Briefly

SOUTH ASIA

Floods, landslides claim at least 221 lives

Floods and landslides triggered by heavy monsoon rains have killed at least 221 people across South Asia over the past month, officials said on Friday. More than 1 million people have been marooned in Nepal, Bangladesh and India and hundreds of thousands have fled their homes for higher ground. Indian officials said floods and mudslides killed 16 more people in the northeast and eight people were killed in building collapses in Mumbai, raising the death toll in the country to 101. Nepal reported at least 117 deaths over the past month and Bangladesh added three. Annual monsoon rains hit the region from June to September. The rains are crucial for rain-fed crops planted during the season but often cause extensive damage.

JAPAN

PM Abe faces anger over tourism subsidy

The Japanese government is facing potentially damaging blow-back after excluding Tokyo residents from a multibillion-dollar campaign aimed at reviving domestic tourism, even as the capital on Friday reported a record number of new COVID-19 cases. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's $16 billion "Go To" tourism campaign was intended to promote travel across the country, but officials agreed on Thursday to exclude Tokyo because of the resurgence in infections there. Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike reported 293 new cases on Friday, a fresh daily record after the city recorded 286 cases a day earlier.

UNITED KINGDOM

BA retires entire Boeing jumbo fleet

British Airways, the world's largest operator of the Boeing 747, said on Thursday that it would retire its entire jumbo jet fleet with immediate effect due to the downturn in the travel industry caused by the coronavirus pandemic. BA, which is owned by International Consolidated Airlines Group, added that it will operate more flights on modern, fuel-efficient aircraft such as its new Airbus A350s and Boeing 787s and expects such aircraft to help in achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The Sun newspaper reported last month that BA had reached an agreement with its pilots to sack 350 of them, with a further 300"in pool" for rehiring when needed.

UNITED STATES

Orbiter snaps closest pictures of sun

A European and NASA spacecraft has snapped the closest pictures ever taken of the sun, revealing countless little "campfires" flaring everywhere. Scientists on Thursday released the first images taken by Solar Orbiter, launched from Cape Canaveral in February. The orbiter was about 77 million kilometers from the sun－about halfway between Earth and the sun－when it took the stunning high-resolution pictures last month. The $1.5 billion spacecraft will tilt its orbit as the mission goes on, providing unprecedented views of the sun's poles. This vantage point will allow it to capture the first pictures of the solar poles.

Agencies - Xinhua