NEWS OF THE DAY
From Around the World
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Fake Ferraris: Brazilian police say they’ve shut down a clandestine factory that was producing fake Ferraris and sham Lamborghinis. A father and son who owned the workshop in the southern state of Santa Catarina have been arrested on industrial property charges. Police said the cars were being offered on social media for $45,000 to $60,000 — a small fraction of the price of the real thing.
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Notre Dame restoration: A French architect says that Notre Dame Cathedral still isn’t safe enough for restoration work to begin, more than three months after a devastating fire nearly destroyed the Paris monument. French television showed the chief architect of France’s historic monuments, Philippe Villeneuve, taking Culture Minister Franck Riester on a tour Wednesday of the cathedral, which President Emmanuel Macron wants restored in five years. Currently, three jagged openings mar Notre Dame’s vaulted ceiling, the stone of the structure is precarious, and the roof is gone. Some 150 workers remain busy recovering the stones, shoring up the building, and protecting it with two giant tarps.
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Building collapse: Rescuers found 14 bodies and pulled out 11 survivors as they began winding down operations at the site of a dilapidated building that collapsed in India’s financial capital of Mumbai, an official said Wednesday. Bijendra Dahiya, a National Disaster Response Force official, said workers were still looking for two to three people feared trapped in the rubble. Heavy monsoon rains fall in India from June to September, causing severe flooding and collapsing poorly built and dilapidated structures. At least four other collapses have occurred this month in Mumbai and another western city, Pune, killing at least 31 people. On Sunday, a building collapse in the northern town of Solan killed 14 people.
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Missing ship: The Iranian Foreign Ministry said security forces recently came to the aid of a foreign oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, hours after reports that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard might have seized a tanker from the United Arab Emirates over the weekend. Abbas Mousavi, Foreign Ministry spokesman, said that Iranian forces had rushed to the aid of an unidentified tanker that had sent a distress call after a “technical glitch.” He said that tugboats had towed it toward Iranian waters for repairs. Mousavi did not say what nation the ship was from, who owned it or what its current status was. The Strait of Hormuz connects the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman, and 20% of the world’s oil passes through the narrow waterway. In recent weeks, it has been the site of several tense episodes that have increasingly strained the relationship between Iran and the United States.
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Ebola outbreak: The deadly Ebola outbreak in Congo is now an international health emergency, the World Health Organization announced Wednesday after a case was confirmed in Goma, a city of 2 million people. A WHO expert committee declined on three previous occasions to advise the U.N. health agency to make the declaration for this outbreak, even though other experts say it has long met the conditions. More than 1,600 people have died since August in the seconddeadliest Ebola outbreak in history, which is unfolding in a region described as a war zone. A declaration of a global health emergency often brings greater international attention and aid. Chronicle News Services