Beijing

Autonomous submersible makes maiden dive

An unmanned autonomous underwater vehicle developed by Chinese scientists has successfully completed a dive to 5,080 meters underwater in the open sea, the State Oceanic Administration said on Friday. The unmanned vehicle Qianlong-1 is a robot that can travel to a depth of 6,000 meters. Created to explore the seabed and collect hydrological data, the vehicle left Honolulu, Hawaii, onboard the Chinese research vessel Haiyang-6 on Sept 28 for the eastern Pacific Ocean. It made its first dive on Oct 6. That was the first time an autonomous Chinese underwater vehicle has been used for a scientific expedition.

Qinghai

5 buried and others injured in building collapse

Five people have been buried and 16 others injured when a building collapsed on Saturday afternoon in Qinghai province, local authorities said. The collapse happened at a construction site in the Haixi Mongolian-Tibetan autonomous prefecture, according to sources with the CPC party committee of the prefecture. The cause of the accident is being investigated.

Chongqing

Beam causes bridge collapse leaving 2 missing

An unstable beam carried by a crane caused an under-construction bridge to collapse in Chongqing on Saturday morning. The initial investigation found the beam fell and struck steel cofferdams that supported a pier of the bridge in Fengdu county, the county's publicity department said. The bridge was being built across the Yangtze River. At least two people were missing and another two were slightly injured as a result of the accident. The injured are being treated in a local hospital. Search and rescue work was still underway on Saturday.

United States

Obama and Republicans search for fiscal deal

US President Barack Obama and congressional Republican leaders inched toward resolving their fiscal impasse on Friday but struggled to agree on the length and terms of a short-term deal to increase the US debt limit and reopen the government. Obama met Senate Republicans at the White House and spoke by phone to House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner as negotiations intensified on how to get hundreds of thousands of federal workers back on the job and extend the government's borrowing authority past the Oct 17 limit. Lawmakers announced a goal of finishing a deal by early next week.

Libya

Libyan PM calls brief abduction a 'coup' by foes

Libya's Prime Minister Ali Zeidan said on Friday former rebels who abducted him briefly were part of an attempted "coup" by his opponents in the country's legislature, accusing them of seeking to undermine his government. Gunmen snatched Zeidan from the Tripoli hotel where he lives during a dawn raid on Thursday only to release him hours later in an incident that showed how far Libya has descended into militia-plagued chaos two years after Muammar Gaddafi's fall.

Russia

Laptops Snowden took were diversions

The four laptop computers that former US spy contractor Edward Snowden carried with him to Hong Kong and Moscow were a "diversion" and contained no secrets, according to an ex-CIA official who met with Snowden in Russia this week. The classified documents that Snowden had downloaded from the US National Security Agency were stored on smaller devices, such as hard drives and thumb drives, and they have not been turned over to the Russian or Chinese authorities, said Ray McGovern, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst.

Dominican Republic

Court nullifies citizenship of hundreds of thousands

Last month, the Domincan Republic's Constitutional Court issued a decision effectively denationalizing an estimated 250,000 immigrants born after 1929. The Sept 23 court ruling retroactively denies Dominican nationality to anyone born after 1929 without at least one parent of Dominican blood, under a constitutional clause declaring all others to be either in the country illegally or "in transit".

Xinhua - Reuters

Fire on the water A boat sprays water to extinguish flames on an exploded oil tanker. An unknown amount of oil was leaking into the Yongjiang River in Zhejiang province's Ningbo after the blast killed at least seven people on Saturday morning. Photo by Zhang Peijian / for China Daily

(China Daily 10/13/2013 page2)