Screengrab of a video showing the altercation between the cyclist and the driver. PHOTO: CNA
CNA – A female cyclist was caught on camera jumping onto the bonnet of a car following an alleged altercation with the driver along East Coast Road in Singapore on Friday.
In response to queries, the police said that they received a call for assistance on Friday at about 3.20pm. No injuries were reported in the incident, they added.
A video circulating on the Facebook group Beh Chia Lor on Sunday showed a cyclist clad in a blue helmet and yellow shirt standing in front of a dark grey car. It was unclear how the incident began.
Other cars could be heard sounding their horns, as the incident appeared to be obstructing the middle lane of the three-lane road.
After speaking on the phone, the cyclist could be seen jumping onto the bonnet of the car. The car then accelerated in the direction of i12 Katong Mall, with the cyclist clinging to the bonnet as it crossed a junction.
In the video, the cyclist could be heard shouting as the car drove off. It is not known how the altercation ended.
The police said that two women, aged 31 and 49, are assisting with investigations.
Screengrab of a video showing the altercation between the cyclist and the driver. PHOTO: CNA
Combo photo shows seven-year-old Lan Tiande on his way to school in 2012 and Lan Tiande, who is about to graduate from a vocational school, in Nongyong Village of Dahua Yao Autonomous County, south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. PHOTOS: XINHUA
DAHUA, GUANGXI (XINHUA) – Meng Xuantai unknowingly made news headlines nearly 11 years ago during his hour-long trek to school in the craggy mountains of Dahua, south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
In a photo taken by a Xinhua photographer in September 2012, the eight-year-old was struggling to climb up a cliff, with one hand pressing against a rock to keep his balance and the other holding a plastic bag containing everything he needed for school.
Meng was put in the middle of a group, sandwiched between two older children expected to give him a hand in case of danger. From their home village Nongyong, they had to get to the other side of the mountain to the nearest school. The trek was long and dangerous, so they only went home on the weekends.
Guangxi is one of the areas facing the worst level of stony desertification, and Dahua county, predominantly inhabited by the Yao ethnic group, is located in Karst landscapes covered with rocks. Meng’s home village was once identified as uninhabitable by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations due to its extremely tough natural conditions.
In the photo, Meng’s brother Meng Xuanren, 11 at the time, was carrying a bedsheet made of bamboo fibre.
Combo photo shows seven-year-old Lan Tiande on his way to school in 2012 and Lan Tiande, who is about to graduate from a vocational school, in Nongyong Village of Dahua Yao Autonomous County, south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. PHOTOS: XINHUACombo photo shows Meng Xuanzhao, who is making a living in Guangdong Province after graduating from a vocational school and him at 11 years old herding sheep in 2012ABOVE & BELOW: Combo photos show Lan Qiuyan, who just graduated from a college her at 11 years old in a yellow top walking home on a mountain road from school in 2012; Meng Wenchao, a senior high school student him at seven years old walking on his way home in 2012; and middle school student Lan Xiuxue studying at home and her at five years old herding sheep in 2013
The two boys had different dreams. Meng Xuantai was eager to grow up, earn his living “somewhere outside the mountains” and support their parents, whereas his brother dreamed of going to university and “changing his fate with knowledge”.
One of their sweetest childhood memories was standing at the door and waiting for their father to come home for the Chinese New Year, coveting the candies and gifts he would bring them from the faraway city where he worked.
Their father Meng Guisu, who did not even finish primary school, joined the majority of villagers who worked far away from home. But he insisted his own sons should receive a better education and earn a decent living. For many parents, schooling was worth the hardship along the children’s long, dangerous trek.
Some children were better protected than others. Meng Keyou started school at nine, two years later than his peers, because his parents thought it was too dangerous for a seven year old to climb up and down a cliff, where a fall could be fatal.
Meng Qiuyan, 11 at the time, remembers an older girl who fell from the cliff on her way to school. “Fortunately she was caught by rocks and trees. A teacher rushed to her rescue, but she has a long scar on her forehead until today.”
Most families in the village have the same family name, Meng, though they are not all related.
Xinhua photographer Huang Xiaobang followed these children on their way to school for the first time in 2012 and kept updating his photo archive over the years. Gradually he noticed the changes: the children grew into adults and blacktop roads replaced the rocky, perilous trail their little feet once trod.
