GUATEMALA
Voters head to polls
More than 8 million people were eligible to vote yesterday as former first lady Sandra Torres and opinion poll frontrunner Alejandro Giammattei bid to succeed President Jimmy Morales. Both candidates have failed in previous bids for the presidency. The center-left Torres, whose ex-husband Alvaro Colom was president from 2008-2012, has been suspected of involvement in corruption before. Giammattei, a 63-year-old conservative, has been branded by investigative Web site Nomada as “impulsive ... despotic, tyrannical ... capricious, vindictive.”
GERMANY
Some Amazon funds halted
The government is to partially suspend funds sent to Brazil to finance projects aimed at preserving the Amazon forest due to increasing deforestation, Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo reported on Saturday. The decision reflects “great concerns with an increasing deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon,” the German embassy told the newspaper, adding that the cut does not affect the Amazon Fund, to which Germany is a key donor. Deforestation in the Brazil’s rainforest surged 67 percent in the first seven months of the year, according to Brazil’s space research agency, though the government has claimed the data are unreliable and misleading.
CANADA
Gondola’s cable rope cut
Dozens of cable cars of the Squamish Sea-to-Sky Gondola in Squamish, British Columbia, crashed into a forested hillside after a vandal attack severed overhead wires before dawn on Saturday, police and operators said. Thirty cabins fell to the ground when the 2km haul rope was cut. “We believe that the cable has been cut and this is a deliberate act of vandalism,” Royal Canadian Mounted Police Inspector Kara Triance told reporters. A major tourist attraction, the route can carry up to 240 people at a time and offers views of fjords on the Pacific Coast. The facility will be closed for the “foreseeable future,” operators said. Police said no one was injured and asked for information from nearby hikers and campers who might have witnessed the incident.
UNITED KINGDOM
PM vows more prison spots
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is promising more prisons and stronger police powers in an effort to fight violent crime. The government yesterday announced plans to create 10,000 more prison places to ease overcrowding and said it would allow police to stop and search people without reasonable suspicion “if serious violence is anticipated.” Labour Party law-and-order spokeswoman Diane Abbott said it was “a tried-and-tested recipe for unrest, not violence reduction.”
UNITED KINGDOM
UKIP elects new leader
The UK Independence Party (UKIP), which was instrumental in bringing about the 2016 referendum to leave the EU, but has since become almost irrelevant, on Saturday elected a new leader, the sixth in the past three years. Richard Braine replaces Gerard Batten, who stepped down in June after support plummeted amid accusations that he had taken the anti-EU party in a far-right direction.
MEXICO
Failure limits bank actions
Problems at a Mexico City data-processing center caused widespread failure across the nation’s banking system on Saturday, with companies and consumers reporting a spike in declined payments and transactions. The issue was tied to Prosa, an electronic payments firm.
MYANMAR
Troops deployed amid floods
Troops deployed to flood-hit parts of the country yesterday to help with relief efforts after rising waters left thousands stranded and the death toll from a landslide jumped to 51. Hundreds of emergency response workers yesterday were still pulling bodies out of the muddy wreckage in Paung township in southeaster Mon state, where a landslide on Friday was followed by heavy flooding that reached the roofs of houses and the tops of street signs in nearby towns. Heavy rains pounded other parts of Mon, Karen and Kachin states, flooding roads, destroying bridges and forcing people to flee by boat. “Our regional military commands are working to help with the search and rescue process in disaster areas,” Brigadier General Zaw Min Tun told reporters. “Helicopters will be used to supply food.”
INDIA
Floods kill more than 100
The army, navy and air force joined rescue efforts as floodwaters in western and southern states claimed more than 100 lives and displaced more than 400,000 in floods and mudslides following days of torrential rains. The weather office said the intensity of rainfall over the southern states of Kerala and Karnataka was likely to wane from yesterday. Kerala accounted for 57 deaths due to rising water and resultant landslides, according to a tweet from Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. Karnataka also saw 26 people losing their lives, with Karnataka Chief Minister B.S. Yediyurappa terming the natural calamity the “biggest” in 45 years, local media reported.
CHINA
Lekima causes landslide
Typhoon Lekima left at least 28 people dead in the southeast, including more than 20 who perished after a landslide backed up a river that then inundated homes, the Xinhua news agency reported yesterday, while another 20 people remained unaccounted for in Zhejiang Province. More than 1 million people were evacuated before the storm struck, including 253,000 in Shanghai. Lekima, downgraded to a tropical storm, was heading slowly northward along the east coast yesterday.
AUSTRALIA
Lawmaker links China, Nazis
A split has opened in ruling Liberal-National coalition over a lawmaker’s comparison of the rise of China to that of Nazi Germany. Conservative federal lawmaker Andrew Hastie, a former special-forces soldier, wrote an opinion piece on Thursday for Channel 9 newspapers comparing the rise of China as an unnoticed existential threat to that of Nazi Germany, prompting a mixed reaction from colleagues and swift condemnation from Beijing. He is the chair of parliament’s intelligence and security committee, which is privy to classified information. His column outlined the dangers of not comprehending China’s ideological motivation for building ports and roads, and said that the West had wrongly calculated that economic liberalization in China would lead to democratization.
LIBYA
Blast kills UN workers
A bomb-laden vehicle exploded on Saturday outside a shopping mall in Benghazi, killing at least three UN staff members, a spokesman for the UN secretary-general said. Health officials said the blast took place outside Arkan Mall in the Hawari neighborhood. The Benghazi municipal council said the attack targeted a convoy for the UN Support Mission in Libya and the site of the attack was close to offices of the UN mission.
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
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
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of