TANZANIA
Factory explosion kills 11
An explosion at a sugar factory killed 11 people and injured two others, police said on Thursday, with at least three foreigners among the dead. The accident occurred on Wednesday night at a facility in the eastern Morogoro region operated by Mtibwa Sugar, one of the nation’s main producers of the commodity. “The factory accident caused [the] death of 11 people and two others were injured,” regional police commander Alex Mkama told reporters. The fatalities included a Kenyan, an Indian and a Brazilian national, Mkama was quoted by the Citizen newspaper as saying. “There are reports that a steam pipe had leakage which caused the explosion,” he said. A pipe connecting one of the factory boilers with a turbine had burst causing the blast, said Shabani Marugujo, commander of the fire and rescue services in Morogoro.
UNITED STATES
Tornado kills five people
A deadly tornado that wreaked havoc in Greenfield, Iowa, left four people dead and nearly three dozen injured, officials said, while a fifth person was killed elsewhere. The twister that tore through the city on Tuesday was rated at least an EF3 by the National Weather Service and was so destructive that it took authorities more than a day to account for the area’s residents. It is believed that the number of people injured is likely higher, the Iowa Department of Public Safety said. The fifth person was killed about 40km from Greenfield when her car was blown off the road in a tornado, the Adams County Sheriff’s Office said. Monica Zamarron, 46, died in the crash on Tuesday afternoon, officials said. Officials have not yet released the names of the other victims. The severe weather turned south on Wednesday. In Texas, officials issued an emergency declaration in Temple, a city of more than 90,000 people north of Austin, after powerful storms ripped through the area.
JAPAN
‘Doge’ meme dog dies
The Japanese shiba inu dog whose photo inspired a generation of oddball online jokes and the US$23 billion Dogecoin cryptocurrency beloved by Elon Musk died yesterday, her owner said. “She quietly passed away as if asleep while I caressed her,” Atsuko Sato wrote on her blog, thanking the fans of her dog called Kabosu, which was the face of the “Doge” meme.
VIETNAM
Hanoi fire kills 14 people
An overnight fire in an apartment building on a narrow alley in Hanoi killed 14 people and injured six others, state media said yesterday. The apartment building could only be accessed through an alley just 2m wide, preventing firetrucks from reaching it, and firefighters eventually contained the fire by using hoses, state media said. The fire started at about 12:30am and was accompanied by several explosions, the Vietnam News Agency said. It took an hour to extinguish. Neighbor Nguyen Thanh Trung said he was asleep when he heard the explosions and rushed out to see what was happening. “I could feel the shock at my house,” he said, adding that he along with others got a ladder to break the window to help people escape. State media reported the building had 24 residents at the time, seven in the owner’s family and 17 tenants. The injured are stable and being treated at Hanoi Transport Hospital. The fire started in the small courtyard in front of the building that was used as a garage for the sale and repair of electric bikes, state media reported. Trung said the family would often charge the bikes’ batteries at night.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might