■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.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
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