PHILIPPINES
Rains kill one, five missing
Heavy rains have drenched part of the country, killing one person, leaving five fishermen missing and sending nearly 10,000 people to emergency shelters. Disaster officials said most of the evacuations have been taking place along the Agusan River in Mindanao. Rising knee-deep floodwaters have damaged 60 houses, cut off roads and water and power supply. Flights to the regional capital in Butuan have been suspended. The national disaster agency said yesterday one man drowned and five fishermen were missing earlier this week in the north.
CHINA
Thousands flee quake
Local authorities have evacuated 64,500 people from their homes in Yunnan Province, following a quake that damaged hundreds of houses, state media reported yesterday. The magnitude 4.8 quake rattled an area near the border with Myanmar shortly after 3pm on Tuesday, the US Geological Survey said. A total of 678 homes were damaged, but only one collapsed, Xinhua news agency said. No casualties have been reported in the quake. County officials said emergency supplies of tents, quilts, coats and rice had been sent to the area.
FRANCE
Links to Parkinson’s found
An international consortium of scientists has found five variants of genes that are linked to Parkinson’s disease, bringing the tally to 11, a paper published by The Lancet yesterday said. Until the first genetic clue was found in 1997, the medical consensus was that Parkinson’s had environmental — ie, non-inherited — causes. The five variants were netted in an overview of genomic studies carried out by scientists in Britain, Germany, France, Iceland, the Netherlands and the US. None of the tiny DNA changes is responsible by itself for causing for this complex disease of the nervous system, but in conjunction with other variants, boosts the risk of it. The 20 percent of patients who had the highest number of variants were two-and-a-half times likelier to develop Parkinson’s compared with the 20 percent with the least variants, the researchers said. found.
RUSSIA
Rebel’s brother detained
The brother of the nation’s most prominent Islamist rebel, Doku Umarov, was detained in Italy on his way to seek political asylum, newspapers reported on Tuesday, citing Italian immigration officers. Chechen native Ruslan Umarov was traveling from France to Italy when he was detained in a train station outside Venice for entering the country illegally. Media reports said he was detained on Jan. 6. He was based in Europe after he won a 2008 case in the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights against Russia. Ruslan’s brother, Doku, leads the Caucasus Emirate, an Islamist insurgent group seeking to establish an independent Islamic state for the predominantly Muslim North Caucasus region.
BRAZIL
‘Largest orchid’ on show
The “largest orchid in the world” was growing in a botanic garden in Brasilia, at a height of 2.5m, with some stems measuring as long as 3m, the environmental agency said on Tuesday. Displayed at the Brazilian Orchids Project garden, the flower — part of the Grammatophyllum genus — has been growing for five years and already has 19 long stems, on which 400 flowers bloom, the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources said. Experts are working on a special hybrid species of orchid by crossing Grammatophyllum flowers with the Cyrtopodium genus.
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
ISSUE: Some foreigners seek women to give birth to their children in Cambodia, and the 13 women were charged with contravening a law banning commercial surrogacy Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday thanked Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni for granting a royal pardon last year to 13 Filipino women who were convicted of illegally serving as surrogate mothers in the Southeast Asian kingdom. Marcos expressed his gratitude in a meeting with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, who was visiting Manila for talks on expanding trade, agricultural, tourism, cultural and security relations. The Philippines and Cambodia belong to the 10-nation ASEAN, a regional bloc that promotes economic integration but is divided on other issues, including countries whose security alignments is with the US or China. Marcos has strengthened