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.
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
‘THE RED LINE’: Colombian President Gustavo Petro promised a thorough probe into the attack on the senator, who had announced his presidential bid in March Colombian Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay, a possible candidate in the country’s presidential election next year, was shot and wounded at a campaign rally in Bogota on Saturday, authorities said. His conservative Democratic Center party released a statement calling it “an unacceptable act of violence.” The attack took place in a park in the Fontibon neighborhood when armed assailants shot him from behind, said the right-wing Democratic Center, which was the party of former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe. The men are not related. Images circulating on social media showed Uribe Turbay, 39, covered in blood being held by several people. The Santa Fe Foundation
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
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