Horror history
On February 8, dancers perform at the Taipei Peace Park during the anniversary of the 1947 massacre, in which thousands of Taiwanese people were killed by nationalist Kuomintang troops from China. — AFP
Rings arrested
Child traffickers caught
Beijing — Chinese police detained 1,094 people and rescued 382 infants in a nationwide crackdown on four online baby trafficking rings, state media reported on February 28.
Child trafficking is widespread in China, where population control rules have bolstered a traditional bias for sons, seen as the support of elderly parents and heirs to the family name, and led to the abortion, killing or abandonment of girls. — Reuters
Fired up
Blazes cause thick haze
Jakarta — An Indonesian province has been declared a state of emergency after being blanketed in thick haze from forest fires since the middle of February, officials said on February 27.
Thousands of people have fallen ill, transport has been disrupted and schools closed after several days of fires in Riau province on Sumatra Island, where blazes were deliberately lit to clear land for palm oil and wood pulp plantations.
More than two dozen people suspected of starting fires have so far been arrested, national disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said. — AFP
Freedom march
Thousands of protesters on March 2 marched in Hong Kong to support press freedom, following the attack on a former editor of a local liberal newspaper. — AFP
Power failure
Millions affected in Philippines
Manila — Millions of people were left without electricity in southern Philippines on February 27after a massive power breakdown, officials said, as repair crews worked to determine the cause of the outage.
The power cuts began before dawn and affected heavily populated areas in Mindanao, which is home to a quarter of the country’s nearly 100 million population.
“Reports indicate that the Mindanao grid experienced a disturbance at 3:53 am, but we are still determining the cause of the disturbance,” the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines said in a statement. — AFP
Angry protest
Charges dropped over disaster
Tokyo — Hundreds of Japanese rallied on March 2 to protest the decision by prosecutors to drop charges over the Fukushima nuclear crisis, with no one yet punished nearly three years after the disaster.
Nobody has been officially recorded as having died as a direct result of radiation released when a 9.0-magnitude earthquake crashed into the Fukushima nuclear plant in March 2011, swamping cooling systems and sparking reactor meltdowns.
However, some Fukushima residents committed suicide owing to fears over radiation, while others died during evacuation. Tens of thousands of people are still unable to return to their homes around the plant. — AFP
Bodies found
Illegal miners killed
Cape Town — South African emergency workers on February 26 discovered the bodies of five illegal miners outside an abandoned gold mine, Emergency Management Services spokesman Robert Mulaudzi said. Police found the bodies of four men and a woman, he added.
The bodies showed no injuries, but authorities detected some chemical substances which were believed to be lethal carbon monoxide in the area where their bodies were found. — AFP
EASY NEWS FOR M1-3
Big bang
Gas explosion kills nine
Doha — There was a gas explosion. It happened near a shopping mall in Doha, Qatar on February 27. At least nine people were killed. Police were examining the cause of the explosion. — AFP
Exercises
1. What happened on in Mindanao February 27?
a. Electric lights exploded.
b. There was a power outage.
c. A massive earthquake hit the area.
2. A 9.0-magnitude earthquake hit the Fukushima nuclear plant last year. True or false?
3. How many methamphetamine tablets were found inside the spare tyre?
Vocabulary
- ring (n): a group of people who are working together, especially secretly or illegally
bolster (v): to improve something or make it stronger
outage (n): a period of time when the supply of electricity, etc. is not working
meltdown (n): a serious accident in which the central part of a nuclear reactor melts, causing harmful radiation to escape
carbon monoxide (n): a poisonous gas formed when carbon burns partly but not completely
