CHINESE ANGER GROWS AFTER EXPLOSIONS
Families of firefighters who died battling the fires that followed last week’s massive explosions at a storage warehouse in the Chinese port city of Tianjin protested and clashed with police amid revelations that several hundred tons of poisonous cyanide were stored where the explosions took place, the South China Morning Post reports. According to the BBC, local residents also protested yesterday, arguing that the warehouses had been illegally built too close to their homes, and asked the government for compensation. Everyone within a three-kilometer radius was ordered to evacuate after cyanide was found in wastewater discharge, the People’s Daily reports. At least 114 people are confirmed dead, and 70 people remain missing. Responding to criticism, China’s Communist Party insisted there would be no cover-up.
BRAZILIANS CALL FOR ROUSSEFF IMPEACHMENT
Photo: Rahel Patrasso/Xinhua/ZUMA
Hundreds of thousands of Brazilians took to the streets in cities across the country Sunday, calling for Dilma Rousseff’s resignation as the Brazilian president and her party face corruption allegations. Read more in our Extra! feature.
30 MINUTES
North Korean clocks were set back 30 minutes Saturday as the country returned to its former time zone to commemorate the 70th anniversary of its liberation from Japanese colonial rule at the end of World War II. “Pyongyang Time” was established in the then-unified Korean peninsula in 1908 and was changed in 1912, two years after Japanese colonization.
INDONESIAN PLANE WRECKAGE FOUND
Search teams have spotted the wreckage of an airliner that disappeared amid bad weather in Indonesia’s mountainous Papua region, AFP reports. The plane, which is believed to have crashed about 10 minutes before reaching its destination, was carrying 54 people and the equivalent of $470,000 in cash for poor families in the remote region.
ON THIS DAY
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This day in 1978 marked the first successful passage of a hot air balloon across the Atlantic Ocean. More in today’s shot of history.
SYRIA AIRSTRIKES HIT MARKETPLACE
At least 110 people died and 300 were wounded in the Syrian town of Douma, east of Damascus, after a series of government airstrikes on a marketplace Sunday, Al Jazeera quotes the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights as saying. The strikes reportedly targeted a rebel group that fired rockets into Damascus, and they represented the second attack on the same marketplace after last Wednesday’s strikes, which killed at least 37 people.
VERBATIM
“I strongly believe that anyone working in a company that really is like the one described in the NYT would be crazy to stay. I know I would leave such a company,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos wrote in a memo to company employees after a damning New York Times piece portrayed the retail giant as a ruthless workplace where workers are pushed to breaking point.
ISRAEL-HAMAS CLOSE TO DEAL
Israel and the Palestinian organization Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, are close to signing a “comprehensive” agreement that would end the enclave’s eight-year blockade and establish a long-term ceasefire, a senior adviser to Turkey’s prime minister told a Gaza newspaper. Such a deal could lead to normalization of Israel-Turkey relations, with Ankara looking to build a port in Gaza and to create a “safe passage” to Northern Cyprus. Israel’s daily Haaretz notes that comments from such a senior source suggest real progress. Meanwhile, some Palestinian factions don’t support the move, fearing it could endanger the “political unity of Gaza and the West Bank as stipulated by the Oslo Accords,” The Times of Israel reports.
WORLDCRUNCH-TO-GO
Mexican journalist Anabel Hernandez’s corruption investigations led to death threats and persecution against her. She has been forced to flee her country, but many of her colleagues were murdered before they could do the same, she writes in an essay for La Stampa. “I have personally been receiving death threats since 2010 for revealing documented links between the Mexican government and the Sinaloa Cartel. My sources were killed, and my family and friends have suffered horrible attacks and acts of intimidation. In December 2013, in revenge for the fact that I continued to investigate corruption among federal police leaders, they came to my house in Mexico City and held one of my bodyguards hostage, threatening my neighbors and pointing a gun to the head of a 6-year-old girl so that they could find out where I was.”
Read the full article, The Death Of Freedom In My Corrupt Mexico.
MY GRAND-PÈRE’S WORLD
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A BOOK TO KILL ‘EM ALL
Meet the “drinkable book,” a hardcover whose pages can filter dirty water to kill 99% of bacteria and make it safe for consumption.