News in Brief

Date: 17 December 2022 - 21:53

News ID: ۱۱۰۲۶۲

BATANG KALI, Malaysia (AP) – Rescuers on Saturday found the bodies of a woman and two children, raising the death toll from a landslide on an unlicensed campground in Malaysia to 24 with nine others still missing. Selangor state fire chief Norazam Khamis told reporters the bodies of a mother and son were found buried under a meter of mud and debris. The body of a little girl was discovered later. He said there was hope of finding survivors if they clung on to piles or branches or rocks with pockets of air but that chances were slim. Authorities said 94 people were sleeping at the camp site on an organic farm early Friday when the dirt tumbled from a road about 30 meters above them and covered about 1 hectare. Most were families enjoying a short vacation during the yearend school break. The 24 victims included seven children and 13 women. Authorities were still carrying out autopsies and waiting for next of kin to identify the victims.

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WASHINGTON (Al Jazeera) – While the use of the death penalty continues to decline in the United States, a new report found that “botched” executions reached a new high this year. In its annual report on the use of capital punishment in the country, the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) said that seven of the 20 attempted executions by U.S. states in 2022 were “visibly problematic”. That included a case in which Alabama officials struggled to insert an intravenous (IV) line into a man for three hours, said the report, which defined a “botched” execution as one that includes “executioner incompetence, failures to follow protocols, or defects in the protocols themselves”. “As lethal injection turns 40 years old this year, 2022 can be called ‘the year of the botched execution,’” the DPIC, a non-profit research group based in Washington, DC, said in a statement accompanying its findings, calling the proportion of problematic execution attempts “astonishing”.

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WASHINGTON (Anadolu) – Before Twitter was bought by billionaire Elon Musk in October, the FBI used to send it messages flagging tweets for suggested moderation, according to an ongoing release of internal documents by Musk. Among contacts with the FBI’s social media task force FTIF, staffed with some 80 agents, some were mundane, but “a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts,” said Matt Taibbi, a journalist who has been working with Musk to release the internal documents, which have been dubbed the Twitter Files. “The Twitter Files show something new: agencies like the FBI and DHS (Department of Homeland Security) regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation,” Taibbi said on Twitter late Friday.

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DAKAR, Senegal (AP) – More than 25,000 people could face starvation in conflict-plagued parts of West Africa next year, a United Nations official has warned. Federico Doehnert of the World Food Program said violence and the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine are largely driving the threat to people in Nigeria, Mali and Burkina Faso. “One of the most striking things is that where we already had issues with severe food insecurity last year, this year we’re seeing a further deterioration” Doehnert said in Dakar while presenting findings from the latest food security report by regional governments, the UN and aid groups. The cross-border region between Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger is the epicenter of West Africa’s escalating humanitarian crisis, which is compounded by climate change, severe floods and droughts placing more than 10 million people in need of assistance, the UN said in a statement this week. Doehnert said nearly 80% of people facing catastrophic hunger - some 20,000 - are in Burkina Faso’s Sahel region, where militants linked to al-Qaeda and the Daesh group have besieged cities and cut off assistance. Residents of the city of Djibo have been blockaded for months, unable to access their farms.

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NEW YORK (Dispatches) – The UN general assembly has for the second time approved postponing a decision on whether the Afghan Taliban administration and the Myanmar’s military junta can send a UN ambassador to New York. The decision that took place when the 193-member general assembly approving without a vote and rather by consensus, a decision by the UN credentials committee to delay the vote that also deferred a decision on rival claims to Libya’s UN seat. The nine-member UN credentials committee includes Russia, China and the United States. “The committee decided to postpone its consideration of the credentials pertaining to the representatives of Myanmar, Afghanistan and of Libya,” said Guyana’s UN ambassador Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, who chairs the credentials committee. Ever since Afghanistan’s Taliban government came to power again and ever since Myanmar’s leader Aung Suu Kyi was removed from power, the void of a new envoy has not been filled yet.

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JOHANNESBURG (Xinhua) – Heavy rains have killed 16 people in South Africa’s largest city Johannesburg in the last two weeks, an official said on Saturday. “Thus far, 23 people have been rescued by Joburg Emergency Medical Services and 148 people have been rescued by the police search and rescue,” Executive Mayor of Johannesburg Mpho Phalatse said at a media briefing. The torrential rains have damaged property, fauna and flora, and essential infrastructure, particularly roads, traffic lights, buildings, substations, power stations and pipelines, she said.