Foreign News
President Yoon orders all-out effort after heavy rains kill 39 in S Korea
South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol has ordered an all-out rescue and recovery effort after days of torrential rains unleashed devastating floods and landslides that killed at least 39 people.
The death toll on Monday included 13 people found dead in a submerged underpass in the central city of Cheongju in North Chungcheong Province.
Yoon, on his return to Seoul following a trip to Ukraine, convened an intra-agency meeting on the disaster response and called for authorities to make the utmost effort to rescue victims.
“There is no way to suppress my sadness. I pray for the souls of those killed in the heavy rains and offer words of comfort to the bereaved families,” the president said. “We all need to take the situation gravely and mobilise all available resources.” Yoon also pledged support for recovery work, including designating affected areas as special disaster zones.
South Korea, which is at the peak of its summer monsoon season, has been battered by heavy rains since July 9. The downpours have caused widespread flooding and landslides, mostly in the country’s central and southern regions.
In Cheongju, rescue workers pulled four more bodies overnight from a tunnel where some 16 vehicles, including a bus, were swamped by a flash flood after a levee of a nearby river collapsed.
(Aljazeera)
Thousands of Georgians protested in the capital Tbilisi as a new president allied with the ruling Georgian Dream party was inaugurated.
Mikheil Kavelashvili, a former pro-footballer, has been sworn in during a critical political period for the country after the government suspended its application to join the European Union.
Georgian Dream won parliamentary elections in October, but the victory was mired in allegations of fraud which have since sparked several street protests.
Outgoing president Salome Zourabichvili refused to step down on Sunday, saying she was the “only legitimate president”.
Addressing crowds gathered outside, Zourabichvili said she would leave the presidential palace but branded her successor illegitimate. “This building was a symbol only as long as a legitimate president was sitting here,” she said.
A few minutes’ walk away, Kavelashvili was sworn in at a closed-doors ceremony in parliament, where he was accompanied by his family. Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze also attended the inauguration.
Speaking after taking the oath, Kavelashvili went on to praise Georgian “traditions, values, national identity, the sanctity of the family, and faith”. “Our history clearly shows that, after countless struggles to defend our homeland and traditions, peace has always been one of the main goals and values for the Georgian people,” he said.
Georgia’s four main opposition groups have rejected Kavelashvili and boycotted parliament.
Kavelashvili is a former MP with the Georgian Dream party and was the only candidate for the job. Zourabichvili has previously denounced his election as a travesty.
Georgian Dream has become increasingly authoritarian in recent years, passing Russian-style laws targeting media and non-government groups who receive foreign funding, and the LGBT community.
It refused to join Western sanctions on Russia after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and called the West the “global war party”, making a mockery of its stated aim of joining the EU and Nato.
An overwhelming majority of Georgians back the country’s path to the EU and it is part of the constitution.
But in November, the country’s ruling party said the government would not seek EU accession talks until 2028.
The announcement sparked days of protests, and riot police used tear gas and water cannon against protesters, who fought back by throwing fireworks and stones.
On Saturday, protesters waving Georgian and EU flags gathered again ahead of the inauguration, forming a human chain that spanned kilometres.
“I am out in the street together with my whole family trying somehow to tear out this small country out of the claws of the Russian empire,” one protester told the Associated Press.
The US this week imposed sanctions on Georgia’s former prime minister and billionaire founder of Georgian Dream, Bidzina Ivanishvili.
Georgia is a parliamentary democracy with the president the head of state, and the prime minister the head of parliament.
When Zourabichvili became president in 2018 she was endorsed by Georgian Dream, but she has since condemned their contested election victory in late October as a “Russian special operation” and backed nightly pro-EU protests outside parliament.
[BBC]
A court in China has sentenced a man to death for killing 35 people last month by driving into a crowd, in an attack that raised national concern about mass killings.
Fan Weiqiu was venting his anger because he was unhappy with his divorce settlement, the court in the southern city of Zhuhai said in handing down the sentence on Friday.
