CHINA
Dust shrouds Lhasa
The country’s pollution reached new heights yesterday as the Tibetan capital of Lhasa was shrouded in a cloud of dust that halted flights and rendered one of its most-recognizable landmarks nearly invisible. Lhasa, which at 3,700m above sea level is one of the highest cities in the world, was named by the Ministry of Environmental Protection last month as one of 10 cities with the country’s best air quality. However, yesterday the picturesque city was enveloped in a thick cloud of pollution that the Hong Kong-based ifeng.com news Web site said was caused by dust that had blown in from north of the Tibetan Plateau. Visibility in some areas was reduced to 5km, flights were grounded and the city’s air quality index exceeded 500, the highest level, the report said. Photos posted online by ifeng.com showed the world-famous Potala Palace, a sprawling Buddhist complex and UNESCO World Heritage Site that previously served as the winter palace of the Dalai Lama, nearly invisible from a few kilometers away.
AUSTRALIA
Woman finds semen in water
A woman is suing a deli after drinking bottled water that allegedly contained semen, lawyers said yesterday, with claims that DNA showed it matched the owner of the business. Alicia Cooper has filed a writ of summons in the District Court of Western Australia against the owner, who no longer runs the business, according to media reports that were confirmed by Slater and Gordon, the legal firm representing Cooper. Among its accusations the writ states the owner knowingly placed the sperm in the bottled water and allowed its sale. “Instantly I knew something was not right, I just knew,” Cooper, who is seeking damages and medical expenses for the stress and depression suffered from drinking the water, told Fairfax Media. After Cooper lodged a complaint about the water with the health department in the city of Stirling, a sample was collected for testing and the results revealed it contained spermatozoa, the Fairfax report said. A DNA sample was taken from the owner and testing confirmed his sample was a profile match for the sperm in the water.
JAPAN
Body found at US base
A human body decomposed “beyond recognition” has been found at a US military camp on the island of Okinawa, military and police officials said yesterday. The corpse was discovered on Wednesday inside a former housing area at Camp Foster, but the identity of the person, including their gender and approximate date of death, were unknown, a spokeswoman for the base said. The US Naval Criminal Investigative Service is leading a probe into the case, she added. The body was badly decomposed, but was presumed to be that of an adult, an official at Okinawa prefectural police headquarters said. It was found by Japanese workers contracted to dismantle buildings and survey the grounds in the housing area.
SOUTH SUDAN
UN choppers to evacuate staff
The UN sent four helicopters to evacuate staff from one of its bases in the country’s Jonglei State where three UN peacekeepers were killed on Thursday in violence gripping the world’s newest nation. Fighting has spread since the attack on Sunday last week outside an army barracks in the capital, Juba, with the violence leaving as many as 500 people dead, while at least 20,000 have sought shelter at UN compounds, according to the government and UN. The government lost control of Bor, the capital of Jonglei State, on Wednesday to a group linked to former vice president Riek Machar, who is being hunted by security forces for staging a failed coup this week. Machar denies that accusation. The violence has heightened ethnic tensions, with Machar’s Nuer group pitted against the Dinka people of President Salva Kiir.
UNITED STATES
Crack prison sentences cut
President Barack Obama commuted the prison sentences of eight people convicted of crack cocaine offenses on Thursday, saying they were punished under an unfair legal disparity that overwhelmingly hurt impoverished black communities. All of the inmates had been imprisoned for at least 15 years, including six who were sentenced to life behind bars. Most will be released by April 17. The prisoners would likely have received lighter jail terms if they had been sentenced under a law Obama signed three years ago that reduced sentencing disparities that once treated crack cocaine offenses more harshly than powder cocaine ones. Obama said the six men and two women were jailed under an “unfair system” in which someone arrested with one gram of crack cocaine received the same sentencing as someone arrested with 100 grams of powdered cocaine, a ratio that was mitigated by the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act.
GERMANY
Stolen cars have Tajik link
Officials say stolen cars may have ended up with people close to the family of the Tajik president. Berlin regional justice minister Thomas Heilmann’s office confirmed a report on Thursday by daily Bild that he alerted the Foreign Ministry to the issue in May after Tajikistan ignored requests for legal assistance. Heilmann wrote that some cars are in the hands of “people with business and family ties to the Tajik president’s family.” The Foreign Ministry said there had been talks with Tajikistan on fighting organized crime, but would not Bild’s report that the Tajik ambassador was summoned.
JAPAN
Second man gunned down
Police said the head of a fishermen’s union was shot dead yesterday, the second fatal shooting in as many days in a nation unaccustomed to gun crime. Tadayoshi Ueno, 70, was found lying in the street in the southern city of Kitakyushu after residents nearby heard what was believed to be the sound of gunfire. Police said he was confirmed dead at hospital, with reports suggesting he had been shot multiple times. Ueno, whose family runs a civil engineering company, was previously fired at in front of his house in 1997, but escaped unhurt, Jiji Press news agency said. However, his brother was shot dead the following year, a crime for which mobsters were arrested, with investigators saying they had targeted him because he refused to give favors in public works projects, Jiji said. Yesterday’s shooting came the day after the president of a well-known dumpling restaurant chain was shot dead in Kyoto.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the