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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
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