CHINA
Wall collapse kills 18
A wall collapse at a recycling plant triggered by heavy rains killed 18 people and injured three others early yesterday in Qingdao, state media reported. According to the Qingdao government’s information office, the collapse crushed a house for workers in which 40 people were gathered. Authorities are investigating the cause of the collapse. The area has been drenched by heavy rainfall in recent days.
HONG KONG
Dog saved from python
A woman used a pocket knife to fight off a huge Burmese python that attacked her dog while out walking in a country park, the Sunday Morning Post reported yesterday. Courtney Link told the newspaper that a 5m-long snake had coiled itself around her 24kg mongrel Dexter the previous weekend. “When I suddenly saw the snake’s head, I just started stabbing furiously,” Link said, adding she resorted to using the knife only after hitting the serpent with her fists had failed to make it release the dog. The snake finally loosened its grip and slithered away, leaving the dog with bite wounds on its chest and legs. Burmese pythons are the territory’s biggest natural predator and are a protected species.
PHILIPPINES
Two men kill five in ‘spree’
Two men on a motorcycle killed five people in an apparent shooting spree in a suburb of Manila yesterday, a police official said. Investigators are still trying to establish the motive behind what appeared to be random shootings, said Inspector Roldante Sarmiento, deputy chief of the Quezon City neighborhood where the killings took place. “There were five people in four different locations. They had no connection. They were just bystanders. We have no idea why they were shot,” he said. “It looks like a shooting spree.” The two men on a motorcycle started their rampage before dawn, first shooting a man riding a motorcycle, then a woman waiting for a bus, Sarmiento said. They then shot dead a man and a woman on a motorcycle. Their last victim was a scavenger picking through rubbish.
INDIA
Bus crash kills 17
Seventeen people have died after a bus plunged off a mountain road in the Himalayan foothills before dawn on Saturday. The bus fell 300m and smashed into pieces at the bottom of a gorge in Chamoli District, in the state of Uttarakhand. Disaster management officials said 15 people died instantly, two others died later and five were injured. There was no one else on board. The bus was traveling from Rishikesh and was half a kilometer from Ghat, its destination, when it crashed.
PHILIPPINES
Diplomat probed over nanny
The government on Saturday said it was investigating a diplomat charged in Canada for alleged human trafficking involving the exploitation of her nanny. Foreign Affairs spokesman Charles Jose said Buenaflor Cruz was formerly assigned to the embassy in Ottawa, but had since been reassigned to the home office in Manila “as part of the department’s normal rotation.” Canadian federal police said they filed charges on Cruz and her husband for mischief, uttering threats, withholding their former nanny’s identification documents and human trafficking. It said the suspects had left the country while the 26-year-old nanny, who worked at the couple’s Ottawa home between July 2009 and December last year, had been “relocated to a safe location” in Canada.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
CARTEL ARRESTS: The president said that a US government operation to arrest two cartel members made it jointly responsible for the unrest in the state’s capital Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday blamed the US in part for a surge in cartel violence in the northern state of Sinaloa that has left at least 30 people dead in the past week. Two warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel have clashed in the state capital of Culiacan in what appears to be a fight for power after two of its leaders were arrested in the US in late July. Teams of gunmen have shot at each other and the security forces. Meanwhile, dead bodies continued to be found across the city. On one busy street corner, cars drove
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
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