UNITED STATES
Fetal remains found
More than 2,000 medically preserved fetal remains have been found at the Illinois home of a former Indiana abortion clinic doctor who died on Sept. 3, authorities said. The Will County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release on Friday that an attorney for Ulrich Klopfer’s family contacted the coroner’s office on Thursday about possible fetal remains being found at the home in an unincorporated part of Will County in northeastern Illinois. The sheriff’s office said that authorities found 2,246 preserved fetal remains, but there was no evidence that medical procedures were performed at the home. Klopfer was a longtime doctor at an abortion clinic in South Bend, Indiana. It closed after the state revoked the clinic’s license in 2015. Representative Jackie Walorski called the discovery of the fetal remains “sickening beyond words” in a statement released by her office. “He was responsible for thousands of abortions in Indiana and his careless treatment of human remains is an outrage,” she said. In June 2014, Klopfer was charged in St Joseph County, Indiana, with a misdemeanor for failure to file a timely public report. He was accused of waiting months to report an abortion he provided to a 13-year-old girl in South Bend. That charge was later dropped after Klopfer completed a pre-trial diversion program.
UNITED STATES
Shooting report refuted
Authorities in northern Virginia say they have found no evidence that a shooting occurred at a movie theater that is part of a mall. Reports of a shooting had prompted panic and a large police presence on Saturday night, but the Arlington County Police Department later tweeted that authorities had completed a preliminary search of the theater at the Ballston Quarter mall in Arlington without finding any evidence that a shooting took place. As fears over the possibility of a shooting dissipated, many continued to eat and drink inside restaurants and bars in the area.
UNITED STATES
Home blast deemed suicide
A homeowner near Pittsburgh blew up his house on his daughter’s wedding day, police said shortly after his body was found in the rubble on Saturday. The man had been seen standing in front of his house in Edgewood shortly before it exploded and caught fire, authorities said, but for several hours he could not be accounted for. His death has been ruled a suicide. Officials are still investigating the explosion’s cause, but “it looks like he disconnected the gas line in the basement of the house,” Police Chief Robert Payne said. “And of course, it wouldn’t take much of a spark to explode the house.” Most of the family was out of the house at the time for the wedding, officials said.
JAPAN
Fever-affected pigs culled
Officials have culled 753 pigs in Saitama Prefecture north of Tokyo after detecting an outbreak of swine fever, the Yomiuri newspaper said yesterday. The cull, which took place on Saturday, was necessary after it was determined that pigs raised in the prefecture for shipment to central Japan were infected, the Yomiuri reported. Saitama also halted shipments from two other pig farms in the area of the outbreak, it said. Officials from the Saitama Prefecture government were not immediately available to comment. The fever detected in Japan is a different strain from the African swine fever that China has been battling, the Ministry of Agriculture has said.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
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
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees