■CHINA
Storm death toll rises
The number of people killed as a result of massive downpours in the southwest — many buried in landslides — has risen to 43, and another 47 are missing, state media reported yesterday. Rains that have pounded Yunnan Province and the neighboring Guangxi region have caused a series of landslides, affecting nearly 1 million people, the official China Daily reported. At least 35 people were killed in Yunnan and eight died in Guangxi, according to the newspaper. More rain is expected to hit the southwest part of the country in the coming days.
■CHINA
Officials to resolve taxi strike
Authorities in the southwest have agreed to resolve some of the complaints behind a violent strike by taxi drivers angered by high fees and fuel shortages, state media reported yesterday. The local government in Chongqing, the nation’s fourth-largest city, will review how earnings are divided between taxi companies and drivers, who have complained they are being gouged, the official Xinhua news agency said. Municipal authorities will also boost the daily supply of natural gas on which most taxis run and crack down on fee-dodging unlicensed drivers, Xinhua said. Shortages of fuel have forced drivers to waste hours each day lining up to fill their tanks, further cutting into earnings.
■SOUTH KOREA
Fighter jets collide in midair
Two fighter jets collided in midair during a training exercise yesterday, causing one to crash and four missiles to fall to the ground, the air force said. The missiles did not explode. The pilot of the crashed jet ejected safely before it went down in a rice paddy in Pocheon, 46km north of Seoul, the air force said in a statement. The other jet returned safely to its base, although it was not clear how much damage it sustained in the collision. Four air-to-air missiles that were loaded on the two F-5E jets were dropped on the ground as a result of the collision but did not go off.
■MALAYSIA
Endangered eggs seized
Marine police say they have seized 10,000 endangered turtle eggs believed to be from the Philippines. Muhammad Sallam Spawi, an officer in Sabah state on Borneo island, says police surprised four smugglers as they were unloading bags of eggs on Sunday. Muhammad Sallam says the men, who were speaking Tagalog, managed to flee in their boat. He said yesterday the seizure was “the biggest ever” in Sabah. Abdul Karim Dakog, an officer with the state wildlife department, says the department hopes the eggs, from the endangered green and Hawksbill turtles, may still hatch in a conservation area.
■UNITED STATES
Earthquake relief offered
The government on Monday offered an extra US$1.5 million in relief for victims of the earthquake in southwest Pakistan, raising the total figure to US$2.5 million. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) “is providing an additional US$1.5 million in emergency assistance in the aftermath of last week’s earthquake in Baluchistan province,” a statement said. “This brings the total USAID emergency assistance package to US$2.5 million to date,” USAID said. US$1 million is being distributed via the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). “The ICRC is providing emergency assistance, including emergency health care, shelter, relief commodities, and water and sanitation interventions, for earthquake-affected populations,” it said.
■ ITALY
Man ‘beaten’ by clergy
A man has claimed he was beaten up by two 83-year-old nuns and a priest in a row over the ownership of a restaurant in Rutino, Campania. Aniello Esposito, 49, told police he arrived at the restaurant to find the three throwing furniture into the street and smashing plates. When he tried to intervene the priest knocked him to the ground with a chair and the two nuns began to kick him, he claimed. A lawyer representing the nuns, Gaetano Di Vietri, denied his clients had attacked Esposito. The mother superior of the local convent said on Monday the premises were owned by the convent and had been occupied illegally by Esposito.
■ITALY
Mussolini body thief dies
A right-wing activist and politician who stole the corpse of dictator Benito Mussolini more than a half century ago has died, his son said on Monday. Domenico Leccisi, 88, died on Sunday at a retirement home in Milan after a battle with heart and respiratory problems, his son Gabriele said. In 1946, Leccisi and two other Italians marked the first anniversary of the death of “Il Duce” by digging up Mussolini’s body at night from an unmarked grave in a Milan cemetery. The theft sparked a nationwide manhunt for the group. The three entrusted the body to two monks who buried it at a monastery near the northern city. Authorities located the remains there and returned them to the family years later for burial in Mussolini’s birthplace.
