CHINA
Demolition officials fired
Local officials in a central Chinese province violated rules in forcibly demolishing part of a hospital, sending medical staff fleeing and burying under rubble six bodies being processed at a morgue, the state broadcaster CCTV said yesterday. Xiong Zhiliang, a district official overseeing demolition work in the city of Zhengzhou, was fired, while local police were further investigating Thursday’s incident, CCTV said. Forced demolitions are common in Chinese cities, where local authorities turn to real estate development to fuel economic growth. Clashes over land are frequent, and some turn deadly. The No. 4 Hospital of Zhengzhou University has accused the local government of ordering the demolition after failing to get the hospital to agree to a road expansion project. The hospital management also complained to state media that it was extremely disrespectful for the demolition crew to bury the dead in the rubble. The Huiji district government in Zhengzhou on Thursday said that it sent in the bulldozer only after the hospital turned a deaf ear to requests that its CT room and morgue must be demolished to make way for the road project. The district defended itself by saying that the workers checked that no one was inside before they tore down the buildings.
YEMEN
Peace talks delayed
The next round of peace talks between the Yemeni government and Iran-backed Huthi rebels scheduled for next week have been postponed, Yemeni Minister of Foreign Affairs Abdel Malak al-Mekhlafi said on Saturday. “The negotiations will not take place on the announced date of Jan. 14,” Mekhlafi said on the telephone from Cairo. “They will be postponed until Jan. 20 or 23 because the Huthis rejected the date of Jan. 14,” he said. Al-Mekhlafi said UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed would travel to the capital, Sana’a yesterday to “convince the Huthis to participate in the negotiations on the new date.” The envoy would also seek “confidence-building measures” from the Huthis, including the lifting of their siege of Taez and allowing aid into the southwestern city, he added. The next round of peace talks would be held in Geneva, al-Mekhlafi said. The Yemeni government sat down with the rebels and their allies in Switzerland last month for six days of talks that ended with no major breakthrough. The UN says fighting since March has killed thousands of people and left about 80 percent of the population in need of humanitarian aid.
UNITED KINGDOM
Dead actress’ partner held
British media reports said the partner of a former EastEnders actress who was murdered along with her two sons has been arrested in Ghana. British police earlier opened a murder inquiry for Sian Blake, eight-year-old Zachary and four-year-old Amon, whose bodies were found in the garden of their home in southeast London. The three were last seen onDec. 13. The BBC and others reported on Saturday, without citing sources, that Blake’s partner, Arthur Simpson-Kent, was detained in Ghana. Simpson-Kent disappeared after speaking to detectives on Dec. 16. When asked about the reports, Scotland Yard said detectives are aware of an arrest in Ghana, but cannot confirm the identity of the man. Police in Ghana on Saturday said they had tracked down and arrested Simpson-Kent. “The suspect has been arrested by police and I can confirm his identity,” a Ghanaian police spokesman said. “He was at a hideout in Western Region,” he added. Blake, 43, appeared in the long-running soap opera in 1996 to 1997.
‘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
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
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
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