PHILIPPINES
Quake sparks evacuations
People yesterday evacuated buildings in the capital, Manila, after a magnitude 5.9 earthquake struck off Luzon, according to the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology and images shared by media on social media. The agency wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that it did not expect damage, but warned of aftershocks. It recorded the earthquake with a depth of 79km. Images shared by local media on X showed government workers leaving senate, presidential palace and justice ministry buildings. Students also vacated universities.
INDONESIA
More hikers found
Rescuers searching the hazardous slopes of Mount Marapi found more bodies among the climbers caught by an eruption two days ago, raising the number of confirmed and presumed dead to 23. More than 50 climbers were rescued after the initial eruption on Sunday, and 11 others were initially confirmed dead. Another eruption on Monday spewed a new burst of hot ash as high as 800m into the air and temporarily halted search operations. Meanwhile, Volcanological Survey of Indonesia head Hendra Gunawan said the agency had since 2011 warned that the volcano was unsafe to climb.
JAPAN
Remains of US crew found
US and Japanese dive teams found the remains of five more crew members from a V-22 Osprey aircraft that crashed off Yakushima Island on Wednesday last week, the Pentagon said on Monday. Eight crew were aboard the tilt-rotor aircraft when it crashed during a routine training mission. Prior to this week’s discovery, one body had been recovered. Two crew members remain unaccounted for.
UNITED KINGDOM
No nuclear site hack: UK
No records or evidence has been found to suggest that networks at the Sellafield nuclear site were the victim of a successful cyberattack by state actors, the government said on Monday following a report by the Guardian. The newspaper reported that Sellafield, which carries out nuclear fuel reprocessing, nuclear waste storage and decommissioning, had been hacked by cybergroups closely linked to Russia and China. “Our monitoring systems are robust and we have a high degree of confidence that no such malware exists on our system,” the government said. “This was confirmed to the Guardian well in advance of publication, along with rebuttals to a number of other inaccuracies in their reporting.”
JAPAN
Driver held over pigeon death
A Tokyo taxi driver was arrested for deliberately driving into a flock of pigeons and killing one, police said yesterday. Atsushi Ozawa, 50, “used his car to kill a common pigeon, which is not a game animal,” last month, and was arrested on Sunday for contravening wildlife protection laws, a Tokyo police spokesman said. Ozawa sped off from a traffic light when it turned green, ploughing his taxi into the bevy of birds at a speed of 60kph, local media said. The sound of the engine reportedly prompted a surprised passersby to report the incident. Tokyo police had a veterinarian perform a postmortem on the bird and determined its cause of death as traumatic shock, local media said. “Roads belong to humans, so pigeons should have dodged out of the way,” Ozawa was quoted by local media as telling investigators. “Wow, can you get arrested for running over a pigeon?” a user wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
CARTEL ARRESTS: The president said that a US government operation to arrest two cartel members made it jointly responsible for the unrest in the state’s capital Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday blamed the US in part for a surge in cartel violence in the northern state of Sinaloa that has left at least 30 people dead in the past week. Two warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel have clashed in the state capital of Culiacan in what appears to be a fight for power after two of its leaders were arrested in the US in late July. Teams of gunmen have shot at each other and the security forces. Meanwhile, dead bodies continued to be found across the city. On one busy street corner, cars drove
Residents of a tiny Appalachian town on Friday struggled to cope with a shooting involving two of its most prominent citizens: a judge who was gunned down in his courthouse chambers and a local sheriff charged with his murder. “It’s just so sad. I just hate it,” Letcher County Circuit Court Clerk Mike Watts said. “Both of them are friends of mine. I’ve worked with both of them for years.” It was not clear what led to the shooting. The preliminary investigation indicates that Letcher County Sheriff Shawn “Mickey” Stines shot District Judge Kevin Mullins multiple times following an argument inside the
CALLS FOR RESTRAINT: A UN spokesman said the world body was concerned about a heightened escalation from the strike, which officials said killed at least 31 people Hezbollah yesterday said that a second senior commander was among 16 fighters killed in an Israeli airstrike on its Beirut stronghold the previous day, highlighting the scale of the blow to its military leadership. Israel said Friday’s strike on the southern suburbs of Lebanon’s capital killed the head of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, Ibrahim Aqil, and several other commanders. Coming hot on the heels of sabotage attacks on communications devices this week that killed 37 people in Hezbollah strongholds, the strike raised new questions about the Iran-backed group’s security arrangements and dealt a heavy blow to its fighters’ morale. Hezbollah named the second
‘CICADA VOTERS’: A Fairfax County elections official said about one-third of local voters came to the polls on election day in 2020, while the rest voted by mail or early The Democratic and Republican national conventions are just a memory, the first and perhaps only debate between US Vice President Kamala Harris and former US president Donald Trump is in the bag and election offices are beginning to send out absentee ballots. Now come the voters. Yesterday was the start of early in-person voting for the US presidential election on Nov. 5, starting in Virginia, South Dakota and the home state of Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. The first ballots being cast in person were made with just over six weeks left before election day. About a dozen more states will