Cities around the world on Saturday evening turned out lights to mark the 10th annual Earth Hour, a global movement dedicated to protecting the planet and highlighting the effects of climate change.
As night fell, lights went out in cities from South Korea to the US in what the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) described as a moment of solidarity for climate action. The group, which sponsors the event, said people in 178 nations and territories had planned to participate.
Lights went out for the hour-long event — from 8:30pm to 9:30pm — in Beijing, Moscow, Beirut, Cairo, Athens, Rome and Paris. The lights atop the Empire State Building in New York were dimmed and some billboards in the city’s Times Square also went dark.
Photo: Reuters
In Seoul, the glass-covered City Hall was among several public buildings where officials switched off the lights inside and out. Lights illuminating landmarks such as the massive COEX shopping mall, the city’s main railway station and several bridges on the Han River were all either turned off or dimmed.
In Beijing, Chinese actress Li Bingbing (李冰冰) attended the iconic Temple of Confucius, which went dark for an hour while municipal government officials announced that the city’s energy conservation slogan would be: “Consume less, consume wisely.”
The Taipei 101 skyscraper was among the buildings to go dark in Taiwan’s capital.
Philippine officials in Metro Manila led hundreds of environmental activists, students, and movie and TV celebrities in switching off lights at the Quezon Memorial Circle in suburban Quezon City. Amid the darkness, some participants pedaled bamboo bikes attached to small energy generators to power LED lights and illuminate a giant map of the Philippines to symbolize the nation’s yearning to shift to renewable energy sources, organizers said.
The first Earth Hour event was held on March 31, 2007, when the WWF conservation group inspired people in Sydney to turn out lights for an hour.
Since then, the WWF-organized event has expanded to thousands of cities and towns around the world and has been held in March every year.
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
ISSUE: Some foreigners seek women to give birth to their children in Cambodia, and the 13 women were charged with contravening a law banning commercial surrogacy Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday thanked Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni for granting a royal pardon last year to 13 Filipino women who were convicted of illegally serving as surrogate mothers in the Southeast Asian kingdom. Marcos expressed his gratitude in a meeting with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, who was visiting Manila for talks on expanding trade, agricultural, tourism, cultural and security relations. The Philippines and Cambodia belong to the 10-nation ASEAN, a regional bloc that promotes economic integration but is divided on other issues, including countries whose security alignments is with the US or China. Marcos has strengthened