■CHINA
Quake kills one in Sichuan
A moderate earthquake struck the southwestern part of the country on Saturday, killing one person, injuring at least 11 others and collapsing some homes, the government said. The quake measuring 5.0 on the Richter scale struck Sichuan Province at 5:36am, with its epicenter near the city of Suining, the Sichuan earthquake authority said. The US Geological Survey rated the quake at magnitude 5.2. State TV showed pictures of single-story homes that had collapsed into rubble. The reports indicated that dozens of homes were damaged or collapsed but did not give a precise figure.
■LIBYA
Russia to sell weapons
Tripoli struck a deal to buy Russian arms worth almost US$2 billion, Russian news agencies quoted Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as saying on Saturday. “Yesterday [Friday], a contract worth 1.3 billion euros [US$1.8 billion] was signed. It does not only involve firearms,” Putin was quoted as saying by Ria Novosti and Interfax. Putin was speaking following a meeting with the head of the Izhmash factory, which manufactures Kalashnikov rifles. Russian officials said last week that negotiations were underway with Libyan Defense Minister Younes Jaber in Moscow over the sale of Russian weapons. Putin did not specify the type of arms or military equipment involved in the deal.
■BULGARIA
Stray dogs kill zoo animals
The director of Sofia’s zoo said a pack of stray dogs killed 13 of its animals. Zoo director Ivan Ivanov said an unknown number of dogs leapt through a fence and attacked eight mouflon, four fallow deer and a doe. Ivanov said on Saturday the incident occurred last week and was the most serious in the zoo’s recent history. He said freezing temperatures and hunger had driven the dogs. Two fallow deer and one mouflon managed to escape and survived before security guards intervened. The dogs also escaped. Ivanov said that new animals of the same species have been already transported to Sofia. The zoo is the largest in the country, with 1,310 animals of 274 different species.
■IRAN
Two men hanged for rape
Criticized by rights groups for its use of capital punishment, Tehran hanged two men on Saturday for rape, a local news agency reported “The two accused were hanged today at Evin prison with blue ropes around their necks so as to serve as a lesson for all aggressors,” Fars news agency quoted the head of Tehran criminal affairs court Fakhreddin Jafarzadeh as saying. Fars said the rape was committed last year. Murder, adultery, rape, armed robbery, drug trafficking and apostasy — the renouncing of religion — are all punishable by death under Shariah.
■GERMANY
Three killed in snow chaos
Heavy snow and high winds have caused traffic chaos, leaving three people dead and dozens more injured. Police say one person was killed and more than 40 injured in more than 300 accidents on Friday night and Saturday in the northwestern state of North Rhine-Wesphalia alone. Two other people were killed in separate accidents on slick roads in the southern state of Bavaria. The winter weather caused long traffic jams on many highways, the closure of others, and flight delays and cancellations. In the northern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania all public transit was shut down in the city of Rostock as the area was hit with 30cm of new snow overnight and high winds.
■UNITED STATES
Film editor killed in chase
An award-winning film editor has been struck and killed by a getaway car speeding from a New York City drugstore robbery. Police identified the woman as 39-year-old Karen Schmeer. Her mother, Eleanor DuBois Schmeer, confirmed the film editor’s death. Schmeer was the editor of Academy Award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris’ documentaries, including Fog of War. Morris wrote on his Twitter feed that Schmeer’s death was a “senseless tragedy.” She was crossing a street on the Upper West Side on Friday night when she was struck by a car fleeing a CVS drugstore where police say three men had stolen over-the-counter medication. She was pronounced dead at St Luke’s Hospital. Lieutenant John Grimpel said the driver of the getaway car has been arrested on a murder charge.
■COLOMBIA
Dogs sniff cocaine cookies
Sniffer dogs smelled something that was just not right: cocaine-stuffed cookies that were about to be shipped to Barcelona, police said on Saturday. A total of 5kg of the drug were concealed in 10 packs of cookies, counternarcotics police said in a statement. Not your average bisciut, “the cream was taken out of the cookies and replaced with compressed bleached cocaine to avoid suspicion from counternarcotics units,” it said. The South American nation is the world’s biggest producer of cocaine, with about 430 tonnes last year — around half of global production — the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said. Spain is one of the top ports of entry for drugs to be smuggled in Europe, including hashish from North Africa and cocaine from Latin America.
■PERU
Twenty killed in flooding
Heavy flooding that trapped thousands of tourists visiting the Inca city of Machu Picchu has killed 20 and left at least five missing, the Civil Defense force said on Saturday. Thousands of others have been affected by heavy rains, the worst to hit the country in five years. In the Cusco region, the downpours prompted landslides that trapped 3,500 visitors in and around the picturesque mountaintop tourist site of Machu Picchu. Authorities used 12 helicopters and 40 pilots over four days to evacuate all the travelers trapped near the site, Latin America’s top tourist destination. The evacuation of all visitors ended late on Friday. “The good news is that Machu Picchu, along with all the ancient sites, is intact,” said Carlos Millas, president of the chamber of commerce in Cusco, a region heavily dependent on the income from visiting tourists. But the railway that ferries 90 percent of the 1,000 people that visit Machu Picchu each day to the site was damaged in the floods, and Peru Rail warned that repairs could take up to two months.
■UNITED STATES
Dog carver shoots himself
Stephen Huneck, an internationally known artist, woodcarver and furniture maker whose most famous work was the Dog Chapel, a hand-built church in Vermont to which dogs and their owners can go for quiet reflection and spiritual renewal, died on Jan. 7 in Littleton, New Hampshire. He was 61 and lived in St Johnsbury, Vermont. Huneck shot himself, his wife, Gwen, said. She said he had been despondent over having had to lay off most of the employees of his art business that week. A largely self-taught carver, Huneck achieved a level of success that comes to few outsider artists. His work was sought after by collectors, exhibited widely and featured often in the news media.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
The administration of US President Donald Trump has appointed to serve as the top public diplomacy official a former speech writer for Trump with a history of doubts over US foreign policy toward Taiwan and inflammatory comments on women and minorities, at one point saying that "competent white men must be in charge." Darren Beattie has been named the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, a senior US Department of State official said, a role that determines the tone of the US' public messaging in the world. Beattie requires US Senate confirmation to serve on a permanent basis. "Thanks to
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
‘IMPOSSIBLE’: The authors of the study, which was published in an environment journal, said that the findings appeared grim, but that honesty is necessary for change Holding long-term global warming to 2°C — the fallback target of the Paris climate accord — is now “impossible,” according to a new analysis published by leading scientists. Led by renowned climatologist James Hansen, the paper appears in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development and concludes that Earth’s climate is more sensitive to rising greenhouse gas emissions than previously thought. Compounding the crisis, Hansen and colleagues argued, is a recent decline in sunlight-blocking aerosol pollution from the shipping industry, which had been mitigating some of the warming. An ambitious climate change scenario outlined by the UN’s climate
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