WORLDWIDE
This month’s WWTF collection must surely - yet again - fall into the cate- gory of You Couldn’t Make It Up. The prize-winner for the most horrifying must be the Indian driver who walked into the
police station with his wife’s head in a bag, having attacked her with a machete because she was cheating on him. Then we have a woman passenger murdered in China by a Didi driver, the second in three months. How about the Russian driver who chucked his passenger out onto the road because he threw litter out of the window?! Or the taxi driver who rammed his car into a customer for non-pay- ment. And finally, the woman in New Zealand whose McDonald’s cost her $1,500… Expensive burger!
from China
CHINA’S DIDI HALTS EXPANSION AFTER MURDER OF FEMALE PASSENGER
The Chinese car-hail- ing giant Didi Chux- ing has slammed the brakes on its relent- less expansion after the murder of a female passenger raised major safety concerns at one of Asia’s biggest tech- nology companies. Didi, which is known as Beijing’s answer to Uber, has conquered cities in many emerg- ing markets and chased its US rival out of China two years ago. But as the Telegraph reports, it has become the target of national outrage after a 20-year-old woman using the app was raped and murdered in the eastern city of Wengzhou in August, the second death involving a female passenger in three months. The driver, who had previously been the subject of a sexual harassment com- plaint, has been arrested. The attack has sparked a reckoning for Didi after years of break- neck growth that has seen it valued at more than $55bn (£42bn) and become a candidate for a stock market flotation next year. The company issued a repentant statement admitting to “an enor- mous amount of self-doubt, guilt and soul-searching”. “Our vanity overtook our original beliefs.We raced non-stop riding on the force of breathless expansion and capital through these few years; but this has no meaning in such a tragic loss of life,” Didi said. “The only thing we can do at thismoment of pain is to face the pain and take on our responsibility. Not a single second shall be lost in solving the problems with our full effort. To bring back what we
Didi has attempted to expand across the world
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were here for from day one, this is the only meaningful kind of con- dolence we could offer to the victim.” Didi said it would no longer prioritise scale and growth but would insteadmake safety its “singlemost important performance indica- tor”. The company had already suspended its “Hitch” service, which allows drivers to pick up passengers on their daily commute, and fired two executives. It promised to introduce new safety features to its app, such as an improved SOS button and the ability to share trip information with friends, as well as features to quickly relay safety issues to police. Didi has drawn increased scrutiny from the Chinese government, which said over the weekend that the company has “unshirkable responsibility” for the incident. Celebrities and Chinese social media users have pledged to delete the application, in an echo of the viral “Delete Uber” campaign that saw thousands of users leave the US transport app last year. Didi, founded in 2012, fought a brutal war of attrition with Uber in China that saw both companies spend billions to capture the mar- ket. In 2016, Uber buckled and sold its Chinese operations to Didi in exchange for an 18pc stake for the company. Since then, Didi has continued to expand internationally and has made steps into some Western markets. It launched in Australia earlier this year and recently secured a $500minvestmentfromthe US owner of travel website
Booking.com.
from India
CABBIE WALKS INTO POLICE STATION WITH WIFE’S HEAD BECAUSE ‘SHE CHEATED’
A man in India shocked police officers when he walked into a sta- tion with the head of his wife. Sky News reports that the suspect, identified only as Satish, was holding a bag in one hand and a machete in the other, according to a report in The Times Of India. In footage taken by someone at the station, Satish, 35, is heard telling the officers: “This is my wife, sir, I gave her all the love I could.” At that point he pulls the woman’s head out of the plastic bag and holds it up, telling officers that his wife Roopa had cheated on him “I saw her with that guy near the plantation, I killed her, but that guy ran away,” he said, according to local media reports. “I couldn’t kill him though.” Satish went on to say that Roopa’s alleged lover Sunil was facing a number of criminal charges and that, despite Satish being a taxi driver and promising to support the family, his wife had chosen to cheat on him. Police took Satish’s statement and registered an FIR, which is a document in India that sets a criminal case in motion. Satish reportedly took police to where he had buried the rest of his wife’s body and was then remanded in custody. Circle Inspector Ramachandra Nayak, the investigating officer at Chikkamagaluru’s Ajjampura police station in the state of Kar- nataka, was quoted in The News Minute as saying: “Based on his statement, Satish suspected that his wife was cheating on him and followed her with a machete. “When he saw her meet Sunil at the Nilagiri Plantation near Shiv- ani Railway Station, he hacked at her neck.”
OCTOBER 2018
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