VANUATU
Cyclone kills at least three
Three people were killed and six missing after a cyclone hit the Pacific island, officials said yesterday. Tropical Cyclone Lusi swept across the country this week and damage assessments were still coming in from remote areas, the National Disaster Management Office said. Office director Shadrack Welegtabit said three deaths had been confirmed and a search was underway for six missing women and children. “A search and rescue team was deployed yesterday [on Thursday] and we are now waiting to hear from them,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. Lusi has since traveled south and was losing intensity yesterday as it approached New Zealand.
SRI LANKA
Aussies denied hangman job
Two Australians have applied in vain for the nation’s hangman job after the island nation’s last official executioner got upset on seeing the gallows for the first time and quit. “Two Australians have sent e-mails to one of our departments saying that they are interested,” commissioner general of prisons Chandrarathna Pallegama said on Thursday. “One is a system administrator and the other had not mentioned the job he is doing,” he said. “We have not called the applications, moreover we do not have any provisions to recruit foreigners.” Pallegama said on Tuesday the last hangman, who was third most qualified among 176 applicants for the job, quit after getting upset at seeing the gallows. Two hangmen chosen late last year failed to show up for work.
JAPAN
Police arrest ‘diary vandal’
A man was arrested yesterday on suspicion of vandalizing copies of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl in Tokyo libraries, police said. More than 300 copies of the diary, or publications containing biographies of Anne Frank, Nazi persecution of Jews and related material had been torn at many public libraries. Police yesterday did not identify the suspect, whom they said has admitted to the vandalism. Authorities often refrain from naming a suspect when there are questions over the individual’s mental competence. “The suspect is a 36-year-old unemployed man who lives in Tokyo,” the Tokyo metropolitan police department said.
JAPAN
Earthquake injures 17
A strong magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck off the southern coast early yesterday, injuring 17 people, reports said, as officials warned residents to be alert to the danger of landslides. There was no tsunami warning or reports of major damage. Public broadcaster NHK said 17 people were injured. None of the injuries seemed to be life-threatening. The epicenter of the quake — which struck at 2:06am — was located 13km north of the city of Kunisaki, the US Geological Survey said. The quake hit at a depth of 82km.
ISRAEL
Gaza truce holding
A truce declared by Gaza militants appeared to be holding yesterday with the military reporting no fresh rocket fire during the night after two days of tit-for-tat violence. “It’s all quiet, there has been no fire overnight,” an army spokesman said at 8am. The radical Islamic Jihad group announced on Thursday that an Egyptian-brokered truce on the Israel-Gaza border had been restored after warplanes pounded the territory in response to a barrage of rocket fire by its militants.
UNITED STATES
NYC death toll rises to eight
Rescuers scouring the rubble of two Manhattan apartment buildings leveled in a gas explosion found the body of an eighth victim on Thursday, nearly 36 hours after the disaster. An unspecified number of people remain missing after Wednesday’s building collapse in East Harlem. The New York Police Department said that five women and three men were killed, and 68 others injured in the incident.
UNITED STATES
Man dies — for real
A coroner says a 78-year-old Mississippi man has died two weeks after he woke up in a body bag at a funeral home after being mistakenly pronounced dead. Coroner Dexter Howard says Walter Williams died at his home early on Thursday. The cause was not released. Williams was first pronounced dead on Feb. 26 at a hospice. Workers at Porter and Sons Funeral Home in Lexington were getting ready to embalm him when Williams started to move. He was rushed to a hospital and he was released a few days later. Williams, a father of 11 with six great-grandchildren, said he had merely fallen into a deep sleep, but family members felt God had given him extra time for a reason. “Well, they came and got him again around 4:15am,” said Williams’ nephew, Eddie Hester, quoted by Jackson television station WAPT, on Thursday. “I think he’s gone this time.”
MEXICO
Militia leader indicted
One of the main leaders of the civilian armed movement that formed to drive a drug cartel out of Michoacan state was charged on Thursday with the murder of two members of a rival vigilante group. State prosecutor Jose Martin Godoy said investigators had found enough evidence to link Hipolito Mora to the killings of two men whose bodies were discovered in the back of a burned pickup truck last weekend. The “self-defense” groups had a falling out and fractured into two factions in the town of La Ruana when Mora had a dispute over leadership with Luis Antonio Torres Gonzalez, another vigilante leader. The two dead men were allies of Torres Gonzalez. Prosecutors said witnesses testified that Mora had threatened to kill one of the men for opposing the way he wanted to collect money to run the vigilante uprising.
ITALY
Ex-Berlusconi aide arrested
Police on Thursday arrested Federica Gagliardi, a woman who acted as former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s secretary at two international summits in Canada in 2010, on suspicion of smuggling 24kg of cocaine on a flight from Venezuela. Gagliardi, who is in her early 30s, was taken into custody at Fiumicino-Leonardo da Vinci International Airport in Rome shortly after arriving on a flight from Caracas after police found the drugs in her carry-on luggage, a finance police spokesman said. Officials provided no further details.
A plan by Switzerland’s right-wing People’s Party to cap the population at 10 million has the backing of almost half the country, according to a poll before an expected vote next year. The party, which has long campaigned against immigration, argues that too-fast population growth is overwhelming housing, transport and public services. The level of support comes despite the government urging voters to reject it, warning that strict curbs would damage the economy and prosperity, as Swiss companies depend on foreign workers. The poll by newspaper group Tamedia/20 Minuten and released yesterday showed that 48 percent of the population plan to vote
PARLIAMENT CHAOS: Police forcibly removed Brazilian Deputy Glauber Braga after he called the legislation part of a ‘coup offensive’ and occupied the speaker’s chair Brazil’s lower house of Congress early yesterday approved a bill that could slash former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence for plotting a coup, after efforts by a lawmaker to disrupt the proceedings sparked chaos in parliament. Bolsonaro has been serving a 27-year term since last month after his conviction for a scheme to stop Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after the 2022 election. Lawmakers had been discussing a bill that would significantly reduce sentences for several crimes, including attempting a coup d’etat — opening up the prospect that Bolsonaro, 70, could have his sentence cut to
A powerful magnitude 7.6 earthquake shook Japan’s northeast region late on Monday, prompting tsunami warnings and orders for residents to evacuate. A tsunami as high as three metres (10 feet) could hit Japan’s northeastern coast after an earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 7.6 occurred offshore at 11:15 p.m. (1415 GMT), the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) said. Tsunami warnings were issued for the prefectures of Hokkaido, Aomori and Iwate, and a tsunami of 40cm had been observed at Aomori’s Mutsu Ogawara and Hokkaido’s Urakawa ports before midnight, JMA said. The epicentre of the quake was 80 km (50 miles) off the coast of
RELAXED: After talks on Ukraine and trade, the French president met with students while his wife visited pandas, after the pair parted ways with their Chinese counterparts French President Emmanuel Macron concluded his fourth state visit to China yesterday in Chengdu, striking a more relaxed note after tough discussions on Ukraine and trade with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) a day earlier. Far from the imposing Great Hall of the People in Beijing where the two leaders held talks, Xi and China’s first lady, Peng Liyuan (彭麗媛), showed Macron and his wife Brigitte around the centuries-old Dujiangyan Dam, a World Heritage Site set against the mountainous landscape of Sichuan Province. Macron was told through an interpreter about the ancient irrigation system, which dates back to the third century
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