BULGARIA
Floods claim at least 12
At least 12 people, including two children, died and more were missing in heavy floods after torrential rain lashed the country, Minister of the Interior Tsvetlin Yovchev said yesterday. Nine of the victims, including the children, were in the worst-hit Black Sea city of Varna, where cars were swept into the sea by the flood, which submerged streets and houses late on Thursday, the minister said. Another body was found in the nearby northeastern town of Dobrich, where 150 people were evacuated from their flooded homes. “The situation is beginning to calm down but it is still critical,” Yovchev said. Heavy rain was forecast to continue throughout yesterday.
DENMARK
Photographer freed in Syria
A Danish freelance photographer has been freed after being held hostage in Syria for 13 months, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. Daniel Rye Ottesen was captured in Syria on May 17 last year after traveling there to document the conflict and living conditions of civilians, especially children, his family said in a statement e-mailed by the ministry late on Thursday. The family said the 25-year-old was “under the circumstances [feeling] well and is now about to be reunited with his family.”
NEPAL
Landslide buries family
A police official said a landslide triggered by heavy rainfall has buried a house in a west Nepal village, killing nine members of the same family. Police official Nishant Shrivastav said yesterday that the landslide buried the house at about midnight in Aglung village, about 200km west of Kathmandu. Rescuers were able to pull out all the bodies from the debris. The grandparents were living in the same house with their children and grandchildren. Monsoon season began this month in Nepal.
SOUTH KOREA
National fire drill run
Workers, shoppers and hotel guests evacuated buildings across South Korea yesterday in an unprecedented nationwide fire drill to beef up public safety following a ferry disaster that claimed about 300 lives in April. Public buildings, including department stores, shopping malls, bus terminals and schools, emptied simultaneously as the 20-minute exercise began at 2pm. South Korea has held mass civil emergency drills — largely connected to the risk of attack by North Korea — for decades, but a spokesman for the National Emergency Management Agency said yesterday’s exercise was the first of its kind. The spokesman said the drill was aimed at honing emergency response times to a major fire, with a particular focus on the “golden hour” — the time period following traumatic injury during which there is the highest likelihood that prompt medical treatment will prevent death. “We want to see how quickly we can create and maintain proper access for fire vehicles and ambulances during the golden hour,” the spokesman told reporters.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
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