Vadodara, India
AP
 — 

At least nine people were killed after a bridge over a river collapsed in India’s western Gujarat state on Wednesday, news agency Press Trust of India reported while quoting police officials.

Gujarat’s Health Minister Rushikesh Patel said several vehicles were on the bridge when a portion of it collapsed, sending many into the river. He said at least five people were rescued.

The incident occurred in Gujarat’s Vadodara district, which has witnessed heavy rains over the past few days. The bridge was constructed in 1985, Patel said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the accident was ”deeply saddening” and offered condolences to those who died.

India’s infrastructure has long been marred by safety concerns, sometimes leading to major disasters on its highways and bridges.

In 2022, a century-old cable suspension bridge collapsed into a river in Gujarat, sending hundreds plunging into the water and killing at least 132.

Hong Kong
CNN
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More than 200 kindergarten students in northwestern China were found to have abnormal blood lead levels after kitchen staff used paint as food coloring, authorities said, in a case that’s stoked outrage in a country long plagued by food safety scandals.

Eight people, including the principal of the private kindergarten that the children attended, have been detained “on suspicion of producing toxic and harmful food,” according to a report released Tuesday by Tianshui city government, as cited by Chinese state broadcaster CCTV.

The principal and a financial backer of the school had allowed kitchen staff at the Heshi Peixin Kindergarten to use paint pigments to color the children’s food, leading to contamination, according to the report, which followed a days-long but ongoing probe into the cases.

Of the 251 students enrolled at the kindergarten, 233 were found to have abnormal levels of lead in their blood, the report found. The children were undergoing medical treatment with 201 of them currently in hospital, authorities said. Medical evaluation on the effects of their exposure, which can cause long-term and developmental harm, were not yet made public.

Local media cited a pediatrics professor as saying aspects of the case suggest there could be chronic lead poisoning, meaning exposure over a period of more than three months.

During the investigation, two food samples from the kindergarten – a red date steamed breakfast cake and a sausage corn roll – were found to have lead levels more than 2,000 times the national food safety standard for contamination, according to figures cited in the investigation report.

Buckets containing the paint were also seized by authorities and found to contain lead – and were clearly labeled as non-edible products, the report said. Tianshui’s top law enforcement official told CCTV that the principal and his investor had aimed to “attract more enrollment and increase revenue” with the colorful food. CNN has reached out to Heshi Peixin Kindergarten several times for comment.

Authorities said they launched the probe on July 1 after becoming aware of reports that children at the school had abnormal blood lead levels. Lead exposure in children can lead to severe consequences, including impacting children’s brain development, behavior and IQ.

The government report did not disclose how long the exposure had gone on, with some affected parents interviewed by state media saying they had noticed abnormal signs in their children’s health and behavior for months – and clamoring for more answers about how the exposure happened.

“My mind went blank,” a mother of one affected student told state media after learning from a hospital in a nearby city that her child had a blood lead level of 528 micrograms per liter – a revelation that came after she said a local department in Tianshui told her the blood levels were normal, according to a report published by outlet China National Radio (CNR). China’s National Health Agency classifies “severe lead poisoning” as anything above 450 micrograms per liter.

“Right now, I’m not thinking about compensation – I just want my child to be healthy,” she was quoted as saying.

The case has raised all-too-familiar concerns in China about food safety as well as the levels of transparency with which such cases are handled – especially in a system where independent journalism is tightly controlled and officials are under pressure to resolve issues quickly.

Earlier this month, after the school conducted tests on the students but did not issue individual results, many parents took their children to Xi’an – a major city a roughly four-hour drive from Tianshui – for testing, according to a report published by a news outlet affiliated with the official People’s Daily.

Reports from state-affiliated media found that 70 children who were tested in Xi’an had blood lead levels surpassing the threshold of lead poisoning, with six of those cases exceeding 450 micrograms per liter. According to China’s official guidelines, this level is classified as “severe.” A full picture of the results from all the students with abnormal levels was not publicly available.

One mother told the People’s Daily-affiliated outlet that she had been confused by her daughter’s constant stomach aches, loss of appetite and behavioral changes over the past six months, which didn’t improve after treating her with traditional Chinese medicine.

Others expressed skepticism about the results of the official investigation.

“The children only eat three-color jujube steamed cake and corn sausage rolls once or twice a week, how could they be poisoned so seriously?” one mother, who gave her surname Wu, told CNR. “If something like this happened to the children in school, at least give us an explanation. Now there is nothing.”

Earlier this week, Tianshui’s mayor Liu Lijiang said the city would “do everything possible to ensure the children’s treatment, rehabilitation and follow-up protection,” while vowing to close “loopholes” in Tianshui’s public food safety supervision.

The case has led to widespread expressions of outrage across Chinese social media, the latest among dozens of high-profile scandals have been reported by local media since the early 2000s.

