■CANADA
Snowboarder, skier killed
Two separate avalanches have claimed the lives of a skier and snowboarder in British Columbia, just days after eight snowmobilers met a similar fate on the perilous slopes of Canada’s westernmost province, the Toronto Star reported on Friday. The 26-year-old snowboarder died on Thursday while snowboarding solo on a part of Whistler Mountain that was closed to the public. Whistler is to host events during the 2010 Winter Olympics. A 37-year-old skier was buried in sliding snow late on Wednesday on nearby Blackcomb Mountain, the newspaper reported. “The problem is you’ve got tempting conditions with fresh snow on the other side of the boundary lines and people are ducking the ropes to go into those areas,” Royal Canadian Mounted Police Staff Sergeant Steve LeClair was quoted as saying.
■BRAZIL
US winery owner dies
A German-born businessman who owned a New York winery died while swimming in the ocean off Brazil, police said on Friday. Christian Wolffer, 70, suffered two deep cuts on his back while swimming on New Year’s Eve near the colonial town of Paraty, about 150km west of Rio de Janeiro, police investigator Luiz Carlos dos Anjos Batista said. Authorities are investigating whether the cuts were caused by a passing boat. It isn’t clear if Wolffer drowned or died from the cuts.
■UNITED STATES
Filmmaker not dead
Filmmaker George Butler, whose movie Pumping Iron featured a then-unknown bodybuilder named Arnold Schwarzenegger, wants his friends to know he’s very much alive, despite a premature obituary on a TV talk show this week. During The Charlie Rose Show’s annual New Year’s Eve tribute on PBS to notable figures who during the year, he included Butler. The screen even flashed a Butler tombstone, 1943-2008. The PBS show had confused him with another George Butler, a longtime jazz record executive who signed Wynton Marsalis, who died on April 9. What is odd about the mistake is that Rose and Butler are old friends through Rose’s first wife, meeting shortly after they graduated from college in North Carolina.
■MEXICO
Alleged killer arrested
Police in western Mexico have arrested a farmworker who allegedly hacked a doctor to death with a machete for refusing to treat his son. Prosecutors in the Pacific coast state of Jalisco say 25-year-old suspect Ricardo Garcia Barajas had confessed to killing Dr Laura Avila, who was found dead in the rural health clinic she was staffing on Dec. 26. In a Friday statement, prosecutors quoted Garcia Barajas as saying his son fell ill and he took the infant to the clinic. He said Avila told him the case wasn’t an emergency and that he should return the next day during normal office hours, which angered him.
■MEXICO
Rebel attends anniversary
Zapatista rebel leader “Subcomandante” Marcos made his first public appearance in more than a year on Friday at an event marking the 15th anniversary of his rebellion. The masked leader of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, which rose up in arms in Chiapas, southeast Mexico, on January 1, 1994, attended an anniversary meeting with leftist politicians and activists from some 20 countries. The anniversary meeting ends today.
■PORTUGAL
World’s oldest person dies
The world’s oldest living person, Maria de Jesus, died on Friday at the age of 115, the Lusa news agency reported. Born Sept. 10, 1893, Maria de Jesus became the world’s oldest living person after the death of American Edna Parker on Nov. 26, also aged 115. A family member told the Lusa news agency that de Jesus died “just after 10am while en route to hospital.” De Jesus was born in a poor area in Urquiera, close to Ourem in the center of the country. She started working in agriculture at the age of 12 and never went to school, remaining unable to write and read for her entire life. After marrying, she moved to the town of Corujo with her husband where she brought up her six children.
■UNITED STATES
Disabled man left for dead
A severely disabled New Yorker was lucky to be alive after being abandoned for 17 hours on an icy bus. Ed Rivera, 22, spent New Year’s Eve night in minus 9°C temperatures strapped into an empty bus after the overseer allegedly decided to leave him behind, police said. Rivera suffers from cerebral palsy and reportedly has the mental capacity of a two year old. Police have charged the bus matron, who was meant to bring Rivera back home from a special school, with reckless endangerment, a police spokesman said.
■SWITZERLAND
Mario Simmel dies in Zug
Austrian-born author Johannes Mario Simmel, whose books are said to have sold more than 70 million copies worldwide, died in the Swiss town where he lived, a local official said on Friday. He was 84. Simmel died in a care home in Zug, near Zurich, on Thursday, town clerk Irene Schwendimann said, without giving the cause of death or any further details. Simmel’s books regularly topped German-language best-seller lists before Nobel laureates such as Heinrich Boell and Guenter Grass. His works include the World War II spy novel It can’t always be caviar and the Cold War thriller Dear Fatherland. Many of his books were translated into other languages, and the play The Classmate was adapted for Broadway.
