The strawberry contamination scare in Australia, which has caused supermarkets to recall brands and farmers to dump fruit, has spread to all six of the country’s states, police have said. The supermarket chains Coles and Aldi had pulled strawberries from their shelves across Australia except in Western Australia, and on Monday police in that state said a suspected case had been identified there.

A man in the town of York reported to police that he had found a needle in a sink after washing strawberries. The incident came after a seven-year-old girl in South Australia state found a needle in a Western Australia-grown strawberry on Saturday. A 62-year-old woman was caught putting a needle into a banana in Mackay, central Queensland, in what is believed to have been a copycat act.

Neil Handasyde, president of the Strawberry Growers Association of Western Australia, said growers had received requests from retailers and insurance companies to scan fruit for needles. “As an industry, we are sure that [the needles] are not coming from the farm, but we’re trying to get confidence into consumers that when they buy … strawberries, that there isn’t going to be anything other than strawberries in there and they’re safe to eat,” he told ABC. “[We] are looking at lots of different ways of tackling this issue. There’s been metal detectors purchased and tamper-proof packaging looked at.”(theguardian)…[+]

Bill de Blasio was two weeks into his term as New York mayor when he stood with weeping parents at the street corner where eight-year-old Noshat Nahian was killed while walking to school and pledged to end the city’s “epidemic” of road deaths.

Noshat was crossing the seven-lane Northern Boulevard in Queens with his 11-year-old sister five days before Christmas 2013 when Mauricio Osorio-Palominos, operating an enormous truck on a suspended driving licence, turned left across their path. Noshat was the 11th child under 13 to be killed on the streets of New York that year.

The urgent 30-day plan De Blasio ordered became the first Vision Zero policy of a major US city, blazing a trail for mayors around the world to tackle what the World Health Organization calls a “major but neglected global health problem” and which killed 1.25 million people in 2013. In two weeks in late November that year, four New Yorkers were killed by drivers on sidewalks, sparking protests.(theguardian)…[+]

Officials are planning to airlift food and water to Wilmington after the city of nearly 120,000 people became cut off from the rest of North Carolina by rising flood water from Florence. At least 17 people have died in North and South Carolina, as rescuers continued to pull residents from homes threatened by swollen rivers.

The US’s highest emergency official said other states were in the path of Florence. “Not only are you going to see more impact across North Carolina this week … but we’re also anticipating you are about to see a lot of damage going through West Virginia, all the way up to Ohio as the system exits out,” said Brock Long of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

In Wilmington, the state’s eighth-largest city, residents waited for hours outside stores and restaurants for necessities such as water. Police guarded the door of one store and only 10 people were allowed inside at a time. Woody White, the New Hanover county commission chair, said officials were planning for food and water to be flown into the coastal city. “Our roads are flooded,” he said. “There is no access to Wilmington.”(theguardian)…[+]