“Eleven years seem long,” said Huang. “I recorded the mountain life with my camera lens and categorised the photos. The kids went to school, came home, herded the sheep, did their laundry, helped in the kitchen and out in the field, and grew up.”
He caught snapshots of their tough life and every single change for the better: expanded road networks, more vehicles, as well as free nutritious meals and new dormitory buildings for schoolchildren. “Last but not least, the young adults I know from 11 years ago.” Most of the former schoolchildren in Huang’s photos are now aged from 18- to 24 years old. Some are in their final year at high school and preparing to enter university this fall, some are already in university and the others have taken up jobs as teachers, doctors,or workers.
The Meng brothers have both fulfilled their dreams: Xuanren is studying at Liaoning Provincial College of Communications in northeast China, whereas his younger brother Xuantai has finished technical school and secured a job in the neighboring Guangdong Province, repairing vehicles.
Huang took another photo for the brothers when they came home for the Chinese New Year in January, in a tunnel that leads to the other side of the mountain. For the younger children in the village, a walk to school along the new road takes 20 minutes. A car or motorbike ride halves the travel time.
Qiuyan, who always regrets the scar on the face of her friend who slipped off the cliff, is now studying at a university of medical sciences in Nanning, the regional capital.
China declared a complete victory in its fight against poverty in February 2021. The country has lifted 770 million rural residents out of poverty since the beginning of the reform and opening up over 40 years ago, accounting for over 70 per cent of the global total, according to the World Bank’s international poverty line.
ABOVE & BELOW: Passenger Gura Pallay, injured on Friday’s train accident receives treatment at a hospital; and people look at the mangled wreckage of the two passenger trains in India.
PHOTOS: AP
BALASORE, INDIA (AP) – Gura Pallay was watching another train pass by the one he was sitting in when he heard sudden, loud screeching. Before he could make sense of what was happening, he was thrown out of the train.
Pallay landed next to the tracks along with metal wreckage of the train he’d been riding in, and instantly lost consciousness. The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was the twisted remains of three trains on the tracks.
His train had derailed after colliding with a stopped freight train. Another passenger train, the one he had seen pass by moments earlier, had hit the derailed carriages.
“I saw it with my own eyes, but I still can’t describe what I saw. I am haunted by it,” he said at a hospital, where he lay on a stretcher with a broken leg and dark wounds on his face and arms.
Pallay is a labourer, like most of the people onboard the two passenger trains that crashed on Friday in the eastern Odisha state, killing 275 people and injuring hundreds. He was travelling to Chennai city in southern India to take up a job in a paper mill factory when the Coromandel Express crashed with a goods freight train, knocking it off track, and was then hit by a second train coming from the opposite direction on a parallel track.
ABOVE & BELOW: Passenger Gura Pallay, injured on Friday’s train accident receives treatment at a hospital; and people look at the mangled wreckage of the two passenger trains in India. PHOTOS: AP
A passenger train passes by the site where two passenger trains derailed
“I never imagined something like this could happen, but I guess it was our fate,” he said.
Investigators said on Sunday that a signaling failure might have caused the three-train crash, one of the worst rail disasters in the country’s history. Authorities recommended that India’s Central Bureau of Investigations, which probes major criminal cases, open an investigation into the crash.
“We can’t bring back those we have lost, but the government is with the families in their grief. Whosoever is found guilty will be punished severely,” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Saturday while visiting the site of the accident.
The crash occurred as Modi’s government is focussing on the modernisation of India’s colonial-era railroad network.
Several survivors of the crash said they were still struggling to comprehend the disaster.
“Everything happened so quickly,” said a student Subhashish Patra who was travelling with his family from Balasore to the state capital, Bhubaneswar, on the Coromandel Express. He was planning to take his mother to a hospital in Bhubaneswar to seek treatment for a hand injury, and then to travel to Puri, home to one of Odisha’s most important temples.
The first thing Patra could make sense of after the crash was the sound of children crying. People were screaming for help in the dark, and around him lay corpses.
“There were dead bodies all around me,” he said. Patra said the rail carriage he was in landed with the door facing upwards. He climbed onto a pile of wreckage inside the train and managed to pull himself out. At the hospital on Sunday, Patra’s head was bandaged in gauze as he waited for an MRI scan. His head was throbbing with pain, he said, but he was grateful that he and his entire family had survived.