■UNITED STATES
Troopers clear away shoes
State troopers are looking for a charity to take thousands of shoes that were dumped on a Miami expressway, tying up rush hour traffic. Lieutenant Pat Santangelo said the Florida Highway Patrol received a call about the shoes on Friday morning. Santangelo said he was not sure where the shoes came from. There were no signs of a crash and no one stopped to claim them. He said he hopes someone will take them because he doesn’t want to send them to a dump. Workers using a front-end loader and a dump truck were able to quickly clear at least one lane by sweeping all the shoes to the shoulder, but delays were expected until they could all be taken away.
■YEMEN
Tribe kidnaps South African
Tribesmen seeking the release of a jailed fellow clansman kidnapped a South African tourist and her two sons in the southern province of Abyan, police officials said yesterday. The woman, the boys aged 10 and 13, as well as a Yemeni driver were kidnapped late on Friday as they drove on a highway from the southeastern province of Hadhramout to the port city of Aden, the officials said. Armed tribesmen from the al-Maraqisha tribe stopped the South African family’s vehicle near the al-Khubar town, 170km east of Aden.
■CHINA
Blast kills at least five
At least five people were killed in an explosion at a chemical plant, state media reported yesterday. The blast happened in Wucheng County in Shandong Province on Thursday afternoon and killed one person on the spot, injuring 13 others, Xinhua news agency said, quoting government sources in the county. Four others — all migrant workers — died later in hospital, Xinhua said. An investigation has been launched into the cause of the blast. The country’s work safety record is notoriously bad. Thousands of people die every year in mines, factories and on construction sites.
■VIETNAM
Five killed in flooding
Unseasonal floods brought by rains this week have killed at least five people, while 10 others remained missing, the government and state-run media said yesterday. Waters were now receding in main rivers in the region but three including a woman drowned in Quang Nam Province and another 44-year-old man died in floods in Quang Ngai Province, the government said in a disaster report. A 22-year-old man died in Binh Dinh Province while nine fishermen were among the missing after their boats sank, yesterday’s Thanh Nien newspaper quoted provincial disaster reports as saying. Heavy rains since Monday caused by a cold spell have hit the region widely exposed to the sea and raised river waters. The government said more than 5,000 homes were submerged and floods inundated a combined 74,400 hectares of rice in five provinces.
■HONG KONG
Prostitute robber jail
A jobless man who repeatedly slept with prostitutes and then tied them up and robbed them began serving a nine-year jail term yesterday. Chong Kwonk-hung, 24, stole hundreds of dollars from four prostitutes he slept with between October 2006 and June last year, the High Court was told. He tied up his victims with tape, threatening one of them with a knife, and then ordered them to hand over money to him before fleeing the apartments where all four women worked alone. Chong was eventually caught when police identified his DNA on a glass in which one of his victims had given him water to drink before he robbed her, the South China Morning Post reported. Chong admitted four charges of robbery and was jailed for nine years by judge Derek Pang at a hearing on Friday. He denied two further charges of robbery, also on prostitutes, which were left on file. The case brought calls from prostitutes working for greater police protection from attackers. Groups representing sex workers say prostitutes are vulnerable because most work alone. Four prostitutes were murdered in the space of three days last year.
■AUSTRALIA
Speeder caught with drugs
A Thai man who had overstayed his visa for more than a year made a big mistake when he drove his car at 137km an hour in a restricted zone in Sydney shortly after midnight yesterday, police said. Officers who stopped him for speeding found a stash of cash, casino chips and ecstasy tablets in the vehicle. On top of the speeding charge, the 27-year-old, who was driving on a learner’s license, was charged with possessing and supplying drugs and dealing in the proceeds of crime. The car may be confiscated under crime proceeds legislation and immigration officials were alerted that his visa expired in 2007.
■PHILIPPINES
One rebel killed in Quezon
One communist rebel was killed yesterday in a clash with government troops in an eastern town, a military report said. The fighting erupted early yesterday when patrolling troops encountered heavily armed communist guerrillas in Candelaria town in Quezon Province, 120km southeast of Manila. Government troops also recovered one assault rifle from the slain guerrilla, who has yet to be identified.
■AUSTRALIA
Gillard says no to detainees
Canberra has told Washington for a second time that it will not resettle detainees freed from the Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba, the acting prime minister said yesterday. Acting Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said US President George W. Bush’s administration was told on Friday that a second request made early last month to resettle an unspecified number of detainees had been rejected. “We advised the United States government that we would not be agreeing to those resettlement requests,” said Gillard, who is filling in for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd while he is on vacation.
■PHILIPPINES
Floods displace thousands
About 5,000 families in the south have been displaced by flash floods and large waves spawned by heavy rains, officials said yesterday. More than 100 houses have been destroyed and many people are fleeing their homes in the face of rising waters in the northern part of the southern island of Mindanao, civil defense officials said. Regional civil defense director Carmelito Lupo said that most of those whose homes were destroyed were from Cagayan de Oro city but officials were still trying to get information on the situation in the surrounding areas.
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
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
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
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
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