MALAYSIA
Snake diverts plane
An AirAsia plane was forced to divert and make an unscheduled landing after a snake was spotted slithering through the overhead lights, the Malaysian budget carrier said on Monday. In a video social media users were quick to link with the Samuel L. Jackson cult classic Snakes on a Plane, the creature’s silhouette could be seen wriggling in the cabin’s light fittings. The incident, which the airline described as “very rare,” took place last week aboard a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Tawau, on the eastern coast of Borneo island. After the captain found out about the snake, he took “appropriate action” and landed in Kuching — 900km west of Tawau — so the plane could be fumigated, AirAsia said. The passengers then boarded another flight to continue their journey. “At no time was the safety of guests or crew at any risk,” AirAsia chief safety officer Liong Tien Ling said in a statement. Social media users said that the incident was reminiscent of the 2006 action film that featured Jackson. “Snakes on a plane is real,” one user wrote. “One of my worst nightmares. Too scary for me,” another wrote.
FRANCE
Paris installs noise radar
Paris on Monday inaugurated its first noise radar as part of a plan to fine loud motorcycles and other vehicles in one of Europe’s noisiest cities. High on a street lamp in 20th District, the noise radar is able to measure the noise level of moving vehicles and to identify their license plate. “Too much noise makes people sick. For our health and quality of life ... this first sound radar’s aim is to automatically issue fines for vehicles that makes too much noise,” Paris Deputy Mayor David Belliard wrote on Twitter. In the next few months, the city will test whether the radar can unequivocally identify the license plates of roaring motorcycles or other vehicles, after which the equipment will have to be officially approved by authorities. No fines will be issued, but Paris plans to start fining from early next year, while the government deploys more noise radars in other French cities and tests out procedures for automating the fines.
UNITED STATES
Kids’ boat found in Norway
A small boat launched in October 2020 by some New Hampshire middle-school students and containing photographs, leaves, acorns and state quarters has been found 462 days later — by a sixth-grade student in Norway. The 1.8m Rye Riptides, decorated with artwork and equipped with a tracking device that went silent for parts of the journey, was found on Feb. 1 in Smola, a small island near Dyrnes, Norway, the Portsmouth Herald reported on Monday. It had lost its hull and keel on the 13,360km journey and was covered in gooseneck barnacles, but the deck and cargo hold were still intact. The student who found it, Karel Nuncic, took the boat to his school, and he and his classmates eagerly opened it last week. The school in Norway plans a telephone call with the Rye Junior High students. “When you’re sending it out, you have no idea where it’s going to end up, how it’s going to get there, if it ends up [anywhere] at all,” said Cassie Stymiest, executive director of Educational Passages, a Maine non-profit organization that began working with the school on the project in 2018. “But these kids, they put their hopes and dreams and wishes into it, and I tend to think sometimes that helps.” “I was surprised the boat actually made it somewhere,” seventh-grader Molly Flynn said. “I thought it was going to get stuck in some middle spot [on the map] and it actually made it, and it was really, really cool and surprising.”
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
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate
The US government has banned US government personnel in China, as well as family members and contractors with security clearances, from any romantic or sexual relationships with Chinese citizens, The Associated Press (AP) has learned. Four people with direct knowledge of the matter told the AP about the policy, which was put into effect by departing US ambassador Nicholas Burns in January shortly before he left China. The people would speak only on condition of anonymity to discuss details of a confidential directive. Although some US agencies already had strict rules on such relationships, a blanket “nonfraternization” policy, as it is known, has
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
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