examined the bag, saw what appeared to be bombs, and called the police.
FINLAND
Car auction a success
Customs officials say more than 100 mostly vintage Soviet cars abandoned by migrants crossing the nation’s border with Russia have been sold in a two-day auction that drew about 1,300 car aficionados to the Arctic. The government netted about 19,000 euros (US$20,969) for selling 129 cars, Salla customs unit spokesman Sampo Vaisanen said on Saturday. Many were rusty Soviet-era Ladas and Volgas from the 1970s and 1980s that had been left by migrants earlier this year after the government barred people from crossing the vehicles-only border point in Salla on bicycles for safety reasons. The highest price in the auction was paid for a rare Volga 3010 model, which sold for 1,200 euros to the Salla Municipality “as a souvenir,” county official Asko Viitanen said.
UNITED STATES
Disney World rehires intern
A Walt Disney World intern is back on the job after she was briefly fired for tweeting a photograph of a sign telling employees how to respond to questions about alligators in the theme park’s waters. The Orlando Sentinel reported that Shannon Sullivan was fired last week after posting the photograph. It told employees that if guests ask whether alligators live in the park’s waters, they should say: “Not that we know of… Please do not say that we have seen them before.” Sullivan told her bosses that it was misleading. Disney said the sign had not been authorized. A two-year-old boy was killed by an alligator at the park last month.
UNITED STATES
Card number is sex line
Some holders of Maine’s electronic benefits transfer cards find that dialing the telephone number on the back of the cards gets them a sex line, not their balances. A Maine Department of Health and Human Services spokesman told the Sun Journal that officials have been aware for months that the telephone number on some cards is off by one digit. Lj Langelier, of Lewiston, discovered the error last week when he went to check his bank card balance before going to the grocery store. What he got instead was a message welcoming him to “America’s hottest talk line.” The department plans to replace the misprinted cards.
SEEKING CHANGE: A hospital worker said she did not vote in previous elections, but ‘now I can see that maybe my vote can change the system and the country’ Voting closed yesterday across the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific nation’s first general election since the government switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing and struck a secret security pact that has raised fears of the Chinese navy gaining a foothold in the region. The Solomon Islands’ closer relationship with China and a troubled domestic economy weighed on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots. As many as 420,000 registered voters had their say across 50 national seats. For the first time, the national vote also coincided with elections for eight of the 10 local governments. Esther Maeluma cast her vote in 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
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