World in brief: Fires in southern Greece kill 18
Fires raced across dry woodlands in southern Greece on Friday, sweeping into mountainous towns and villages and killing at least 18 people, the country’s deadliest forest fire toll in decades, officials said.
Hot, dry winds – at times gusting to gale force – fueled the flames and prevented firefighting planes from taking off. That left just ground forces to deal with fires scorching the rugged mountains of the southern Peloponnese and elsewhere, occasionally helped by helicopters and residents using their garden hoses.
Scores of separate fires burned in several parts of Greece with the most concentrated blazes in the rugged mountains of the Peloponnese region to the southwest of Athens, officials said. A recent heat wave with temperatures reaching 104 degrees has left many forests and scrublands tinder- dry.
Hong Kong
China bans surgery television shows
The Chinese government banned television shows about cosmetic surgery and sex changes Friday, less than two weeks after shutting down a talent show that regulators deemed coarse.
The Beijing News newspaper said the order singled out southern Guangdong province’s public broadcaster’s “A New Date with Beauty,” which it described as involving live shows of cosmetic surgery.
The order said such programs, and those about sex changes, show “bloody imagery” and called the shows “explicit, cheap in tone,” the newspaper said.
Moscow
Possible Romanov find investigated
Prosecutors announced Friday that they have reopened an investigation into the deaths of the last Russian czar and his family nearly 90 years ago after an archaeologist reported that he may have found the missing remains of Nicholas II’s son and heir to the throne.
The announcement of the reopened investigation signaled the government might be taking seriously the claims made Thursday by Yekaterinburg researcher Sergei Pogorelov.
In comments broadcast on NTV, Pogorelov said bones found in a burned area of ground near Yekaterinburg belong to a boy and a young woman roughly the ages of Nicholas’ 13-year-old hemophiliac son, Alexei, and a daughter whose remains also never have been found.
Yekaterinburg is the Urals Mountain city where Czar Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra, and their five children were held prisoner by the communists and then shot in 1918.
If confirmed, the find would fill in a missing chapter in the story of the doomed Romanovs, whose reign was ended by the violent 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that ushered in more than 70 years of Communist Party rule.