CHINA
Crash rumors denied
China’s Xinhua news agency has denied widespread rumors that railway authorities tried to conceal evidence by burying carriages damaged during a high-speed rail crash that killed at least 40 people last weekend. Citing an unnamed official with the Ministry of Railways, Xinhua said late on Friday that “the problem of burying rail carriages and ‘destroying evidence’ does not exist during the handling of the whole of the accident.” The report said that only the damaged parts of some carriages were buried at the site in order to facilitate clean-up and rescue operations. A high-speed train rammed into the back of another in Wenzhou on July 23. A Chinese railway research institute has already taken responsibility for the accident, blaming faulty signaling equipment.
AUSTRALIA
Blackout halts air travel
The travel plans of thousands of Australians were disrupted yesterday by a power outage at Sydney’s international airport. Australia’s busiest air terminal was blacked out for an hour and a half, crippling security screening and check-in and delaying “thousands” of passengers, a Sydney Airport spokesman said. “The cause of the failure is under investigation,” he said, estimating that it would take “several hours” to get back on schedule. Back-up generators also took “some time” to come on, he added, compounding the problem. The reason for the generator problems was also being investigated, he said. Passengers said the outage brought customs and security to “a standstill” and there was “chaos” in the terminal, with huge lines as people were manually processed. “Madness at Sydney Airport! Nobody going anywhere!” one passenger wrote on Twitter.
THAILAND
Sex traffic women freed
Thai authorities freed 71 women and girls who had been lured into selling sex in massage parlors and karaoke bars, police said yesterday, after a crackdown on human trafficking on the Malaysian border. Thirteen of those were under the age of 18, said Lieutenant Colonel Noppadon Petsut, deputy commander of police in Sadao district of Songkhla province, where the operation was carried out on Friday. “The operation followed complaints by the Laotian embassy in Bangkok,” he said, adding that 70 of the young women were Laotian and one was from Myanmar. A Singaporean man, a Malaysian man and a Thai woman were charged with human trafficking and illegally procuring sex, Noppadon said. “Charges of human trafficking are very serious and carry a maximum sentence of the death penalty,” he said. Police freed 59 women from a karaoke bar and another 12 from a spa near a Thai--Malaysian border checkpoint. Another officer said it was believed that the women and girls were sold to the suspects by brokers and forced to work as prostitutes.
VIETNAM
Thousands flee Nock-ten
Vietnam is evacuating nearly 300,000 people from northern coastal areas as Tropical Storm Nock-ten approaches after leaving a path of destruction in the Philippines. Disaster official Nguyen Xuan Hung of central Nghe An Province says provincial authorities have begun evacuating 13,500 people from coastal villages, while more than 30,000 are being moved in neighboring Thanh Hoa Province. Weather forecasters said the storm was expected to hit northern Vietnam yesterday evening packed with sustained winds of up to 102km per hour. Nock-ten left 41 people dead and 26 missing when it hit the Philippines earlier this week.
UNITED STATES
Gaga’s meat dress preserved
A California taxidermist has earned a rare place in pop history. Sergio Vigalato preserved Lady Gaga’s now-famous raw-meat dress for display in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. The project has prompted a swarm of media interest in the 66-year-old former Southeast Alaska charter boat skipper, who is originally from Brazil. Vigalato operates American Taxidermy in Burbank, California. That is where he was contacted by the museum about preserving the dress that Lady Gaga wore at last year’s MTV Video Music Awards. The ensemble, which Lady Gaga said was a statement about equality, arrived at his shop frozen and decomposing. He restored it over the next three-and-a-half months, and the dress went on display last month.
AUSTRIA
Pot plants found in Vienna
Vienna police have shut down an unusual cannabis “ring” — hemp growing along busy Ring Street encircling the city’s center. Alerted by a news article about the illegal crop, police officers on Friday plucked a 200m stretch of green space along the three-lane street clean of the offending plants. They acted after a Viennese biology student walking along the Ringstrasse identified the green sprouts poking through bark mulch beneath the stately trees seaming the street and told TV news show Heute about his discovery.
MEXICO
Murder rate doubles
The number of homicides in the country has more than doubled in the past five years, according to the country’s statistics institute, as the drug war claimed more victims across the country. The National Institute of Statistics and Geography recorded 24,374 homicides last year, compared with 9,921 in 2005, according to a report late on Thursday. The number of deaths blamed on organized crime has risen since President Felipe Calderon launched a military crackdown on criminal gangs at the end of 2006. Calderon’s office blamed organized crime for more than 15,000 murders last year. There were 22 killings for every 100,000 residents in Mexico last year, according to the report, which is still relatively low for the region. Honduras recorded 58 murders per 100,000 inhabitants last year, according to a report from the Organization of American States (OAS), followed by El Salvador with 52, Guatemala with 48 and Venezuela with 47.
UNITED STATES
Clark Gable arrested
Clark Gable, a grandson of the late movie legend, was arrested in Hollywood on Friday for allegedly pointing a laser device at a police helicopter. The 22-year-old was detained with a friend after a patrolling police pilot reported a “bright green laser light” had illuminated his cockpit over Sunset Boulevard. Officers on the ground traced the source of the light to a car, inside which were Clark James Gable and a friend, Maximilian Anderson, 23. They were booked for a felony and held on US$250,000 bail. Gable was released later in the day.
SPAIN
Early elections called
Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero on Friday called general elections for Nov. 20, four months early, insisting the country’s battered economy was on the road to recovery. Zapatero announced in April that he would not seek a third term as Socialist leader in the next elections. The party chose Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba, then interior minister and a party heavyweight, to replace him.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done