YEMEN
Merchant ship sinks
A merchant ship is thought to have sunk in the Red Sea after a deadly attack by Houthi rebels that forced it to be abandoned last week, a security agency said. The MV Tutor, which was holed during an attack that left one sailor dead, is “believed to have sunk,” UK Maritime Trade Operations said on Tuesday. “Military authorities report maritime debris and oil sighted in the last reported location,” the group said.
BANGLADESH
Landslides kill nine
Torrential rains have triggered landslides burying at least nine people and forcing thousands to flee to higher ground, police and government officials said yesterday. Schools have been turned into shelters for those abandoning their homes to rising river waters, while more than 1 million people have been stranded in northern areas. “At least 700,000 people have been stranded by flash floods and heavy rains in Sylhet District, and another 500,000 people in neighboring Sunamganj District,” Sylhet Commissioner Abu Ahmed Siddique said. Those killed in landslides were in the Cox’s Bazar District. Eight were Rohingya refugees from Myanmar and the other was from Bangladesh, said Amir Jafar, a police official in command of security in the camps. “They were sleeping in their shelters when heavy rains overnight triggered the landslides in five spots of the camps,” Jafar said. “They were buried under the mud.”
GERMANY
Rhubarb rap storms TikTok
A tongue-twisting rap about rhubarb has become the latest unlikely musical hit to storm the Internet, racking up millions of views and inspiring a viral dance routine. The song by musical comedian Bodo Wartke was first posted on YouTube in December last year, but took off earlier this year thanks to a dance video made by two Australian students. Last month, the track briefly reached No. 12 in the TikTok music charts. The charm lies in the song’s tongue-twisting title, Barbaras Rhabarberbar (Barbara’s Rhubarb Bar). The song tells the story of Barbara, a woman famous for her rhubarb cakes who opens a bar in her village. As the song goes on, Barbara is joined by an ever-growing cast of people whose names add to the tongue-twister -- such as barbarians and barbers. Barbara’s Rhubarb Bar has racked up more than 47 million views on TikTok and has been translated into several languages.
JAPAN
‘Beat poet’ Shiraishi dies
Kazuko Shiraishi, a leading name in modern Japanese “beat” poetry, known for her dramatic readings, at times performed with jazz music, has died. She was 93. Shiraishi, whom American poet and translator Kenneth Rexroth dubbed “the Allen Ginsberg of Japan,” died of heart failure on Friday last week, Shichosha, a Tokyo publisher of her works, said yesterday. Shiraishi shot to fame when she was 20, freshly graduated from Waseda University in Tokyo, with her Tamago no Furu Machi, translated as The Town that Rains Eggs — a surrealist portrayal of Japan’s wartime destruction. Shiraishi counted Joan Miro, Salvador Dali and John Coltrane among her influences. She was a pioneer in performance poetry. A private funeral among family has been held while a memorial service is being planned. She is survived by her husband, Nobuhiko Hishinuma, and a daughter.
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
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
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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