NORTH KOREA
Government cashing gold
Pyongyang has been secretly selling gold to make up for shortages of hard currency after it spent millions of dollars to celebrate the 100th birthday of its founder, a news report said yesterday. The Chosun Ilbo daily quoted sources in China as saying that the impoverished communist state had cashed more than two tonnes of gold worth US$100 million in China over the past year. “North Korea has been exporting not only gold ingots it had obtained from mines or stored in government agencies, but gold trinkets it had collected from ordinary people,” an ethnic Korean businessman told the daily. “North Korean trading companies in China have been cashing the gold in secrecy,” the source said. “For this purpose, North Koreans are compelled to sell gold trinkets to government authorities.”
CHINA
US firm stops using lead
US battery giant Johnson Controls will stop lead processing at a plant in Shanghai, the firm said, after the city found high levels of the metal in children living nearby. The Fortune 500 company has denied the plant’s operations caused elevated lead exposure for people living in Shanghai’s Kangqiao area. However, Johnson Controls said in a statement it would stop lead processing at the facility in response to Shanghai authorities’ moves to “remove lead manufacturing from the community.” In February, Shanghai blamed Johnson Controls and two local companies for causing lead poisoning in 49 children, most of them aged between one and three. The city has already shut the other two firms, Shanghai Xinmingyuan Automobile Parts Co Ltd and Shanghai Kangshuo Waste Recycling Co Ltd, state media have reported.
PAKISTAN
Drone strike kills five
A US drone strike on Monday killed at least five Islamic militants in the restive tribal region near the Afghan border, security officials said. The strike targeted a compound in the Mir Ali area of North Waziristan, known as a bastion for the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The drone fired two missiles, they said. A security official in Miranshah said that five militants had been killed. “This area has sanctuaries for all groups of Taliban and foreign militants,” the official said. Another security official in Peshawar confirmed the death toll. There has been a dramatic increase in US drone strikes in the country since May, when a NATO summit in Chicago failed to strike a deal to end a six-month blockade on convoys transporting supplies to coalition forces in Afghanistan.
CHINA
Miners die in pit plunge
A coal mining accident in Gansu Province yesterday left 20 miners dead and 14 injured, state media said, in the latest incident to hit the industry. The cable of a rail carriage taking workers into the mine in Gansu Province snapped, sending the 34 miners plummeting into the pit, Xinhua news agency reported. The injured have been transported to hospital, including three who were in a serious condition, it said. Officials at the Baiyin city work safety administration, which oversees the Qusheng mine, refused to comment when contacted by reporters. Accidents are common in the country’s mining industry because safety is often neglected by bosses seeking quick profits. Yesterday’s accident followed a gas explosion at a colliery in the Sichuan Province last month that killed 43 miners.
ISRAEL
Army reports shelling
Israel’s army says several mortar shells fired by Syrian government troops targeting rebels have hit the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. The military says no one was hurt in yesterday’s shelling. An army spokesman says the shells were not aimed at Israel but at rebels in Syrian villages close to the Golan frontier and were part of the ongoing fighting in Syria. He spoke on condition of anonymity in line with military regulations. It is the second time Syrian mortars have landed on the border area since Syria’s crisis erupted 18 months ago. In July, mortar shells fell about 1km from the Golan boundary. The Israeli army says it has filed a complaint to the UN peacekeeping force that patrols the tense region between Israel and Syria.
IRAN
General discusses drone
A senior commander says the country’s newly produced missile-carrying drone has a range of 2,000km, which puts much of the Middle East within operating distance of Iranian territory. The Monday report by the semiofficial Fars agency quoted General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, who is aerospace chief of the powerful Revolutionary Guards. His description of the aircraft, which Iran first announced last week, is like that of the US’ RQ-170 Sentinel, one of which went down in Iranian territory last year. Iran said it was building a copy of the RQ-170 in April. The Islamic Republic’s defense industry frequently announces technological breakthroughs that are impossible to verify independently.
IRAN
President criticizes gays
Supporting homosexuality is the stuff of hardline capitalists who do not care about real human values, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Monday. He said in an interview that homosexuality is a “very ugly behavior” that he said was banned by “all prophets and all religions and all faiths.” In New York to attend the UN General Assembly, Ahmadinejad ridiculed politicians and parties who, he said, approve of gays and lesbians just to win “four or five additional votes.” More broadly he said supporting homosexuality had nothing to do with supporting human development. “This kind of support of homosexuality is only engrained in the thoughts of hard-core capitalists and those who support the growth of capital only, rather than human values,” the president said through an interpreter. He insisted that people become homosexual, rather than being born that way, and dodged a question as to what he would do if one of his three children were homosexual.
UNITED STATES
School offers contraception
Hundreds of New York City high-school students have received morning-after pills since the launch of a program that provides emergency contraception through public school nurses, the city’s health department said on Monday. Many schools around the nation have long made condoms available to students, but New York health officials said they believe the city is the first to make hormonal contraceptives available. The program, launched in 13 high schools last year, gives students access to emergency contraceptive pills, designed to prevent pregnancy following unprotected sex or a contraceptive failure if taken within 72 hours, as well as condoms, birth-control pills and pregnancy testing. The program is designed to battle the problem of unplanned pregnancies among teens, health officials said.
A ship that appears to be taking on the identity of a scrapped gas carrier exited the Strait of Hormuz on Friday, showing how strategies to get through the waterway are evolving as the Middle East war progresses. The vessel identifying as liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier Jamal left the Strait on Friday morning, ship-tracking data show. However, the same tanker was also recorded as having beached at an Indian demolition yard in October last year, where it is being broken up, according to market participants and port agent’s reports. The ship claiming to be Jamal is likely a zombie vessel that
Cannabis-based medicines have shown little evidence of effectiveness for treating most mental health and substance-use disorders, according to a large review of past studies published in a major medical journal on Monday. Medical use of cannabinoids has been expanding, including in the US, Canada and Australia, where many patients report using cannabis products to manage conditions such as anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and sleep problems. Researchers reviewed data from 54 randomized clinical trials conducted between 1980 and May last year involving 2,477 participants for their analysis published in The Lancet. The studies assessed cannabinoids as a primary treatment for mental disorders or substance-use
NATIONWIDE BLACKOUT: US President Donald Trump cut off Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba, strangling the Caribbean island’s already antiquated grid Cuba’s national electric grid collapsed on Monday, the nation’s grid operator said, leaving about 10 million people without power amid a US-imposed oil blockade that has crippled the already obsolete generation system. Grid operator UNE on social media said that it is investigating the causes of the blackout, the latest in a series of widespread outages that last for hours or days and that this weekend sparked a rare violent protest in the communist-run nation. Officials ruled out a major power plant failure, but had still not pinpointed the root cause of the grid collapse, suggesting a problem with transmission. Officials said that
‘HEALTH ISSUE’: More than 250 women are hospitalized every day due to complications from unsafe abortions, and about three die, a study showed Jane had been bleeding heavily for days before finally seeking help, not from a hospital, but from the man who sold her the pills meant to end her six-week pregnancy. Abortions are strictly outlawed in the mainly Catholic Philippines, forcing women to turn to a patchwork of providers operating in the online shadows. While rare in practice, Philippine law allows for prison terms of up to six years for abortion patients and providers, leaving thousands of Filipinas to search for solutions in online forums where unlicensed sellers promote abortifacients. “It was very painful, as if my abdomen was being twisted,” said Jane, whose
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