■FRANCE
Writers defend Kundera
Nearly a dozen major writers, four of them Nobel laureates, issued a call of support on Monday for author Milan Kundera and denounced claims published by a Czech weekly that he once informed on a Western spy. “The honor of one of the greatest living novelists has been tarnished on dubious grounds, to say the least,” said a statement accompanying the 11 signatures, which include Nobel laureates JM Coetzee, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nadine Gordimer and Orhan Pamuk. On Oct. 13, the Respekt weekly published an article reporting that a team of historians had found a Czech Communist police document identifying Kundera as having informed in 1950 on Miroslav Dvoracek, who served 14 years in prison after being uncovered as a spy. Kundera, now 79, denied the charge.
■SUDAN
Former president dies
Former president Ahmed al-Mirghani has died at the age of 67 in Egypt, family friends said on Monday. Al-Mirghani, who died late on Sunday, was removed from power 19 years ago by the military coup that brought the current regime to power. He came from a prominent Sudanese family that heads a Sufi Muslim sect in Sudan which traces its lineage back to the Prophet Mohammed. The cause of death was not immediately known. A close friend of the Mirghanis, Ali Ahmed al-Said, said the body was to be flown back to Khartoum yesterday for burial.
■ZAMBIA
Sata contests Banda’s win
Opposition leader Michael Sata rejected again yesterday ruling party Rupiah Banda’s victory in last week’s presidential byelection, setting the stage for a protracted political stand-off. “I have not lost this election,” Sata, 71, told South Africa’s SAfm radio. “Rupiah Banda has no vision, Rupiah Banda has no platform. The only platform Rupiah Banda is on is cheating.” Sata’s Patriotic Front planned to turn to the courts yesterday to challenge Banda’s slight edge over the populist opposition leader in Thursday’s vote.
■UNITED STATES
Tests prove Fossett’s fate
Genetic tests on two bones found near the wreckage of Steve Fossett’s airplane in the California mountains confirm the missing multimillionaire adventurer is dead, local authorities said on Monday. “A California Department of Justice Forensics lab has determined that items containing DNA — discovered last week — match James Stephen Fossett’s DNA,” the Madera County, California, sheriff-coroner’s office said in a statement. Office spokeswoman Erica Stuart said the match of the DNA in the bones discovered last Wednesday brings her office’s investigation to an end.
■UNITED STATES
Court convicts propagandist
A propagandist for Osama bin Laden was convicted on three charges of war crimes on Monday at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, a Yemeni, will immediately begin serving his prison term at the naval base, the Pentagon said after announcing the sentence. Pentagon prosecutors argued that al-Bahlul, about 40 years old, made videos designed to boost al-Qaeda recruitment and incite suicide bombings, the report said. He was found guilty of conspiracy, providing material support for terrorism and soliciting murder. Al-Bahlul refused to mount a defense, saying he could only be tried under Islamic Sharia law, the Miami Herald reported.
■MEXICO
State police chief killed
Gunmen killed a state police chief in the border city of Nogales and three police detectives in Guanajuato State, as a wave of drug-related violence batters Mexican security forces, authorities said on Monday. In Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, authorities on Monday found the bullet-riddled bodies of six men in a vegetable warehouse along with more than 100 shell casings from assault rifles. The bodies of three other men were found in a sport utility vehicle on a Tijuana street on Sunday. On Sunday night, Sonora state police chief Juan Manuel Pavon Felix was shot dead as he entered a hotel with his bodyguard and other officers, a statement from the state investigative police office said. In Guanajuato, the state attorney general reported that gunmen killed three state police detectives on Monday. In another attack in the same state, one detective was killed and another wounded.
■UNITED STATES
Yma Sumac dies at 86
Legendary soprano Yma Sumac, the “Peruvian Songbird who dazzled music lovers in the 1950s and 60s with her incredible range, died at an assisted living facility in Los Angeles,” her Web site said on Monday. She was 86. “It is with deep sadness, that we report that Yma Sumac passed away at 11am on Saturday, Nov. 1. It was peaceful. Those closest to her were at her side,” the Web site said. The Los Angeles Times said Sumac, who had lived in Los Angeles for the past 60 years, died of cancer.
■VENEZUELA
Lapi ineligible for office
A popular opposition politician accused of corruption who escaped from jail last year and fled to Peru cannot run for re-election as governor of the Venezuelan state of Yaracuy, the country’s top court ruled on Monday. The decision opens the way for an ally of President Hugo Chavez to win a tightly contested election for governor of the small farming state. Lapi vowed to continue his election bid despite the ruling. “I want Hugo Chavez to know — they will have to shoot me in the head to stop me fighting for democracy,” he told television station Globovision by telephone.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
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