JAPAN
Radiation detected in nose
A worker at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant has had a high radiation level detected in his nose, authorities said. Radioactive materials might have touched the worker’s face on Monday as he took off a mask after finishing his work, Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said on Thursday. The employee was not experiencing any adverse health effects and a full body scan showed no internal contamination, but a full analysis will be available next month, TEPCO said.
MEXICO
Animal kills tourist
A Belgian tourist was killed in an attack on Thursday by either a shark or a crocodile in Zihuatanejo, officials said. The civil defense office in Guerrero State said that a man and a woman were bitten in the legs by an unidentified animal. The man was reported dead at the scene, while the woman was taken to a hospital. State officials said the man was from Belgium and the woman’s nationality was not immediately clear. The office said it was studying the wounds to determine whether they were bitten by a shark or a crocodile, both of which inhabit the area.
HAITI
MSF reacts after attack
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) on Thursday said that it was suspending work at a medical center in the capital after an armed group pulled a critically ill patient from an ambulance and shot him dead in the street. The attack took place on Tuesday near Turgeau Emergency Center in Port-au-Prince, the group said in a news release. As two ambulances left the center with patients on board, including a man recently admitted in critical condition, about 10 armed individuals blocked the vehicles. After firing shots into the air and inspecting the interior of the ambulances, they ordered “the second ambulance to reverse while they pulled the patient from the first,” MSF said. The armed group then beat the man before shooting him several times at close range, then fleeing the scene. “MSF remains one of the last international organizations to provide healthcare in the Haitian capital and cannot accept that its ambulances are violently attacked and patients shot dead in the street,” MSF head of mission Benoit Vasseur said in the news release. The center would be closed “indefinitely” while MSF conducts a security analysis, the group said, adding that it would continue providing medical care at other sites in Port-au-Prince.
UNITED STATES
Baby survives tornado
A four-month-old boy has survived after a tornado in Tennessee sucked him up from his family’s mobile home, which was demolished in the storm. Sydney Moore told WSMV-TV that when the tornado hit their home in Clarksville on Saturday, it ripped off the roof and lifted the bassinet with her son inside. Her boyfriend, the child’s father, grabbed the bassinet, but was spun up into the twister as well, Moore said. “He was just holding on to the bassinet the whole time, and they went into circles, he said, and then they got thrown,” Moore said. At about the same time in another room, Moore jumped on top of their other son, who is one. She grabbed the child as the walls collapsed, she said. Moore and the one-year-old were left under the trailer, but she pushed them out, she said. They searched for the younger son for 10 minutes and found him lying in a fallen tree in the rain. “I was pretty sure he was dead and we weren’t going to find him, but he’s here and that’s by the grace of God,” Moore said. All the family members survived, but their home and belongings were a total loss.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN
A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with Swiss police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested. The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border. The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country, but assisted dying has been legal for decades. On the same day it was used, Swiss Department of Home