PAPUA NEW GUINEA
Landslide rescuers arrive
Rescue crews yesterday arrived at the site of a massive landslide in the remote highlands, helping villagers search for hundreds of people feared dead under towering mounds of rubble and mud. The disaster struck an isolated part of Enga Province at about 3am on Friday, wiping out swathes of the hillside settlement as villagers slept. “While verified casualty numbers are still pending, people living in the approximately 60 destroyed homes are unaccounted for,” a UN situation report said. So far, at least four bodies have been recovered, said a UN official based in the capital Port Moresby. A rapid response team of medics, military and police began pouring into the disaster zone yesterday morning after a journey complicated by the rugged terrain and damage to major roads.
INDIA
Heatwave hits election
As people participate in the next-to-last phase of voting in the world’s largest election, temperatures were forecast to surge to 47°C in the capital, New Delhi. More than 111 million people in 58 constituencies across eight states and federal territories are eligible to vote in the general election’s sixth phase, which recorded a turnout of 10.82 percent in the first two hours of the 11-hour poll. The overall turnout in the same phase of the last elections in 2019 was about 63 percent. “There is a concern, but we hope that people will overcome the fear of the heatwave and come and vote,” Delhi Chief Electoral Officer P. Krishnamurthy said. The Election Commission has deployed paramedics with medicines and oral hydration salts at polling stations in Delhi, which have additionally been equipped with mist machines, shaded waiting areas and cold water dispensers for voters. In some parts of the northern state of Haryana, people residing near polling booths also pitched in to help voters beat the heat, handing out cold drinks, dry fruits and milk free of charge.
MEXICO
Hijackers steal avocados
Highway bandits made off with more than 36 tonnes of avocados, federal prosecutors said on Friday. The Attorney General’s Office said the avocados were stolen in two separate robberies in the western state of Michoacan, Mexico’s main producer of the fruit. In both cases, armed men stopped freight trucks carrying about 18 tonnes each, and stole the shipments. Avocado growers have long been targeted by drug cartel extortion demands in Michoacan, but hijackings of entire shipments are rare.
UNITED STATES
Sean Kingston arrested
Rapper and singer Sean Kingston and his mother allegedly committed more than US$1 million in fraud in the past few months, stealing money, jewelry, a Cadillac Escalade and furniture, documents released on Friday said. Kingston, 34, and his 61-year-old mother, Janice Turner, have been charged with conducting an organized scheme to defraud, grand theft, identity theft and related crimes, arrest warrants released by the Broward County Sheriff’s Office said. The two were arrested on Thursday after a SWAT team raided Kingston’s rented mansion in suburban Fort Lauderdale. Turner was arrested in the raid, while Kingston was arrested at Fort Irwin, an army training base in California’s Mojave Desert where he was performing. Kingston, who had a No. 1 hit with Beautiful Girls in 2007, is being held at a California jail awaiting his return to Florida. His mother was being held on Friday at the Broward County jail on US$160,000 bond.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
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