■CHINA
Explosion kills five
An explosion and fire killed at least five people, left two missing and injured more than 100 at a chemical plant in central Henan Province yesterday, state media said. The blast ripped through the plant owned by the Luoran chemical dye company in Luoyang city in the early hours yesterday, killing five night shift workers, Xinhua news agency reported. Two other night shift workers remained missing, while more than 100 local residents were injured, most of them apparently suffering from smoke inhalation.
■HONG KONG
Senior begins jail term
An 81-year-old man has begun a two-year jail term for the attempted rape of his family’s maid, a news report said yesterday. Wong Pak-sum, who was jailed after a High Court hearing on Tuesday, is believed to be the oldest man to be convicted of the offense in the former British colony. He assaulted the 36-year-old maid after being left alone with her in the family’s flat in Hong Kong’s Tai Po district in October.
■HONG KONG
Street level air worsens
Street-level air pollution in the busiest districts has soared over the past four years, official data has shown, despite a government campaign to curb vehicle emissions. The government recorded a total of 1,066 hours of “very high” air pollution, equal to more than 44 days, in three main city districts in the first half of this year — a six-fold jump compared to the same period in 2005. The number of such hours recorded above street level in the same districts however dropped by more than half over the same period, the data showed. A change in wind direction and the closure of factories could account for the improvement.
■NEW ZEALAND
7.8 quake rocks Fiordland
The most powerful earthquake to hit the country in 78 years rocked southern regions yesterday, but there were no immediate reports of casualties or major damage. Seismologists of the official GNS Science organisation put the quake at 7.8 on the Richter scale. It was followed by an aftershock measuring 6.1. The quake was centred off the coast 100km southwest of the lakeside resort town Te Anau in Fiordland, but GNS Science said it was felt more than 1,400km away in the North Island’s Taranaki Province. With a focal depth of 12km below the surface, it shook items off the shelves of supermarkets in Queenstown, toppled ornaments and cracked walls and cut power supplies in several towns.
■SOUTH KOREA
UK named in Web attacks
A Vietnamese computer security firm believes Britain was the likely origin of last week’s cyber attacks that crippled major US and South Korean Web sites, Seoul officials said yesterday. The Korea Communications Commission said the information came from Vietnamese firm Bach Khoa Internetwork Security. “The [British] server appears to have controlled compromised handler servers” which spread viruses, said Park Cheol-soon, a network protection team leader of the commission. “However, it needs more investigation to confirm whether this server was the final attacker server or not.”
■UNITED KINGDOM
Nurse guilty of ‘golf rage’
A golfer who beat a fellow player around the head with an eight-iron after an outbreak of “golf rage” was jailed for nine months on Tuesday. Harold Stafford, 54, a psychiatric nurse, launched the attack on Barry Barnes after accusing him of striking his ball at a golf course in Bedfordshire, England. During his trial at Luton crown court, Stafford claimed that he had acted in self-defense after Barnes, also 54, racially abused him. Barnes was left with bruising to his eyes, as well as cuts and bruises to his chest, back and arms.
■AUSTRALIA
Snipers protect penguins
The government has posted snipers to protect endangered penguins in Sydney after a spate of attacks, the National Parks and Wildlife Service said on Tuesday. The service has deployed its own marksmen as well as infrared cameras and traps after nine penguins were mauled to death by dogs or foxes in bushland to the city’s north. The marksmen are patrolling Sydney’s North Head national park at night while officials have also planted traps in a bid to stop the killings.
■CHINA
Ex-Sinopec boss sentenced
The former head of oil giant Sinopec, Chen Tonghai (陳同海), was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve yesterday in a corruption case involving millions of dollars, the People’s Daily reported. A Beijing intermediate court handed down the sentence after finding Chen guilty of graft amounting to 195.7 million yuan (US$28.8 million), the paper said. Chen was also convicted of illegally appropriating funds from projects and land transfers. The two-year reprieve means that Chen’s sentence will be commuted to life in prison if he commits no further crime while in jail.
■FRANCE
Gang robs Cartier shop
Masked thieves dressed in Hawaiian shirts pulled off a brazen robbery at the Cartier jewelry shop in Cannes on Monday morning that could have netted the gang as much as US$21 million. The raid lasted less than one minute.
■SOMALIA
Frenchmen kidnapped
Two French security advisers on a mission to train Somali forces have been kidnapped at a hotel where they had checked in as journalists, officials and witnesses said. About 10 gunmen arrived at the Sahafi Hotel in Mogadishu on Tuesday in a small car and a truck mounted with machine guns before several of the men disarmed the guards and stormed inside, said Abdi Mohamed Ahmed, a witness who runs a tea shop nearby. Gunmen then knocked on the door where the Frenchmen were staying and kidnapped them, hotel manager Mohamed Hassan Gafaa said. The French Foreign Ministry released a statement saying the men were security consultants.
■UNITED STATES
Sleepy crew discharged
The Air Force discharged three North Dakota ballistic missile crew members who fell asleep while holding classified launch code devices, the military announced on Tuesday. Officials said the codes were outdated and remained secure at all times. The crew members were discharged last Thursday under orders from Air Force Secretary Michael Donley, said spokeswoman Laurie Arellano. They had been barred from working around nuclear weapons and classified material since the incident on July 12 last year, she said. The crew members were coming off a shift at a missile alert facility about 113km from Minot Air Force Base when they fell asleep in a secure crew rest area, Arellano said. The crew had with them code components — classified devices that allow them to communicate with missiles.
■MEXICO
Gang shoots mayor dead
An armed gang shot dead a mayor, capping a vicious 48-hour period that has seen 30 people killed, including 12 police officers in the west of the country, officials said on Tuesday. Hector Ariel Meixueiro, who was mayor of Namiquipa near the US border, was shot multiple times after being accosted on Tuesday morning by at least 15 men carrying assault rifles, the state prosecutors office said. Earlier on Tuesday, a spokesman for the Public Security Ministry said the bodies of 12 federal police officers were found along a road in the western state of Michoacan. The 11 men and one woman had been undertaking investigative work in the area.
■ITALY
Bouquet brings plane down
A wedding in the Tuscan countryside ended with injuries after an attempt to launch the bride’s bouquet from an ultralight plane brought down the aircraft. Police say two people were hurt in the crash after the bridal bouquet they launched got caught in the rear rotor. Police in the nearby town of Piombino said on Tuesday the pilot was lightly injured, while the passenger who threw the bouquet had several broken bones. The bride and groom were not aboard the plane.
■UNITED STATES
Democrats win House seat
Democrat Judy Chu (趙美心) easily claimed a vacant House seat on Tuesday in a Los Angeles-area district, reinforcing the Democratic majority in Congress. The former state Assembly member will become Southern California’s only Asian-American in Congress. She will be sworn in today, giving Democrats a 256-178 edge over Republicans in the House. With 173 of 209 precincts reporting on Tuesday night, Chu had 62 percent of the vote. She was trailed by her cousin by marriage, Republican Betty Chu (趙美生).
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
Prime ministers, presidents and royalty on Saturday descended on Cairo to attend the spectacle-laden inauguration of a sprawling new museum built near the pyramids to house one of the world’s richest collections of antiquities. The inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum, or GEM, marks the end of a two-decade construction effort hampered by the Arab Spring uprisings, the COVID-19 pandemic and wars in neighboring countries. “We’ve all dreamed of this project and whether it would really come true,” Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told a news conference, calling the museum a “gift from Egypt to the whole world from a
RSS