CHINA
Grassland fire kills 22
At least 22 people have died after a grassland fire they were fighting in southwestern China turned and trapped them. The official Xinhua news agency said the 22 were among more than 2,000 people fighting the fire on Sunday in Sichuan Province. Three others were badly injured, it said. The provincial government Web site says 15 soldiers and two government workers died. The other five were civilians. The Web site also said the fire was under control as of late Sunday as winds subsided. It did not say what caused the blaze.
MALAYSIA
Husbands blamed for AIDS
Philandering husbands who visit prostitutes across the border in Thailand are being blamed for high HIV-AIDS infection rates among women in the nation’s most conservative state. The Malaysian AIDS Council reportedly said that women in Kelantan State, which is ruled by the Islamic party PAS, top the infection lists in Malaysia. “Many of the women were afflicted with the disease as their husbands had engaged the services of prostitutes,” council president Mohamed Zaman Khan told national news agency Bernama. “For example, Kelantanese men often go to Sungai Golok and after engaging with prostitutes, they return to their wives and pass on the disease,” he said.
PAKISTAN
Suicide bombers kill 40
Two suspected suicide bombers killed at least 40 people in an attack at the office compound of a senior government official in an area along the border with Afghanistan yesterday, officials said. Amjad Ali Khan, the top government official in the Mohmand region, who appeared to be the target of the attack, said by telephone that it appeared to be a suicide attack. “There were two bombers. They were on foot. The first blew himself up inside the office of one of my deputies, while the second one set off explosives when guards caught him,” Khan said.
BANGLADESH
Pirates seize freight ship
Suspected Somali pirates hijacked a ship carrying nickel ore in the Arabian Sea and appear headed to the lawless East African nation, officials said yesterday. The Bangladesh-flagged MV Jahan Moni appears to have been hijacked on Sunday off the Indian coast as it was heading from Singapore to Europe, chief of the Bangladesh Shipping Department Rear Admiral Bazlur Rahman said. The 25 Bangladeshis on the cargo ship include the wife of one crewman, said Captain Habibur Rahman, principal officer of the government’s Mercantile Marine department.
INDIA
Official decries ‘facade’
Home Secretary G.K. Pillai says Pakistan’s efforts to prosecute those behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks are a “facade” with Islamabad concerned that senior government officials might be implicated. In an interview published in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, he said India had provided Pakistan with extensive information on the identities of key conspirators behind the attacks that killed 166 people. Some of the most compelling evidence was garnered from interrogating David Headley, a Pakistani-US citizen who pleaded guilty to surveying the hotels and other targets ahead of the assault blamed on Pakistan-based militants. “I don’t think they’re going to do anything about it,” Pillai told the Journal He said that Pakistan was wary of cracking down on top militants, for fear they will “sing” and implicate Pakistani government officials in the attacks.
HAITI
Cholera outbreak spreads
In the southwestern part of the country, 140 people have died of cholera in recent days. The region had been largely spared the epidemic that has killed more than 1,880 people since mid-October, medical sources said on Sunday. “We have had a high number of deaths in communities where people are linking the illness with witchcraft,” Duvelson Angello, a health management official in Grand’Anse Department, told reporters.
ARGENTINA
Fireworks set off fires
Twenty-five people, including eight children, were injured on Sunday when eight homes in a Buenos Aires suburb went up in a blaze triggered by fireworks, police and witnesses said. Several of the houses collapsed as they were consumed by fire, which witnesses said was ignited by fireworks falling on a stack of cardboard boxes stored indoors. Fourteen fire trucks battled the blaze for hours before it was brought under control in the Boulogne suburb, where many people make their living from collecting and selling cardboard, bottles and plastic containers they keep inside their homes.
COLOMBIA
Landslide kills at least two
A landslide following weeks of drenching rains buried more than 50 homes in the northwest, killing at least two people and likely leaving dozens trapped beneath mud and rubble, officials said on Sunday. Antioquia Department emergency management director John Rendon said two bodies have been recovered and six injured people have been rescued after the mudslide in the Medellin suburb of Bello.
UNITED STATES
Plane safely splashes down
With his engine failing, the pilot of a single-engine plane managed to maneuver the craft and three passengers to a safe splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Lynn Lunsford said the pilot of the Piper Malibu reported engine trouble around 2pm on Saturday and the plane began to descend rapidly from about 7,900m. After gliding for about 25 minutes, the Piper Malibu splashed down near an oilrig about 280km southeast of New Orleans. They were able to make it into one of the plane’s inflatable rafts and a boat from the rig picked them up.
DENMARK
Inspiration for Tintin dies
Palle Huld, who reportedly inspired a Belgian cartoonist to create the comic book globetrotting reporter Tintin, has died. He was 98. Huld died on Nov. 26 in a retirement home in Copenhagen. Huld was a stage actor with the Royal Theater, but his fame came before his acting career began. In 1928, he won a competition organized by a newspaper that wanted to send a teenager would-be-reporter around the globe. Herge, the pen name of Belgian author Georges Remi, heard of Huld’s journey, which reportedly inspired him to create Tintin.
ITALY
Remark sparks outrage
A councilor has sparked outrage by demanding that funding for a local marathon be scrapped because Africans always win it. Speaking during a session of the Padua provincial assembly, Pietro Giovannoni — a member of the anti-immigration Northern League party — said: “Let’s stop using public money to finance the marathon, since the winners are always Africans and foreigners in underpants.” Kenyan runners have won seven of the 11 marathons held locally, with Italians winning just two.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
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