France dismantles camp for migrants
CALAIS, France — Workers in hard hats and orange jumpsuits on Tuesday started dismantling a makeshift camp in France that has become a symbol of Europe’s migrant crisis, as thousands of people remained there waiting to be relocated.
The workers used their gloved hands to tear down flimsy plywood shelters, tarp-covered huts and other temporary buildings at the camp in the port city of Calais that’s known as “the jungle.” Backhoes, construction dumpsters and trucks carted off the debris.
The demolition took place under the watch of police officers as authorities are emptying the camp of an estimated 6,300 people who have been living there, down from a height of 10,000 during the summer.
Officials said the demolition work would be lengthy given the delicate task of clearing the camp by hand and with small machines. Extra precautions are being taken to make sure no one is inside the structures.
Ride malfunction kills 4 in Australia
SYDNEY — Two young children are fortunate to be alive, police said this morning, after they were thrown clear and survived an accident that killed four people on a river-rapids ride at a popular theme park in Australia.
Two men and two women died in the accident Tuesday at Dreamworld, a park on Queensland state’s Gold Coast, Queensland Police Assistant Commissioner Brian Codd said.
The Thunder River Rapids ride whisks people in circular rafts along a fast-moving, artificial river, with a conveyor belt helping move the rafts through the water. Closed-circuit television footage showed the ride was coming to its conclusion when two rafts collided, Codd said.
“One has flipped backward and it has caught and tossed some of the people that were on the ride backward into the conveyor belt,” Codd told reporters.
The two children, a 10-year-old boy and a 12-yearold girl, were thrown clear from a raft and managed to escape, he said.
The victims were in their 30s and early 40s, he said.
Ex-nurse charged
in 8 drug deaths
OTTAWA, Ontario — A former nurse in Ontario was charged Tuesday with murdering eight nursing-home residents by injecting them with lethal drug doses.
The Ontario Provincial Police told reporters at a news conference in Woodstock, Ontario, that the victims ranged in age from 79 to 96.
The former nurse, Elizabeth Tracey Mae Wettlaufer, 49, was charged with eight counts of first-degree, or intentional, murder, committed between August 2007 and August 2014.
Police offered no motive for the killings, seven of which occurred at a nursing home owned by Caressant Care Nursing and Retirement Homes in Woodstock, which is about 80 miles southwest of Toronto. The eighth victim died in another of the company’s nursing homes in London, Ontario, about 20 miles away.
Caressant Care said in a statement that Wettlaufer had left its employment about 2½ years ago.