DHAKA – Lightning strikes have killed an unprecedented 59 people in Bangladesh in three days as tropical thunderstorms hit the country before the annual monsoon, an official said Sunday.

Thirty-four people were killed on Thursday in different locations and another 25 over the next two days around the country, disaster management department chief Reaz Ahmed told AFP.

“We’ve not seen such a huge number of deaths due to lightning before,” Ahmed said, adding most of the victims were farmers struck while working in their rice paddy fields.

Lightning in the course of tropical storms usually strikes Bangladesh during the pre-monsoon and the monsoon season, which runs from June to September.

According to the disaster management department, 200 people have died on average every year from lightning strikes since 2011.

Weather expert Shah Alam said deforestation was to blame for the increased number of deaths, especially the cutting down of taller trees like palms that used to attract lightning bolts.

Old man gets up unscathed when struck by lightning

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Stomp, YouTube screengrabs

Alam, a former head of the Bangladesh Meteorological Department, said farmers and other labourers were also carrying more metal objects such as cellphones than before. Many were also working through the storms rather than traditionally waiting until they had passed.

Authorities said they plan to launch an awareness campaign from Monday on the dangers.

“We’ll ask the people not to work in open spaces such as farmland, avoid the use of electronic gadgets such as mobile phones and not to stand under metal electric poles or big trees during lightning,” Ahmed said.

Ahmed said authorities would also conduct research to determine whether the ferocity of the lightning storms was linked to warmer temperatures from climate change.

The meteorological department has already trained 20,000 school students on preventive measures during lightning.

Storm chaser films himself surviving a lightning strike

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YouTube screengrabs

BEIJING – Chinese police have arrested a man who has been on the run since allegedly hacking a family of six to death 25 years ago, state media reported Sunday.

The suspect, identified as Guo, murdered the family with an axe after a dispute “over trivial matters” in March 1991 and has reportedly confessed to the crime, Xinhua news agency quoted local police as saying.

Guo said the killings were an act of revenge after his own wife was sexually harassed by a man from the family, according to the official Life Daily.

He was quoted by the newspaper as saying he “entered the courtyard in the early morning, saw a woman in the bathroom and killed her with an axe before attacking five other people”.

The oldest victim was in his 80s and the youngest was 11, Life Daily added.

According to police, Guo said he “hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in more than 20 years on the run, often waking up with a start with sweaty palms”, Life Daily reported.

Guo, who was convicted of rape before the 1991 murders, fled several thousand kilometres to Shandong province in China’s east after the murders in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang.

He then headed to Xinjiang in the northwest, on the other side of the country, where he worked odd jobs.

Guo was finally arrested in Xinjiang after investigators discovered a mobile phone registered in the area under his wife’s name.

The case is still under investigation, according to Xinhua.

The Cultural Revolution is no longer just an ugly chapter in China’s past. Its brutal legacy haunts President Xi Jinping’s ‘China dream’

Fifty years ago, on May 16, Mao Zedong unleashed an attack aimed at smashing his own Communist Party apparatus from top to bottom, having concluded that it was going capitalist.

“Bombard the headquarters!” he urged the masses in a famous People’s Daily article. Millions of young zealots responded, becoming Mao’s Red Guards, his fanatical foot-soldiers.

Thus began China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a period of murderous insanity that ended only with Mao’s death a decade later, in 1976.

Nothing could be further from the tactics of President Xi Jinping today as he seeks to rid the party of the ills that he fears could lead to its extinction-corruption, moral decay, the loss of will to fight for a cause.

The cult of Mao

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Reuters

His response has been to impose rigid order from on high, to stifle criticism-party members are forbidden from engaging in “improper discussion”-and to crush organised dissent, no matter how mild. Draconian media censorship has silenced debate on the Internet.

Yet, despite these obvious differences, Mr. Xi has spent his first three years in office resurrecting Mao, borrowing his rhetoric and aping his practices.

He has concentrated power in his own hands and flirted with a personality cult-the most haunting symbol of the Cultural Revolution, in which blind worship of a supreme leader kindled years of convulsive violence.

As many as 1.5 million Chinese were beaten to death, driven to suicide or killed in fighting among Red Guard factions.

Today’s China is nowhere near the point of another Cultural Revolution, and the 50th anniversary of the start of that traumatic era will go unmarked in official circles. Chinese leaders “are frightened of the Cultural Revolution,” says the historian Frank Dikötter. “They think that’s what might happen if you give ordinary people a say.”

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The cult of China’s Mao Zedong

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Internet screengrabs, Reuters, The Straits Times

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AFP, Reuters

HONG KONG – The massive leak of documents known as the Panama Papers suggests that Hong Kong has played a role of connecting China’s elite with a global network of tax havens.

Top officials in China’s Communist Party are tied to this link via relatives who have established permanent residency in Hong Kong.

Family members of sitting senior party officials have used identification issued by the Hong Kong government to set up investment companies in tax havens such as the British Virgin Islands, newspaper Ming Pao and other media here reported in early May. Those reports are drawn from millions of files from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, of which Ming Pao is a collaborator.

The daughter-in-law of Liu Yunshan, a member of the Politburo Standing Committee and fifth-ranking member of the Communist Party, apparently acquired Hong Kong permanent residency in 2008. The daughter and son-in-law of Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli are reported to reside in a luxury property in the city and go by names pronounced in Cantonese. Relatives of former top officials, including Premier Li Peng and the late Deng Xiaoping, have also made Hong Kong their permanent home.

These family members’ reasons for obtaining Hong Kong residency are unclear. One financial industry insider speculated that the comparative ease of doing business in the city could be a driving factor, noting that firmer rule of law in Hong Kong than on the mainland makes real estate investment safer.

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Panama Papers: Secret accounts of the rich and powerful

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AFP, Reuters, The Star/ANN