The victims were exercising at a sports centre. Fan pleaded guilty to endangering public safety by dangerous means, a court statement said.
Fan’s “criminal motive was extremely despicable, the nature of the crime was extremely vile, the means of the crime were particularly cruel, and the consequences of the crime were particularly severe, resulting in great social harm”, the court said.
The attack on November 11 was one of the deadliest attacks in contemporary Chinese history.
It was among a spate of violent attacks that have recently raised questions about public safety in China, where citizens have long been proud of streets safe from violence.
The attacks spurred Chinese leader Xi Jinping to order local governments to take steps to prevent future “extreme cases”.
His order prompted pledges from local leaders to examine personal disputes that could trigger aggression, from marital troubles to disagreements over inheritance.
Some analysts have linked the incidents to growing anger and desperation at the country’s slowing economy and a sense that society is becoming more stratified.
A court earlier this week gave a suspended death sentence with a two-year reprieve to a driver who injured 30 people when he drove into elementary school students and parents in Hunan province. Such sentences are usually commuted to life in prison.
The court in the city of Changde said the driver was taking out his frustration after losing money he had invested.
Chinese authorities keep a tight lid on any reports about the attacks, censoring videos and witness accounts posted on social media and releasing only basic information, often many hours later.
The death toll in Zhuhai was not announced until 24 hours after the attack. In addition to the 35 people killed, 43 were injured, police said.
The 62-year-old driver, Fan, was found in his vehicle trying to stab himself with a knife, a police statement said.
Police set up barricades the day after the attack and barred people from entering the sports complex. Members of the public left bouquets by an adjacent square instead.
[Aljazeera]
More than 1,300 pea-sized, critically endangered snails that were bred in a zoo have been set free to wander (very slowly) on a remote Atlantic island.
The release brings two species of Desertas Grande Island land snails back to the wild. Prior to this they were believed to be extinct – neither species had been spotted for a century.
When a team of conservationists found a small population surviving on the rocky cliffs of Desertas Grande island, close to Madeira, they mounted a rescue effort.
The snails were brought to zoos in the UK and France, including Chester Zoo, where a home was created for them in a converted shipping container.
The tiny molluscs are native to the windswept, mountainous island of Desertas Grande, just south-east of Madeira. Habitat there has been destroyed by rats, mice and goats that were brought to the island by humans.
It was thought that all these invasive predators had eaten the tiny snails to extinction. Then a series of conservation expeditions – between 2012 and 2017 – proved otherwise.
Conservationists discovered just 200 surviving individuals on the island.
Those snails were believed to be the last of their kind, so they were collected and brought into captivity.
At Chester Zoo, the conservation science team made a new home for 60 of the precious snails. The right food, vegetation and conditions were recreated in miniature habitat tanks.
1,329 snail offspring, bred at the zoo, have now been marked with identification dots – using non-toxic pens and nail varnish – and transported back to the wild for release.
“It’s a colour code,” said Dinarte Teixeira, a conservation biologist at Madeira’s Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests. “This will allow us to spot them and track where they disperse to, how much they grow, how many survive and how well they adapt to their new environment.”
A wild refuge has been restored for the snails on Bugio, a smaller neighbouring island in the Ilhas Desertas (Desert Islands) archipelago. Bugio is a nature reserve and invasive species have been eradicated there.
Gerardo Garcia from Chester Zoo said that the reintroduction was “a major step in a species recovery plan”.
“If it goes as well as we hope, more snails will follow them next spring. It’s a huge team effort which shows that it is possible to turn things around for highly threatened species.”
“These snails are such an important part of the natural habitat [on the islands they come from],” explained Heather Prince from Chester Zoo. As well as being food for other native species, she explained, snails break down organic matter and bring nutrients to the soil.
“They help plants grow. All of that is dependent on the little guys – the insects and the snails that so often get overlooked.”
[BBC]
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