AUSTRALIA
Second missing hiker found
A second person missing in the outback for two weeks after going hiking has been found near Alice Springs, police said yesterday. Phu Tran, 40, was found by a farmer at a cattle station near Alice Springs. He survived soaring temperatures by drinking water meant for livestock, and was basically in good condition, although slightly disoriented, police said. Tran was found three days after his friend Tamra McBeath-Riley was found. The third member of the group, Claire Hockridge, is still missing.
SRI LANKA
Parliament suspension set
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has suspended parliament for a month ahead of snap elections he wants to call in March to consolidate his landslide victory in last month’s presidential elections. He issued a proclamation overnight proroguing the legislature and said a new session would begin from Jan. 3. The official announcement of a fresh session of the legislature will give his minority government more control over parliamentary oversight committees.
JAPAN
Nuisance calls bring arrest
A pensioner has been arrested after ringing a telephone company 24,000 times to complain they had violated his contract, Tokyo police and media reported yesterday. Akitoshi Okamoto, 71, was taken into custody last week after he made hundreds of toll-free calls over eight days to KDDI’s customer service section. However, media outlets reported that he made thousands more calls from public pay phones to voice his displeasure with the company and insult customer service staff. He has been arrested on suspicion of “fraudulent obstruction of business,” a police spokesman said.
INDIA
NASA spots crashed lander
NASA has found the Vikram lander that crashed in September while attempting to land near the moon’s south pole. The agency released images showing an impact site and debris from the lander, which disappeared with a rover minutes before a scheduled touchdown that would have made the country just the fourth nation to achieve a soft landing on the moon. Local mechanical engineer Shanmuga Subramanian contacted NASA after studying images of the site released by its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera team on Sept. 26. He identified the debris and the team confirmed the finding after checking images acquired in the following months, NASA said.
ZIMBABWE
WFP sending food aid
The UN World Food Programme (WFP) yesterday announced it was procuring 240,000 tonnes of food assistance to deliver to 4.1 million people in the nation, where food shortages are being exacerbated by runaway inflation and drought induced by climate change. “We are very much concerned as the situation continues to deteriorate,” WFP country director Eddie Rowe said in Harare. “We believe if we do not reach out and assist these people then the situation would blow up into a major crisis.”
ZIMBABWE
Mugabe’s estate listed
Former president Robert Mugabe left behind US$10 million in the bank and four houses in the capital, but there is no will naming his beneficiaries, a list of his estate published by state-owned Herald newspaper showed yesterday. The list included a farm, 10 cars and 11 hectares of land and the orchard where he is buried, but does not mention any overseas assets.
RUSSIA
Blogger registration passed
President Vladimir Putin yesterday signed a bill into law that gives the government the right to register bloggers, journalists and social media users as foreign agents. The law can apply to anyone who distributes content produced by media firms registered as foreign agents and receives payments from abroad. Individuals registered as foreign agents will be subject to additional government scrutiny.
RUSSIA
Murder charge recommended
Investigators yesterday said that two sisters who killed their father after years of abuse should face murder charges. Three sisters — Krestina, Angelina and Maria Khachaturyan — stabbed their father, Mikhail, to death in July last year after years of alleged beatings and sexual assault. They were 17, 18 and 19 at the time of the killing. The Investigate Committee said in a statement that it was recommending charges of murder and conspiracy to commit murder against the two older sisters, Krestina and Angelina. The probe pointed to “mitigating circumstances,” but said the two older sisters were of sound mind and aware of their actions at the time of the attack. They face up to 20 years in prison if convicted. Investigators recommended that the youngest sister, Maria, should enter mandatory psychiatric care.
UNITED STATES
Word of year announced
Climate change, gun violence, the very nature of democracy and an angsty little movie star called Forky helped propel “existential” to Dictionary.com’s word of the year. “In our data, it speaks to this sense of grappling with our survival, both literally and figuratively, that defined so much of the discourse,” John Kelly, senior research editor for the site, said on Monday. The word earned awareness in searches on the Web site in the aftermath of wildfires and Hurricane Dorian, and mass shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso, Texas. It also reared itself in presidential politics and pop culture, including Forky the white plastic spork in Toy Story 4. Oxford Dictionaries picked “climate emergency” as its word of the year.
UNITED STATES
PG&E blamed for fire
California power producer PG&E Corp did not properly inspect and replace transmission lines before a faulty wire sparked a wildfire that killed more than 80 people last year, a probe by a state regulator has concluded. The Caribou-Palermo transmission line was identified as the cause of the Camp Fire last year, which virtually incinerated the northern town of Paradise and stands as the state’s most lethal blaze. “PG&E failed to maintain an effective inspection and maintenance program to identify and correct hazardous conditions on its transmission lines ... as are necessary to promote the safety and health of its patrons and the public,” a 700-page report by the California Public Utilities Commission said.
FRANCE
Drone postal deliveries start
La Poste’s subsidiary DPD has begun using drones to make parcel deliveries to a remote Alpine village. DPD says flying packages by remote control is more reliable, quicker and safer than driving a van up narrow mountain roads in winter when they are often icy or blocked by snow. Launched during a normal postal delivery round, drones are guided to a “secure terminal” near the village where they release the package to be collected by the customer using a code.
‘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
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
RIVER TRAGEDY: Local fishers and residents helped rescue people after the vessel capsized, while motorbike taxis evacuated some of the injured At least 58 people going to a funeral died after their overloaded river boat capsized in the Central African Republic’s (CAR) capital, Bangui, the head of civil protection said on Saturday. “We were able to extract 58 lifeless bodies,” Thomas Djimasse told Radio Guira. “We don’t know the total number of people who are underwater. According to witnesses and videos on social media, the wooden boat was carrying more than 300 people — some standing and others perched on wooden structures — when it sank on the Mpoko River on Friday. The vessel was heading to the funeral of a village chief in