Others weren’t so lucky. Alaudin, who goes by one name, travelled almost 200 kilometres on Saturday from West Bengal state to the crash site, to look for his brother, who was onboard one of the trains.
He learned about the crash from television. When he tried to call his brother’s mobile phone to check on him, no one answered. Worried, he and his sister-in-law rushed to the site of the crash afterwards and spent all of Saturday looking for him in various hospitals, hoping he would be alive. But his brother’s whereabouts remained unknown as the death toll continued to rise.
Distraught, they finally made their way to the mortuary, where Alaudin’s brother body was wrapped in a black plastic bag and placed on top of blocks of melting ice.
“I lost my brother, she lost her husband,” Alaudin said, pointing to his sister-in-law. “And his two boys have lost a father.”
DUNYA NEWS – In one of Keiko Kawano’s recent classes, more than a dozen Tokyo art school students held mirrors to their faces, stretching the sides of their mouths upward with their fingers: they were practising how to smile.
It’s not something most people would think to pay for but Kawano’s services as a smile instructor are seeing a surge in demand in Japan, where mask-wearing was near universal during the pandemic.
Himawari Yoshida, 20, one of the students taking the class as part of her school’s courses to prepare them for the job market, said she needed to work on her smile. “I hadn’t used my facial muscles much during COVID so it’s good exercise,” she said.
Kawano’s company Egaoiku – literally “Smile Education” – has seen a more than four-fold jump in demand from last year, with customers ranging from companies seeking more approachable salespeople and local governments looking to improve their residents’ well-being. An hour-long one-on-one lesson costs JPY7,700 (USD55).
Even before the pandemic, donning a mask in Japan was normal for many during hay fever season and around exams due to concern about getting ill for a key life event.
Smile instructor Keiko Kawano. PHOTO: DUNYA NEWS
But while the government may have lifted its recommendation to wear masks in March, many people have still not let them go on a daily basis. A poll by public broadcaster NHK in May showed 55 per cent of Japanese saying they were wearing them just as often as two months earlier.
Only eight per cent said they had stopped wearing masks altogether.
Tellingly, roughly a quarter of the art school students who took the class kept their masks on during the lesson. Young people have, perhaps, become used to life with masks, Kawano said, noting that women might find it easier to go out without makeup and men could hide that they hadn’t shaved.
The former radio host who started giving lessons in 2017 has also trained 23 others as smiling coaches to spread the virtues and technique of crafting the perfect smile around Japan.
Her trademarked “Hollywood Style Smiling Technique” method comprises “crescent eyes”, “round cheeks” and shaping the edges of the mouth to bare eight pearly whites in the upper row. Students can try out their technique on a tablet to get scored on their smile.
Kawano believes that culturally, Japanese people may be less inclined to smile than Westerners because of their sense of security as an island nation and as a unitary state.
To hear her tell it, the threat of guns might, ironically, encourage more smiling.
“Culturally, a smile signifies that I’m not holding a gun and I’m not a threat to you,” she said. With a surge in inbound tourists, Japanese people need to communicate with foreigners with more than just their eyes, she added. “I think there’s a growing need for people to smile.”
Zoey, a Labrador/German shepherd mix, was awarded the record for longest tongue on a living dog. PHOTO: UPI
UPI – A Louisiana dog’s five-inch tongue has been officially certified as the longest in the world by Guinness World Records.
Zoey, a Labrador/German shepherd mix, was awarded the record for longest tongue on a living dog after a veterinarian measured from the tip of her snout to the tip of her tongue.
Zoey’s owners, Metairie residents Sadie and Drew Williams, said they got the canine when she was only six weeks old, and they almost immediately noticed her unusually long tongue.
“We thought surely she’d grow into it but she obviously didn’t. She still has an enormous tongue compared to her body,” Sadie Williams told Guinness World Records.
The couple said Zoey is popular with neighbours.
“Every now and then while we’re out taking her on a walk, people will come up to her and want to pet her,” Drew Williams said.
“We’ll warn them ahead of time ‘Hey, she’s friendly but she might slobber on you,’ and every now and then she will, and they’ll have a big slobber mark on their black pants.”
