News in Brief

Date: 31 August 2024 - 22:17

News ID: ۱۳۱۰۰۲

BERLIN (DW) – A woman stabbed and wounded six people in a bus in western Germany on Friday evening, police said. They said five were injured in the incident but later revised the figure. The 32-year-old suspect, a German national, was arrested after the attack in the town of Siegen. At least 40 people were on the bus traveling to a city festival at the time of the incident.  Three of the victims are in a life-threatening condition, according to authorities. Police are investigating the motive behind the crime. They said there were no indications that it was a terrorist attack. Police appealed to citizens “not to spread false reports” on social networks or other channels.

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RIO DE JANERIO (AP) – A Brazilian Supreme Court justice has ordered the suspension of Elon Musk’s social media giant X in Brazil after the tech billionaire refused to name a legal representative in the country, according to a copy of his decision. The move further escalates the months- long feud between the two men over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation. Justice Alexandre de Moraes had warned Musk on Wednesday night that X could be blocked in Brazil if he failed to comply with his order to name a representative, and established a 24-hour deadline. The company hasn’t had a representative in the country since earlier this month. “Elon Musk showed his total disrespect for Brazilian sovereignty and, in particular, for the judiciary, setting himself up as a true supranational entity and immune to the laws of each country,” de Moraes wrote in his decision.The justice said the platform will stay suspended until it complies with his orders, and also set a daily fine of 50,000 reais ($8,900) for people or companies using VPNs to access it.

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ATHENS (AFP) – The port city of Volos in central Greece declared a state emergency following an inundation of dead fish that local residents say could threaten their livelihoods, the state news agency announced Saturday. The month-long emergency declaration issued by the climate ministry’s secretary general of civil protection, Vassilis Papageorgiou, will inject funding and resources to speed up the cleaning of the Pagasetic Gulf port where tons of dead fish have piled up along the coast and in rivers, according to Athens News Agency. It is the second environmental catastrophe to hit the port of Volos, a three-and-a-half-hour drive north of Athens, after catastrophic floods hit the Thessaly region last year. Those floods refilled a nearby lake that had been drained in 1962 a bid to fight malaria, swelling it to three times its normal size. “After the storms Daniel and Elias last autumn, around 20,000 hectares (50,000 acres) of plains in Thessaly were flooded, and various freshwater fish were carried by rivers” to the sea, Dimitris Klaudatos, a professor of agriculture and environment at the University of Thessaly had said. Since then the lake waters have receded drastically, forcing the freshwater fish toward the Volos port that empties into the Pagasetic Gulf and the Aegean Sea, where they cannot survive.

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TOKYO (AFP) – A powerful typhoon now downgraded to a tropical storm was still disrupting flights and trains in Japan Saturday, with authorities warning of possible landslides caused by heavy rain. Shanshan, which at landfall was one of the fiercest typhoons to hit Japan in decades, pummelled Kyushu island on Thursday, but its speed has eased to 90 kilometers (56 miles) per hour from 252 kph. The typhoon killed at least six people and injured over 120, according to the Fire and Disaster Management Agency. Now downgraded to a tropical storm, Shanshan was located off the western Wakayama region on Saturday and moving east. ANA and Japan Airlines cancelled around 60 domestic flights for Saturday, affecting almost 7,200 passengers. Shinkansen bullet trains in the central city of Nagoya were also suspended. “Please remain vigilant for landslides, flooding and overflowing rivers,” the Japan Meteorological Agency warned. A city in central Gifu region issued a top evacuation warning to its 2,000 residents near an overflowing river, while some cities in northern Hokkaido saw heavy rain.

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MOSCOW (Dispatches) – A helicopter with 22 people on board, most of them tourists, has gone missing in Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula in the far east, authorities say. Kamchatka Governor Vladimir Solodov said they lost communication with an Mi-8 helicopter at 04:15 GMT “which had 22 people on board – 19 passengers and three crew members”, in a video posted on Telegram on Saturday. Rescue teams in helicopters were searching into the night for the missing aircraft, focusing on a river valley that the helicopter was due to fly along, Russian authorities said. The Mi-8 is a two-engine helicopter designed in the 1960s. It is widely used in Russia, where crashes have been frequent, as well as in neighboring countries and many other nations. The helicopter had picked up passengers near the Vachkajec ancient volcano in a scenic area of the peninsula known for its wild landscapes and active volcanoes. From there it was travelling to the village of Nikolayevka further east – a distance of about 25km (about 15.5 miles), authorities said.

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ABUJA (AP) – Weeks of flooding have killed nearly 200 people in Nigeria and washed away homes and farmlands, the country’s disaster management agency said, further threatening food supplies, especially in the hard-hit northern region.  The floods blamed on poor infrastructure and badly maintained dams have killed 185 people and displaced 208,000 in 28 of Nigeria’s 36 states, the National Emergency Management Agency said in an update Friday, triggering frantic efforts to evacuate hundreds of thousands to makeshift shelters. Nigeria records flooding every year mostly as a result of failure to follow environmental guidelines and inadequate infrastructure. The worst floods the country has seen in a decade were in 2022 when more than 600 people were killed and over 1 million displaced. However, unlike in 2022 when the floods were blamed on heavier rainfall, the Nigerian Meteorological Agency predicted delayed or normal rains in most parts of the country this year and said the current floods were more a result of human activities. “What we are doing is causing this climate change so there is a shift from the normal,” said Ibrahim Wasiu Adeniyi, head of the central forecasting unit. “We have some who dump refuse indiscriminately, some build houses without approvals along the waterways,” he added.