World News
Shot at, they had no chance: six dead, including two police officers, in Australia
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Sylvie Claire / December 13, 2022
Six people, including two young police officers, died in a shooting and siege of a remote property in the Australian state of Queensland, police said Tuesday.
Four police officers arrived late Monday afternoon at a tree-lined property near the small eastern town of Wieambilla. “As soon as they entered the property, they were riddled with gunfire … they didn’t stand a chance,” said Queensland police union president Ian Leavers.
“Two police officers were executed in cold blood,” he added. Those killed have been identified as Rachel McCrow, 26, and Matthew Arnold, 29. Both had joined law enforcement within the past two years.
“These officers made the ultimate sacrifice to keep our community safe,” Queensland Police Commander Katarina Carroll said, holding back tears. A 58-year-old neighbor was also shot and “pronounced dead at the scene,” police said. An investigation was underway Tuesday.
Two other police officers survived the shooting and were taken to hospital with minor injuries. Among them was a policewoman whom the suspects had tried to dislodge from the brush where she had been hiding, sending desperate messages to her relatives, local media reported.
Aerial images of the scene show an ordinary bungalow with a zinc roof, a burnt vehicle and smoke still around the property.
After the first shots were fired, a special response team of more than a dozen members was dispatched to the scene, backed by air support.
Shortly after 10:30 p.m. local time, after a siege lasting several hours, three suspects – two men and a woman – died. Their identities have not been released by the police.
Law enforcement was conducting a search regarding the 2021 disappearance of a former elementary school principal, according to local media. The property was registered to the missing man’s brother and sister-in-law, according to local media.
The missing man’s brother was a regular contributor to conspiracy theory sites that denounced “secret societies” and the alleged conduct of “false flag operations” by secret intelligence agents, according to local media.
Shootings are rare in Australia, which has some of the strictest gun legislation in the world.
A ban on automatic and semi-automatic weapons has been in place since a 1996 shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania, when a lone gunman shot 35 people.
Premier Anthony Albanese called the events in Wieambilla “horrific” and said it was a “heartbreaking day for the families and friends of Queensland police officers who lost their lives in the line of duty. Queensland state officials ordered flags on government buildings to be flown at half-mast.
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Sylvie Claire / September 23, 2023
At least 25 people, including two children, died when a bus crashed into a ravine in the Andean region of Huancavelica, in southern Peru, the authorities announced in a revised death toll on Monday evening.
An initial police report put the death toll at 20, with a further 35 injured. A statement from the Ministry of Health later that morning put the death toll at 24. Finally, at the end of the day on Monday, the death toll stood at “25 dead and 34 wounded”, according to the Ministry of Defense.
The accident occurred on Sunday night, when the bus carrying over 50 passengers from Huanta in Ayacucho to Huancayo in the Junin region ran off the road.
Images show the damaged bus lying on its side near a river below the ravine, debris and personal belongings strewn all around.
Peruvian President Dina Boluarte expressed her “condolences to the families” from New York, where she will be attending the 78th General Assembly of the United Nations. The Peruvian Episcopal Conference, for its part, urged the government to “carry out a serious investigation” to prevent such accidents from happening again.
On August 13, another accident in the same region left 13 people dead and 5 seriously injured.
Road accidents are frequent in Peru, mainly due to speeding and poor road maintenance, especially in mountainous areas.
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Sylvie Claire / September 17, 2023
In Japan, the number of people aged 100 has reached a record level: the world’s third-largest economy now has 92,139 people aged 100 or over. That’s 1,613 more than a year ago, reported the Ministry of Health in Tokyo on Friday.
For over half a century, the number of people aged 100 has been rising every year. Due to a low birth rate and almost non-existent immigration, no other industrial state is aging as fast as this East Asian country.
Japan’s population is also shrinking at a record pace. Last year, the number of Japanese fell by 801,000, the biggest drop since comparable data have been recorded. There are now 122.4 million.
When the Japanese Ministry of Health began compiling statistics in 1963, there were 153 centenarians. Twenty-five years later, there were over 10,000. According to the latest figures, around 88% of centenarians are women. Japan has the longest life expectancy in the world. Life expectancy for women is around 87 years, and 81 for men.
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Steph Deschamps / September 17, 2023
The death toll from the earthquake in Morocco has risen to 2,946, the Moroccan Ministry of the Interior announced on Wednesday evening. A further 5,674 people were injured.
The previous death toll was 2,901. The death toll is expected to rise further. Hopes of finding survivors are now very slim. Rescue workers have not yet been able to reach all the villages affected in the Atlas Mountains.
A magnitude 6.8 earthquake struck the country on Friday night. The epicenter was located some 80 kilometers southwest of Marrakech. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over 300,000 people in and around Marrakech were affected by the disaster.
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