CHINA
Landslide leaves 30 missing
A landslide in southwestern Sichuan Province triggered by heavy rain has killed at least one person, with nearly 30 more missing, state media said yesterday. The landslide hit Jinping village in the city of Yibin at about 11:50am on Saturday. As of yesterday morning, “one person has been killed and 28 people are missing,” Xinhua news agency said. Two people were rescued on Saturday, while more than 900 rescuers were attempting to find the rest of the missing people, Xinhua said. “A preliminary study shows this disaster occurred due to the influence of recent prolonged rainfall and geological factors,” China Central Television said, citing local authorities.
Photo: Xinhua news agency via AP
BANGLADESH
Hasina-linked gangs targeted
The government yesterday launched a major security operation after protesters were attacked by gangs allegedly connected to the ousted regime of former prime minister Sheikh Hasina. A government statement said the operation began after gangs “linked to the fallen autocratic regime attacked a group of students, leaving them severely injured.” Home Affairs Adviser Jahangir Alam Chowdhury called it “Operation Devil Hunt,” telling reporters that it would “continue until we uproot the devils.” The sweeping security operations came after days of unrest, following protests triggered by reports that 77-year-old Hasina — who has defied an arrest warrant to face trial crimes against humanity — would appear in a Facebook broadcast from exile in neighboring India.
Photo: EPA-EFE
INDIA
Dalai Lama’s brother dies
The elder brother of the Dalai Lama and former chairman of the exiled Tibetan government in India, Gyalo Thondup, who led several rounds of talks with China and worked with foreign governments for the Tibetan cause, has died. He was 97. Thondup died at his home in Kalimpong, a hill town in the Himalayan foothills of eastern West Bengal state, on Saturday evening, media reports said. No other details were immediately released about his death. Tibetan media outlets credited Thondup for networking with foreign governments and praised his role in facilitating US support for the Tibetan struggle. The Dalai Lama yesterday led a prayer session for Thondup at a monastery in Bylakuppe in the southern state of Karnataka where he prayed for Thondup’s “swift rebirth” and said “his efforts towards the Tibetan struggle were immense and we are grateful for his contribution.”
Photo: AP
UNITED KINGDOM
Starmer sacks junior minister
A Labour Party lawmaker on Saturday said he regretted “badly misjudged” comments after Prime Minister Keir Starmer sacked him as a minister. Starmer dismissed Andrew Gwynne as a junior health minister as soon as he became aware of the WhatsApp comments, the domestic PA news agency said. He has also been suspended from the Labour Party, with a report alleging that Gwynne made anti-Semitic, racist and sexist remarks. “I deeply regret my badly misjudged comments and apologise for any offence I’ve caused,” Gwynne said on X. Gwynne posted messages in a WhatsApp group that he shares with more than a dozen Labour councilors, party officials and at least one other lawmaker, the Mail on Sunday reported. He also joked about a constituent being “mown down” by a truck, the newspaper said. In another comment, he said he hoped a 72-year-old woman who asked a colleague about trash collection would soon be dead.
Photo: Bloomberg
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
‘IMPOSSIBLE’: The authors of the study, which was published in an environment journal, said that the findings appeared grim, but that honesty is necessary for change Holding long-term global warming to 2°C — the fallback target of the Paris climate accord — is now “impossible,” according to a new analysis published by leading scientists. Led by renowned climatologist James Hansen, the paper appears in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development and concludes that Earth’s climate is more sensitive to rising greenhouse gas emissions than previously thought. Compounding the crisis, Hansen and colleagues argued, is a recent decline in sunlight-blocking aerosol pollution from the shipping industry, which had been mitigating some of the warming. An ambitious climate change scenario outlined by the UN’s climate
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
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