Zoey, a Labrador/German shepherd mix, was awarded the record for longest tongue on a living dog. PHOTO: UPI
UPI – A visitor to a South Carolina bridge, United States, captured video of a mystery creature in the water that wildlife experts have yet to identify.
Raine McKinney captured video near the south causeway bridge to Pawleys Island showing what appears to be an unusual fish swimming in the water. The video was sent to the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, but few answers were available.
“The people in my office are mostly stumped, but we’re not the experts,” a department representative told WCNC-TV. The representative said one law enforcement officer suggested the animal might be a squid, but they were unsure.
Atlantic brief squid are known to live in South Carolina waters. Longfin squid are frequently found in the waters of nearby North Carolina.
Police officers escorting the defendant from her apartment. PHOTO: THE STRAIT TIMES
HONG KONG (AP) – Hong Kong police arrested a woman accused of killing her three young daughters yesterday in a case that has shocked many in the city, where violent crime is rare.
The three girls, aged two, four and five, were unresponsive when officers arrived at their apartment after receiving a call from the woman, who told police that they had been killed by her husband, police said. Police Superintendent Alan Chung said the woman and her husband had been separated for about a year, and they believe the woman was guilty of the killings.
The children were declared dead at a hospital. Chung said no wounds were found on their bodies and no sharp objects or drugs were found at the scene. He said a bloodstained pillow was found and it was possible it was used to smoother the children.
An investigation indicated that the case was linked to family relationship problems, Chung said.
“This is a very serious family violence case,” he said.
The woman and the girls lived in a small apartment in Sham Shui Po, one of the poorest districts in the financial hub, Chung said.
The woman appeared normal when police arrived at the apartment and there was no evidence that she had a bad relationship with the girls, he said. Yesterday’s case was the second in three days involving killings that has shocked many Hong Kong residents.
Last Friday, a man fatally stabbed two women at a shopping mall in an apparently random attack. An initial investigation found no evidence of any relationship between the suspect and the victims, police said.
A local court yesterday ordered a psychiatric examination for the suspect, according to the South China Morning Post.
Police officers escorting the defendant from her apartment. PHOTO: THE STRAIT TIMES
Aerial photo showing the site of a mountain collapse in Leshan in southwestern China’s Sichuan Province. PHOTO: AP
BEIJING (AFP) – All 19 people caught in a landslide in southwestern China’s Sichuan province on Sunday have been confirmed dead, state media reported, announcing the end of rescue efforts.
Part of a mountain collapsed at about 6am local time near a state-owned forestry station in Jinkouhe, near the city of Leshan, state broadcaster CCTV said.
The disaster sent mud and debris hurtling towards a construction site operated by a local mining company, where it “struck and buried parts of the production and living facilities at the mineshaft platform”, CCTV reported.
Nineteen people were confirmed dead as of 8pm, the broadcaster said, adding that “search and rescue work has currently ended, and the cause of the… collapse is under investigation”.
Footage broadcast by CCTV showed rescuers and excavators picking through a tract of mud that had flattened a wooded hillside and strewn it with twisted metal and smashed masonry.
The Jinkouhe government earlier said the landslide had killed 14 people and left five missing. An unspecified number of other mine workers “have been evacuated to a safe location”, according to CCTV.
Authorities sent more than 180 people and over a dozen pieces of rescue and recovery equipment to the site, the broadcaster added.
Contacted by AFP earlier on Sunday, an official in Jinkouhe’s publicity department declined to give further details.
The settlement of about 40,000 people lies in a mountainous region about 240 kilometres south of the provincial capital Chengdu. Landslides are a frequent danger in rural and mountainous parts of China, particularly during the rainy summer months.
Remote and densely forested, much of Sichuan is particularly prone to disasters.
Extreme weather triggered a series of landslides in the province in 2017, including one that completely buried the mountain village of Xinmo, entombing more than 60 homes.
In 2019, massive rains again caused a slew of landslides, including one that buried a section of railway under repair and those working on it.
The province is also seismically active and periodically experiences deadly earthquakes.
Aerial photo showing the site of a mountain collapse in Leshan in southwestern China’s Sichuan Province. PHOTO: AP
File photo of Duke and Duchess of Sussex Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. PHOTO: AP
LONDON (AP) – Prince Harry’s phone hacking trial against the publisher of the Daily Mirror kicked off without him present in court – and the judge was not happy.
