Sat, Jul 12, 2003 page5

• World news quick take

  • • 
    • 
    • 

  ■China
  

  Floods worsen in Anhui

  More than a million people in eastern China were isolated due to floods and rain-fed landslides which have already claimed over 200 lives nationwide since early last month, and more heavy rain was forecast, officials and state media said yesterday. More deaths were reported

  in eastern Anhui province. Along the Huai River, rising floodwaters and mudslides have killed 16 people and stranded more than a million, said Wang Xintao, a disaster relief official at the provincial Civil Affairs Bureau. Heavy rain was also on tap for a wide stretch of south-central China along the flood-prone Yangtze River, Xinhua said, citing area meteorologists.

  ■ Thailand

  Man gets revenge on dogs

  A Thai street vendor who confessed to fatally poisoning 48 dogs living in a Buddhist temple because they stole his lunch has been fined US$20, a Thai newspaper reported yesterday. Warayuth Songslip, a vegetable seller at a Bangkok market, told police he left five bowls of poisoned chicken for the dogs after six of them tried to steal barbecued chicken he had bought for lunch and bit him in the ensuing struggle, the Nation newspaper reported. Warayuth, who was charged with cruelty to animals, was further angered when Buddhist monks said they would not be held responsible because the temple was only sheltering the dogs and did not own them.

  ■ Hong Kong

  Double-decker deaths probed

  Investigators suspect panicky passengers might have caused a double-decker bus to topple and plunge off a bridge after it collided with a container truck, killing 21 people and injuring 20, a newspaper reported yesterday. The bus, which was traveling in a slow lane, teetered for a moment on the edge of the bridge after colliding with the truck traveling in the same direction, the South China Morning Post reported. Some passengers were thrown out of the bus and others were trapped inside the wreckage as it then fell. ``The bus seesawed for a second. Passengers might have panicked and moved to the front so they could get out. It might be that was why it plunged,'' an unidentified government source was quoted as telling the Post.

  ■ Hong Kong

  Politician apologizes

  A pro-government politician has apologized for making an obscene gesture at protesters who gathered around Hong Kong's legislature, a news report said yesterday. Philip Wong was photographed sticking his middle finger up and grinning as he was driven through a 50,000-strong crowd protesting against a proposed national security law outside Hong Kong's legislative council building on Wednesday evening. Wong, quoted by yesterday's South China Morning Post, apologized for the gesture which he said was in response to a young person in the crowd outside the minibus he was traveling in raising his middle finger at him.

  ■ Singapore

  Bra record stretched

  A chain of 79,001 used and unwanted bras stretching over 60km has made it into the Guinness Book of World Records, it was reported yesterday. The bras were pinned together and laid out at a parking lot on Singapore's resort island of Sentosa last December. Organizers of

  the event told the newspaper Today that their effort had been accepted by Guinness as a new record. Named

  "Bras for a Cause," the attempt was partly organized by the Breast Cancer Foundation "to raise awareness for breast cancer as well as funds."

  ■Europe
  

  HIV/AIDS epidemic looms

  An HIV/AIDS epidemic threatens to hit southeastern Europe, the World Bank warned in a report focussing on Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania on Thursday. A rapid increase in HIV-infection was driven by rising poverty, unemployment and social change, worsening health and educational services and increased drug use and prostitution, the report said. Romania has reported 12,559 HIV infections by the middle of last year. Bulgaria has recorded just 366 HIV cases since 1987, and Croatia's official figure was 341 in late 2001.

  ■ United States

  Wrong house demolished

  Jenny Lopez's home in Phoenix is a pile of rubble after a demolition crew mistakenly tore down the wrong house. The house that was supposed to be demolished Wednesday was across the street from Lopez's, where she had lived for 30 years. It was vacant, boarded up and fenced in. One of Lopez's old neighbors spotted the heavy construction equipment in her yard and alerted family members. But when they arrived, the house had already been torn down. Demolition man David Gomez declined to comment about the incident but told a television station that he would probably lose his job.

  ■ Peru

  Brain surgery with pliers

  Lacking the proper instruments, a Peruvian doctor at a state hospital in the Andean highlands used a drill and pliers to perform brain surgery on a man who had been injured in a fight, the doctor said on Thursday. "We have no [neurosurgical] instruments at the hospital. He was dying, so I had no choice but to run to a hardware store to buy a drill and use the pliers that I fix my car with, of course after sterilizing them," Cesar Venero said in a telephone interview. The patient, Centeno Quispe, 47, had arrived at the hospital in Andahuaylas, 400km southeast of Lima, after being hit in the head with a metal object in a street fight, Venero said.

  ■ Germany

  Brothel for jobless woman

  A Berlin job center unwittingly offered an unemployed woman work in a brothel. "The advert just said they were looking for someone to work in a massage parlour, we weren't to know it was a brothel," said a spokesman for the government-run agency in Berlin's central Mitte district on Thursday. Rage, rather than embarrassment was the response of the 25-year-old woman to the offer, who has been looking for work without success since April in Germany's cash-strapped capital. "It really is a bit much if the job center assumes that the best thing is for you to try your luck in a whorehouse," she told Tageszeitung newspaper.

  ■ The Netherlands

  Python slithers out of toilet

  A pet python missing over the last two months made its reappearance by scaring a Dutch woman when it slithered out of her toilet bowl. The constrictor snake, which kills its prey by coiling around it and squeezing, had been on the loose for more than two months after breaking out of its terrarium in a town near the port city of Rotterdam, Dutch news agency ANP said on Thursday. As police and vets came to catch the two-metre long fugitive python, it slid under a bathtub that they had to demolish to capture it. The snake was returned to its owner.

  Agencies
• Most Popular

  • 1

    Taiwan ships first pomeloes to Malaysia

  • 2

    Taiwan to surpass S Korea wealth

  • 3

    Land and sea warnings issued for Typhoon Ragasa

  • 4

    Floods swamp Hualien, hundreds trapped

  • 5

    CWA expects land, sea warnings for Typhoon Ragasa