YEMEN
Merchant ship sinks
A merchant ship is thought to have sunk in the Red Sea after a deadly attack by Houthi rebels that forced it to be abandoned last week, a security agency said. The MV Tutor, which was holed during an attack that left one sailor dead, is “believed to have sunk,” UK Maritime Trade Operations said on Tuesday. “Military authorities report maritime debris and oil sighted in the last reported location,” the group said.
BANGLADESH
Landslides kill nine
Torrential rains have triggered landslides burying at least nine people and forcing thousands to flee to higher ground, police and government officials said yesterday. Schools have been turned into shelters for those abandoning their homes to rising river waters, while more than 1 million people have been stranded in northern areas. “At least 700,000 people have been stranded by flash floods and heavy rains in Sylhet District, and another 500,000 people in neighboring Sunamganj District,” Sylhet Commissioner Abu Ahmed Siddique said. Those killed in landslides were in the Cox’s Bazar District. Eight were Rohingya refugees from Myanmar and the other was from Bangladesh, said Amir Jafar, a police official in command of security in the camps. “They were sleeping in their shelters when heavy rains overnight triggered the landslides in five spots of the camps,” Jafar said. “They were buried under the mud.”
GERMANY
Rhubarb rap storms TikTok
A tongue-twisting rap about rhubarb has become the latest unlikely musical hit to storm the Internet, racking up millions of views and inspiring a viral dance routine. The song by musical comedian Bodo Wartke was first posted on YouTube in December last year, but took off earlier this year thanks to a dance video made by two Australian students. Last month, the track briefly reached No. 12 in the TikTok music charts. The charm lies in the song’s tongue-twisting title, Barbaras Rhabarberbar (Barbara’s Rhubarb Bar). The song tells the story of Barbara, a woman famous for her rhubarb cakes who opens a bar in her village. As the song goes on, Barbara is joined by an ever-growing cast of people whose names add to the tongue-twister -- such as barbarians and barbers. Barbara’s Rhubarb Bar has racked up more than 47 million views on TikTok and has been translated into several languages.
JAPAN
‘Beat poet’ Shiraishi dies
Kazuko Shiraishi, a leading name in modern Japanese “beat” poetry, known for her dramatic readings, at times performed with jazz music, has died. She was 93. Shiraishi, whom American poet and translator Kenneth Rexroth dubbed “the Allen Ginsberg of Japan,” died of heart failure on Friday last week, Shichosha, a Tokyo publisher of her works, said yesterday. Shiraishi shot to fame when she was 20, freshly graduated from Waseda University in Tokyo, with her Tamago no Furu Machi, translated as The Town that Rains Eggs — a surrealist portrayal of Japan’s wartime destruction. Shiraishi counted Joan Miro, Salvador Dali and John Coltrane among her influences. She was a pioneer in performance poetry. A private funeral among family has been held while a memorial service is being planned. She is survived by her husband, Nobuhiko Hishinuma, and a daughter.
It is usually a serene two-and-a-half-hour ride on Japan’s famously efficient bullet train, but on Saturday, the journey quickly descended into a zombie apocalypse, with passengers screaming in terror. Organizers of the adrenaline-filled trip, less than two weeks before Halloween, touted it as the world’s first haunted house experience on a running Shinkansen. On board one chartered car of the Shinkansen, about 40 thrill-seekers were ready to brave an encounter with the living dead between Tokyo and the western metropolis of Osaka. The eerie experience was inspired by the hit 2016 South Korean action-horror movie Train to Busan, in which a father and
IRANIAN THREATS: Revolutionary Guards chief Hossein Salami said that it would be a ‘mistake’ for Israel to attack Iran and if it did ‘we will strike you again painfully’ Israel yesterday bombed a Syrian coastal city, while the US conducted multiple strikes on targets in Yemen nearly a month into Israel’s war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Syria, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Hezbollah and Hamas in Gaza all belong to the so-called “axis of resistance” led by Iran, which on Oct. 1 conducted a missile strike on Israel. Israel has vowed to retaliate for the strike. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards chief Hossein Salami yesterday said in a speech that Tehran would hit Israel “painfully” if it attacks Iranian targets. “If you make a mistake and attack our targets, whether in the region or in
NEW RECRUITS: A video released by Ukrainian officials allegedly shows dozens of North Koreans lining up to collect military fatigues from Russian servicemen Russian aerial strikes wounded more than a dozen and knocked out electricity for tens of thousands of Ukrainians overnight in attacks on residential areas as temperatures dropped toward freezing, Kyiv said yesterday. Ukraine also said it had targeted a crucial Russian explosives factory, about 750km from the border, in an overnight drone attack, while Moscow said it had shot down 110 drones, the largest attempted aerial barrage by Kyiv in more than two weeks. At least 17 people were wounded in an attack on Kryvyi Rig, Ukraine, including a first responder, the Ukrainian State Emergency Service said. “At night, the enemy attacked Kryvyi
The space rock that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period caused a global calamity that doomed the dinosaurs and many other life forms, but that was far from the largest meteorite to strike our planet. One up to 200 times bigger landed 3.26 billion years ago, triggering worldwide destruction at an even greater scale, but as new research shows, that disaster actually might have been beneficial for the early evolution of life by serving as “a giant fertilizer bomb” for the bacteria and other single-celled organisms called archaea that held dominion at the