Harry’s lawyer said the Duke of Sussex would be unavailable to testify after opening statements because he’d taken a flight from Los Angeles, United States (US) on Sunday after the birthday of his two-year-old daughter, Lilibet.
“I’m a little surprised,” Justice Timothy Fancourt said, noting he had directed Harry to be in court for the first day of his case.
Mirror Group Newspaper’s lawyer Andrew Green, said he was “deeply troubled” by Harry’s absence on the trial’s opening day.
Harry was scheduled to testify today, but his lawyer was told last week the duke should attend yesterday’s proceedings in London’s High Court in case the opening statements concluded before the end of the day.
File photo of Duke and Duchess of Sussex Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. PHOTO: AP
The case against the publisher of the Daily Mirror is the first of the prince’s several lawsuits against the media to go to trial, and one of three alleging tabloid publishers unlawfully snooped on him in their cutthroat competition for scoops on the royal family.
Harry, 38, will be the first member of the British royal family in more than a century to testify in court. He is expected to describe his anguish and anger over being hounded by the media throughout his life, and its impact on those around him.
He has blamed paparazzi for causing the car crash that killed his mother Princess Diana, and said harassment and intrusion by the United Kingdom (UK) press, including allegedly racist articles, led him and his wife, Meghan, to flee to the US in 2020 and leave royal life behind.
The articles at issue in the trial date back to his 12th birthday, in 1996, when the Mirror reported Harry was feeling “badly” about the divorce of his mother and father, now King Charles III.
Harry said in court documents that ongoing tabloid reports made him wonder whom he could trust as he feared friends and associates were betraying him by leaking information to the newspapers. His circle of friends grew smaller, and he suffered “huge bouts of depression and paranoia.” Relationships fell apart as the women in his life – and even their family members – were “dragged into the chaos.”
He said he later discovered that the source wasn’t disloyal friends but aggressive journalists and the private investigators they hired to eavesdrop on voicemails and track him to locations as remote as Argentina and an island off Mozambique.
Mirror Group Newspapers said it didn’t hack Harry’s phone and its articles were based on legitimate reporting techniques. The publisher admitted and apologised for hiring a private eye to dig up dirt on one of Harry’s nights out at a restaurant.
Phone hacking to listen in on celebrities’ cell phone voice messages was widespread at British tabloids in the early years of this century.
Protesters waving Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) flags, along with signs stating ‘No to NATO’. PHOTO: AFP
STOCKHOLM (AFP) – Hundreds of people protested in Stockholm on Sunday against new anti-terror legislation that was passed to address Turkiye’s opposition to Sweden joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
The demonstration was organised by groups close to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), outlawed by Turkiye, which this week warned against “terrorists” being allowed to demonstrate in Sweden. Turkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has so far blocked Sweden’s NATO membership, accusing Stockholm of being a haven for the Kurdish activists. To address his concerns, Sweden passed a new law that criminalises “participation in a terrorist organisation”.
“They are after the Kurds in Sweden,” spokesperson for the Alliance Against NATO Tomas Pettersson, told AFP at the protest, titled “No to NATO, No Erdogan Laws in Sweden”.
Petterson added that the idea behind the law is “to have an arrest and a trial and a victim,” so that Erdogan “will then let Sweden into NATO”. Protesters waved numerous PKK flags, along with signs reading “No to NATO”. “Our membership in NATO would cause a lot of blackmail from Erdogan,” former Swedish MP Amineh Kakabaveh told AFP.
A spokesman for Erdogan last Tuesday said it was “completely unacceptable that PKK terrorists continue to operate freely in Sweden” and urged Swedish authorities to block the protest.
Even though the PKK is also considered a terrorist organisation in Sweden – as in the rest of the European Union – its supporters are generally allowed to protest in public.
Sweden and Finland dropped decades of military non-alignment and applied to join NATO in response to the invasion of Ukraine. Finland formally joined in April, however Turkiye and Hungary have yet to ratify Sweden’s membership bid.
Sweden’s justice minister reiterated on Friday that the new law is not aimed at attacking freedom of speech. Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom on Thursday hailed the new legislation as Sweden’s last step under an accord signed with Turkiye last year for Ankara to ratify Stockholm’s membership.
Protesters waving Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) flags, along with signs stating ‘No to NATO’. PHOTO: AFP
