Chinese authorities arrest 2 for smashing shortcut through Great Wall with excavator
Beijing, Sep 6: China’s Great Wall has been pierced by Genghis Khan, the Manchus, and now, allegedly, a couple of construction workers named Zheng and Wang who wanted a shortcut.
Authorities in China arrested two people for smashing a path through a section of the ancient wall, a cultural icon and United Nations protected heritage site.
The area of the breach was a broken-down section far from the restored segments most Chinese and foreign tourists are familiar with.
The government of Youyu County, hundreds of kilometres west of Beijing showed a dirt road cut through a section of the wall against a rural landscape, along with the two suspects, identified as a 38-year-old man surnamed Zheng and a 55-year-old woman surnamed Wang.
The pair wanted a shorter route for some construction work they were doing in nearby towns, the government report said.
The section lies in Shanxi province at the western extreme of the wall, parts of which was constructed 2,000 years ago. It’s relatively well preserved and holds “important preservation and research value”, the local government said.
China places immense pride in the system of towers and connecting walls wide enough for carriages to pass that stretch approximately 8,850 kilometres, built mainly during the Ming dynasty that lasted until 1644. In that year, Manchu tribespeople from the north overcame China’s defences and took over the empire as the Qing dynasty.
The wall was subsequently abandoned and plundered for bricks and stones by local villagers, only to be revived by the Communist government as a symbol of patriotism, mass mobilisation and resistance to outside pressure. (AP)
Russian, French sailors rescued off Australian coast after sharks attack their boat
Brisbane, Sep 6: Three sailors from Russia and France were rescued on Wednesday after the inflatable catamaran they were trying to navigate from Vanuatu to Australia came under attack from sharks, authorities said.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority said it responded to an alert from an emergency beacon at about 1:30 am. When rescuers arrived at the scene more than 800 kilometres east of the Australian coast in the Coral Sea, they found both hulls of the men’s 9-metre boat had been damaged after several shark attacks.
The agency enlisted the help of a Panamanian-flagged ship, the vehicle-carrying “Dugong Ace,” which was able to complete the rescue and take the two Russians and one Frenchman aboard. A rescue plane also flew to the scene.
“The three males were very happy to be rescued, and they’re all healthy and well,” said Joe Zeller, duty manager at the agency’s Canberra response centre.
The men, aged between 28 and 64, are due to arrive in the Australian city of Brisbane on Thursday.
Zeller said a journey from the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu to Australia on such a vessel would usually take two to three weeks.
Aerial photos showed major damage to the catamaran, with the front section of one hull completely missing.
Zeller said the GPS-encoded emergency beacon had saved the men’s lives by allowing rescuers to quickly pinpoint their location and mount an appropriate rescue. He said there were many reasons why a shark may attack a boat.
“However, the motivations of these sharks is unclear,” Zeller said. (AP)