Paris evacuates, bulldozes tent camp
PARIS — Paris police evacuated hundreds of people Tuesday from a makeshift tent camp near a major train station and tourist area, then bulldozed their leftover debris.
The people, mostly from East Africa, traveled on long journeys to reach the French capital but have found themselves in legal limbo, with few prospects for asylum or jobs.
Anger at their presence and concerns about health issues have mounted among locals. In response, police in dozens of vehicles roped off the area near the famed Sacre Coeur basilica and the Gare du Nord train station Tuesday and sent in specialists to encourage the people to leave.
Paris Police Chief Bernard Boucault said the action was taken because of the health risks the people faced, including scabies, dysentery and parasite infection.
Officials said about a third of the 380 people in the camp had applied for asylum in France, while most of the others were planning to head to places like Britain, Germany and the Nordic countries.
4 in aid group’s copter die in Nepal crash
KATHMANDU, Nepal — A helicopter chartered by Doctors Without Borders crashed in earthquake-damaged northeast Nepal on Tuesday and four people on board were killed, police and the aid group said.
The helicopter was returning to Kathmandu when it crashed on Yamuna Danda hill near Balefi village, Nepal police spokesman Kamal Singh Bam said.
The bodies of three men and a woman were recovered, and police rescuers were trying to return the bodies to Kathmandu, he said.
The website of the aid group confirmed it had chartered the flight to deliver relief materials to a severely damaged region and said it was working to confirm the victim’s identities. The group’s Dutch branch said one victim was Dutch but did not release the person’s identity.
A U.S. Marines UH-1 “Huey” helicopter crashed last month in a nearby district while on a rescue mission, killing six Marines and two Nepalese soldiers.
The earthquakes on April 25 and May 12 in Nepal killed more than 8,600 people.
4th Mexico candidate since March slain
MEXICO CITY — A Mexican congressional candidate was shot dead in a town bordering the capital Tuesday, becoming the fourth politician to be slain ahead of Sunday’s midterm elections.
Miguel Angel Luna, a former mayor of Valle de Chalco in the state of Mexico southeast of Mexico City, was attacked by armed men at his campaign offices, according to a statement from his Democratic Revolution Party. Luna died shortly afterward at a hospital. An assistant was wounded.
Since March, two candidates running in mayoral races have been slain in the southern states of Michoacan and Guerrero and a third woman who was planning to run in Guerrero was killed.
Also in Guerrero, an armed group broke into electoral offices in the city of Tlapa and burned more than 116,000 ballots, the state electoral institute reported.
The attack followed similar ballot burnings and thefts in neighboring Oaxaca state.
Groups of unionized teachers have vowed to block Sunday’s voting for the lower house of congress, nine governorships and hundreds of mayorships.
The teachers oppose a 2013 education overhaul that requires competitive testing for teachers. They say those tests don’t measure teaching skills or the special knowledge needed to teach in Indian and rural areas.
Authorities have pledged to reprint or replace lost or stolen ballots.
Middle East disease kills 2 in S. Korea
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea on Tuesday confirmed the country’s first two deaths from Middle East Respiratory Syndrome as it fights to contain the spread of a virus that has killed hundreds of people in the Middle East.
South Korea has reported 24 cases of the disease since diagnosing the country’s first syndrome illness last month in a man who had traveled to Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries. Most of South Korea’s cases have had connections to the first patient — either medical staff members who treated him or patients who stayed near him at the hospital before he was diagnosed and isolated, and their family members.
Tests on a 58-year-old woman who died of acute respiratory failure Monday showed she had been infected with the disease before her death, the Health Ministry said in a statement. A 71-year-old man who tested positive for the virus last week also died, it said.
Health officials said Tuesday that about 750 people in South Korea were isolated at their homes or in state-run facilities after having contact with patients infected with the virus.