“Serious accountability must be maintained and food safety issues cannot be ignored or slacked off. When it involves the life safety of young children, severe punishment must be imposed,” wrote one commentator on the X-like platform Weibo.

“Children are the hope of a family. I hope they can recover soon and grow up healthily,” said another.

Past scandals have also impacted children. In one of the most egregious examples, six infants died and some 300,000 others were sickened by milk powder formula containing the toxic industrial chemical melamine. Several executives found to be responsible for the 2008 case were ultimately handed death sentences, and the tragedy drove deep mistrust of domestic products and food safety in China.

Lead poisoning used to be a more widespread issue in China. In 2010, the central government for the first time allocated special funds for heavy metal pollution prevention in response to at least 12 high-profile cases the previous year that left more than 4,000 people with elevated blood lead levels, according to state media.

Officials have also moved to tighten food safety regulations in recent years, but pervasive cases have shown more needs to be done in terms of enforcement and to build back public trust, experts say.

Improving the food regulatory system calls for “more transparency, more thorough investigation of food safety cases,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and author of the book “Toxic Politics: China’s Environmental Health Crisis and its Challenge to the Chinese State.”

Huang also said a lack of public confidence in the safety systems could evolve into a “trust crisis.”

CNN
 — 

(CNN) – The bow of a US Navy cruiser damaged in a World War II battle in the Pacific has shone new light on one of the most remarkable stories in the service’s history.

More than 80 years ago, the crew of the USS New Orleans, having been hit by a Japanese torpedo and losing scores of sailors, performed hasty repairs with coconut logs, before an 1,800-mile voyage across the Pacific in reverse.

The front of the ship, or the bow, had sunk to the sea floor. But over the weekend, the Nautilus Live expedition from the Ocean Exploration Trust located it in 675 meters (2,214 feet) of water in Iron Bottom Sound in the Solomon Islands.

Using remotely operated underwater vehicles, scientists and historians observed “details in the ship’s structure, painting, and anchor to positively identify the wreckage as New Orleans,” the expedition’s website said.

On November 30, 1942, New Orleans was struck on its portside bow during the Battle of Tassafaronga, off Guadalcanal island, according to an official Navy report of the incident.

The torpedo’s explosion ignited ammunition in the New Orleans’ forward ammunition magazine, severing the first 20% of the 588-foot warship and killing more than 180 of its 900 crew members, records state.

The crew worked to close off bulkheads to prevent flooding in the rest of the ship, and it limped into the harbor on the island of Tulagi, where sailors went into the jungle to get repair supplies.

“Camouflaging their ship from air attack, the crew jury-rigged a bow of coconut logs,” a US Navy account states.

With that makeshift bow, the ship steamed – in reverse – some 1,800 miles across the Pacific to Australia for sturdier repairs, according to an account from the National World War II Museum in Louisiana.

Retired US Navy Capt. Carl Schuster described to CNN the remarkable skill involved in sailing a warship backwards for that extended distance.

“‘Difficult’ does not adequately describe the challenge,” Schuster said.

While a ship’s bow is designed to cut through waves, the stern is not, meaning wave action lifts and drops the stern with each trough, he said.

When the stern rises, rudders lose bite in the water, making steering more difficult, Schuster said.

And losing the front portion of the ship changes the ship’s center of maneuverability, or its “pivot point,” he said.

“That affects how the ship responds to sea and wind effects and changes the ship’s response to rudder and propellor actions,” he said.

The New Orleans’ officers would have had to learn – on the go – a whole new set of actions and commands to keep it stable and moving in the right direction, he said.

The ingenuity and adaptiveness that saved the New Orleans at the Battle of Tassafaronga enabled it to be a force later in the war.

After making it across the Pacific from Australia to the US naval yard at Puget Sound, Washington state – facing the right way this time – the New Orleans undertook permanent repairs. It later participated in actions across the Pacific, including the decisive battles of Saipan and Okinawa, which led to the US gaining airfields that enabled the final blows to be made on Imperial Japan.

The ship was awarded 17 battle stars for its actions in the Pacific, tying it for the third most such decorations in the Pacific theater, according to the World War II Museum.

The New Orleans’ bow was found during the 21-day Maritime Archaeology of Guadalcanal expedition of Iron Bottom Sound by Nautilus Live, a cooperative effort among NOAA Ocean Exploration, the Ocean Exploration Cooperative Institute, the University of New Hampshire and the Naval History and Heritage Command.

Iron Bottom Sound was called Savo Sound before World War II, but Allied sailors gave it its current moniker for the huge numbers of warships that sank in battle there.

According to the expedition, five major naval battles were fought there between August and December 1942, resulting in the loss of more than 20,000 lives, 111 naval vessels and 1,450 planes on all sides.

Before the expedition, “fewer than 100 of these US, Japanese, Australian, and New Zealand military ships and planes have been located,” it says on its website.

The expedition began on July 2 and continues until July 23. Its continuing searches are being live streamed at nautiluslive.org.