GERMANY
Suspected arson kills four
Police have detained a woman on suspicion of arson after a fire at an apartment block in Saarbruecken killed four people. Police yesterday said the 37-year-old was a resident of the building. The fire on Sunday in the five-story building killed four and injured at least 23. A 42-year-old man was severely injured when he jumped off the roof of the burning building. More than 100 firefighters were on the scene to rescue residents from their apartments. The fire apparently broke out on the first or second floor of the building and then quickly made its way to higher floors.
TURKEY
Tax evasion called ‘treason’
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday said that businesspeople who move assets abroad are committing “treason,” adding that his government should put an end to the practice. “I am aware that some businessmen are attempting to place their assets overseas. I call on the government not to authorize any such moves, because these are acts of treason,” Erdogan said in televised comments to party members. He did not name names, but his comments came two days after prosecutors ordered the seizure of assets of a gold trader testifying in a New York trial against a banker accused of violating US sanctions against Iran.
UNITED KINGDOM
Half support new EU vote
Half of Britons support a second vote on whether to leave the EU and a third said they would be worse off financially outside the bloc, an opinion poll showed. The poll, published in the Mail on Sunday newspaper, showed that 34 percent rejected another referendum and 16 percent said they did not know. The newspaper said it was the first major opinion poll since last week’s media reports that Britain is preparing to pay about 50 billion euros (US$59.3 billion) to help to pave the way for talks on a future trade pact with the EU. The online poll, carried out by research firm Survation, interviewed 1,003 adults in Britain from Thursday to Friday last week.
GERMANY
Box of nails was blackmail
A suspicious package containing nails that led to a bomb scare at a Christmas market was part of a blackmailing plot against the delivery company DHL, German authorities said on Sunday. Brandenburg State Minister of the Interior Karl-Heinz Schroeter told reporters the package was part of a scheme to extort millions of euros from DHL. It was delivered on Friday to a pharmacy on the same street as the market in Potsdam and later destroyed in a controlled explosion. Schroeter said the market itself most likely was not a target. The person who sent the parcel was still at large, he said. The market was reopened on Saturday with an increased police presence.
UNITED STATES
Two stabbed over parking
A man angry about a parking dispute on Sunday stabbed two people and then drove into a group of pedestrians on a sidewalk in New York City, leaving one dead and several injured, one critically, police said. The altercation started at about 4:30am outside a hookah lounge, when the driver of a sedan got out of his car and stabbed two other people, New York Police Department Assistant Chief David Barrere said. A dispute ensued with others outside the club and the man drove his car up onto the sidewalk and into a crowd of people before leaving the scene, Barrere said. It was unclear if the pedestrians were involved in the dispute. Authorities said the driver was in custody.
HONG KONG
Flight crew spot missile
The crew of a Cathay Pacific flight from San Francisco to the territory reported seeing a North Korean ballistic missile break up and fall out of the sky last week, the airline has said. Flight trackers put the plane close to Japan around the time of Pyongyang’s Hwasong-15 missile test on Wednesday. The missile fell into the Sea of Japan. “The flight crew of CX893 reported a sighting of what is suspected to be the re-entry of the recent DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] test missile,” an airline spokesman said. “Though the flight was far from the event location, the crew advised Japan [air traffic control] according to procedures.” The South China Morning Post yesterday quoted Cathay Pacific general manager of operations Mark Hoey as saying the message from the pilots to ground staff was: “Be advised, we witnessed the DPRK missile blow up and fall apart near our current location.” A Cathay Pacific cargo plane — CX096 — might have been even closer to the missile, at a lateral distance of a few hundred meters, Hoey added.
AUSTRALIA
‘Kwaussie’ now key word
Inspired by a dual citizenship crisis plaguing the nation’s political world, the term “Kwaussie” — a mix of Kiwi and Aussie — was yesterday named word of the year. The portmanteau term referring to a person who is both Australian and a New Zealander had been used sparingly in the past, but took on a new lease of life when Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce found out in August that he also had Kiwi citizenship. “In a time of covfefe, fake news, and tweetstorms, the Australian National Dictionary Centre has looked for a word of the year that is both lexically interesting and Australian,” center director Amanda Laugesen said in a statement. “We were able to trace it back to print in a Wellington newspaper in 2002 referring to Russell Crowe.” The actor was born in New Zealand, but has long called Australia home.
INDIA
Rahul Gandhi seeks post
Rahul Gandhi, the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty, yesterday submitted nomination papers to succeed his mother as president of main opposition Congress party, which ruled the nation for decades. Without a serious rival for the top party post, he is set to be elected Dec. 16. He faces a challenging task of reinvigorating his party, which was ousted from power by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in 2014. He is set to become the sixth member of the Nehru-Gandhi family to lead Congress.
JAPAN
Officials probing thefts
Officials yesterday said they were investigating a group of North Korean fishermen after items — reportedly including solar panels, a fridge, a television and an anime poster — disappeared from a remote island where they had taken shelter. The coast guard first spotted the group of 10’s rickety vessel off Hokkaido on Wednesday as it struggled during poor weather. They briefly landed on an uninhabited island to take refuge, but soon after the group left, officials noticed items from buildings on the island had vanished. A washing machine and blankets were also missing from a shelter facility for local fishermen, state broadcaster NHK reported. Meanwhile, the coast guard said three bodies were found off northern Yamagata Prefecture. NHK reported that one of the three wore a badge with a photograph of Kim Il-sung, who founded the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in 1948.
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
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
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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