Death toll rises as heat wave drags on
Hastert hush Baghdad blasts ‘Legally sane’ Jihadi brides
HOSPITALS were stretched to breaking point yesterday as India scrambled to cope with a heatwave that has killed 1677 people in the past week.
In Delhi, where roads have melted in temperatures exceeding 45 degrees Celsius, long queues appeared outside hospitals overflowing with heatstroke victims. ‘‘Patients are complaining of severe headache and dizziness,’’ Ajay Lekhi, president of the Delhi Medical Association, said. ‘‘They are also showing symptoms of delirium.’’
The industrial city of Nagpur in Maharashtra, east of Mumbai, was the hottest place in India, with temperatures exceeding 47C.
In the southern states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, where more than 1400 deaths have been reported – mostly among farmers and labourers – doctors were ordered to cancel all leave and the authorities advised people to stay indoors. Officials also advised residents to drink fluids, including salted buttermilk, a mildly spiced milk drink considered the ultimate way to keep cool.
Many labourers said they had no choice but to work in a country where 700 million people live on less than $2 a day.
The Times
Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree yesterday outlawing disclosure of military deaths in peacetime, a move apparently aimed at hiding evidence of Russian military involvement in the war in eastern Ukraine.
The decree published on the government information portal amends a 1995 list of state secrets to add military deaths ‘‘in peacetime during special operations’’ to the already classified ‘‘information disclosing losses in manpower in wartime,’’ the Tass news agency reported.
Putin has denied funnelling Russian troops or arms to proRussia separatists waging war against Ukrainian government forces for control of the country’s eastern industrial region along the Don River basin, known as the Donbas. But captured active-duty Russian troops, including two special forces officers taken prisoner this month, have conceded to Ukrainian authorities that they were dispatched by the Russian military to back the separatists.
Media attempts to report on funerals of Russian soldiers whose bodies were returned from the Donbas battlefields have also been disrupted, with reporters and activists beaten when discovered at the gravesides.
Amnesty International denounced the new decree as an infringement on press freedom and an apparent attempt to hide illegal involvement in a sovereign neighbour’s affairs.
‘‘Not only is this decree a blatant attack on freedom of expression, it also has sinister undertones that will intensify speculation President Putin has something to hide — specifically losses incurred by Russia’s military in Ukraine,’’ John Dalhuisen, Amnesty’s Europe and Central Asia director, said in a statement posted on the rights group’s website.
Dalhuisen said the move also increases fear for the safety of Russian journalists and activists ‘‘who have already faced harassment for trying to independently cover the conflict in Ukraine.’’ His statement cited an August 29 incident in the northwest Pskov region when local lawmaker Lev Shlosberg was hospitalised with head injuries after being beaten, reportedly for disclosing the first secret funerals of Russian war dead from Ukraine on his online news site.
UN rights agencies estimate that at least 6300 people– many of them civilians – have been killed in eastern Ukraine since the separatists seized the governing headquarters of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in April 2014. The Ukrainian government says the death toll is more than 8600.
LA Times
Former US House Speaker Dennis Hastert agreed to pay US$3.5 million in hush money to keep an unidentified person silent about ‘‘prior misconduct’’ by the Illinois Republican who was once third in line to the US presidency, according to a federal grand jury indictment handed down yesterday in Chicago. The indictment, which does not describe the misconduct Hastert was allegedly trying to conceal, charges the 73-year-old with one count of evading bank regulations as he withdrew tens of thousands of dollars at a time to make the payments. He is also charged with one count of lying to the FBI about the reason for the unusual bank withdrawals.
Car bombs have ripped through car parks at two high-profile Baghdad hotels, killing at least five people. The explosions, just before midnight on Thursday, were heard across the city centre. At least 13 people were also wounded.
The man who killed 12 strangers and wounded scores of others in a suburban Denver movie theatre was mentally ill but legally sane, a courtappointed psychiatrist testified yesterday. Prosecutors called Dr William Reid to testify as they meticulously painted a portrait of James Holmes as a calculating if unstable killer. Holmes pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
At least a dozen Melbourne women have tried to join Islamic State militants in Middle East conflict zones, and authorities say there could be more. Victorian police have identified a trend among some young women, who’ve formed a ‘‘romantic view’’ of the terror group and decided to flee to Syria. Assistant Commissioner Tracy Linford said most of the 12 were aged 18 to 20, with five making it to Syria, four turned back in Turkey, one stopped in Australia and two unaccounted for. ‘‘They think they will be put on a pedestal and treated very well overseas, but the reality is that is not the case,’’ Linford said yesterday.