■AUSTRALIA
Oil spill spreading
One of the world’s last great areas of wilderness has been massively contaminated by a spill from a damaged oil rig off the north coast, conservationists said last week. Millions of liters of oil have leaked into the Timor Sea, famed for its coral reefs and home to dolphins, humpback whales and other marine life. The slick, which has already spread over an area 10 times the size of London, continues to expand at the rate of 2,000 barrels of oil a day. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of birds and animals have died since Aug. 21, when there was an accident at the well head of the Montara offshore drilling rig. A survey by the World Wildlife Fund found that dolphins, migratory sea birds, sea snakes and marine turtles had been exposed to toxins. Satellite images show a 25,000km² slick spreading across the surface of the ocean and threatening the marine reserves of Ashmore and Cartier reefs.
■MALAYSIA
Man arrested for murder
Police arrested a man suspected of killing his wife and possibly blinding his teenage daughter by splashing acid on them while they slept, an official said yesterday. The man is believed to have crept into his wife’s separate bedroom early on Saturday and poured a bottle of acid over the two, who were in the same bed, a district police official in Penang state said. Neighbors rushed them to a hospital after the 17-year-old daughter ran out screaming, the official said on condition of anonymity. The man later turned himself in. The wife died, while her daughter suffered burns on her face and would probably lose her sight, the Bernama news agency reported.
■INDONESIA
Quake causes panic
A powerful earthquake struck deep under the sea in the east, causing panic and sending residents running out of their homes, officials and witnesses said. There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The earthquake late on Saturday had a magnitude of 7.0, but at a depth of 138km was too far below the earth’s surface to cause a tsunami, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said. The US Geological Survey said the latest quake was located 365km southeast of Ambon in the Maluku islands in the Banda Sea. The shaking was strong and people ran to higher ground fearing a tsunami, said Ian Kotualubun, an official with the Meteorology and Geophysics Agency in Saumlaki.
■SOUTH KOREA
Power unit running again
A power generation unit at a nuclear power plant has resumed operations after a one-day shutdown because of technical problems, Yonhap news agency reported. The unit, one of six at the Younggwang plant, was shut down late on Friday and resumed operations late on Saturday, Yonhap said. Another unit is under repair at the plant, which is operated by Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co and will remain suspended until Sunday, Yonhap said. Officials at Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power could not be reached for comment.
■JAPAN
Fishing boat missing
A fishing boat with eight crew members was missing yesterday in the Pacific after losing radio contact with other boats, the Coast Guard said yesterday. The 19 tonne Kofuku Maru No. 1 was 300km south of Tokyo when it last communicated with the fleet on Saturday. The Coast Guard has sent patrol boats and helicopters to search for the vessel. The fishing boat had planned to return the Shimoda port in Shizuoka Prefecture yesterday.
■UNITED STATES
Pilots’ licenses at risk
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said on Saturday that it might suspend the licenses of the two pilots of Northwest Flight 188 who flew 240km past their Minneapolis destination on Wednesday evening — remaining out of contact for nearly 90 minutes — while air traffic controllers repeatedly tried to reach them. Air traffic control centers from Denver to Minneapolis tried numerous times to reach the pilots by radio, e-mail, data text and cellphone before a flight attendant was finally able to contact the pilots, and they turned the plane around and landed it safely. A FAA spokeswoman said the agency had sent “letters of investigation” to Captain Timothy Cheney, and the first officer, Richard Cole, notifying them that the incident could lead to the emergency revocation or suspensions of their licenses within days. The two pilots have been suspended by Delta Airlines, which merged with Northwest last year and operates its flights.
■UNITED STATES
Town beads together
A record-setting strand of beads has helped the city of East Providence, Rhode Island, put its recent financial woes behind it, at least for a night. On Friday, the city smashed the Guinness world record for longest strand of beads with a 411.45m string of red and white beads. The previous record was 108.2m, set in February in the UK. Patti Streit led the effort by the East Providence Education Foundation. She told the Providence Journal it was a much-needed “fun, positive” moment. The city has been plagued by budget problems, police and fire layoffs and teacher disputes.
■ISRAEL
Police, worshippers clash
Police and Arab worshippers clashed near Jerusalem’s flashpoint al-Aqsa mosque in the Old City yesterday and several people were arrested, a police spokesman and Palestinian officials said. The clashes came amid rising tensions in the past weeks over the area known to Jews as Temple Mount and to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif, site of the mosque and the Dome of the Rock, one of Islam’s holiest sites. Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said youths threw stones and a gasoline bomb at police on patrol near the mosque. He said 12 arrests were made. Palestinian officials said police had closed off the compound to visitors, leaving hundreds of worshippers inside.
■SAUDI ARABIA
Flu deaths shut two schools
The government shut two schools in Qassim Province northwest of Riyadh after two students died from swine flu, the Arab News reported yesterday. The deaths took the country’s toll from A(H1N1) virus to 39, the daily said. The government has intensified its watch for swine flu outbreaks amid concern the disease could spread among some 2 million foreign visitors arriving over the next month for the annual hajj pilgrimage.
■CANADA
Tamil man released
The government is to release one of 76 Tamils arrested last week in a ship off its Pacific coast, local media reported on Saturday. The decision came after a custody hearing, lawyer Narinder Kang told the Globe and Mail newspaper. The released man was ordered to report regularly to authorities, Kang said. Federal police detained the 76 men on Friday, after the navy seized the Ocean Lady freighter off the west coast. The move came after it emerged a 26-year-old man is being sought by Sri Lankan authorities for an unspecified terror offense.
‘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
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