PHILIPPINES
Drugs worth US$30m seized
Police arrested four men and seized 1.3 billion pesos (US$30 million) worth of methamphetamine on Friday in the second large drug bust in Manila in 10 days. The men were in a van loaded with five wooden crates containing 272kg of crystal methamphetamine when they were intercepted by police, said Senior Superintendent Bartolome Tobias, head of the National Police anti-illegal drugs task force. The arrests followed a tip from an informant. Last week, the National Bureau of Investigation arrested four Canadian men suspected of trafficking drugs from Mexico in separate raids on posh condominiums. Tobias said police are investigating an “unholy alliance” between Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel and Chinese drug syndicates in the Philippines. “We have to move fast to nip this partnership in the bud,” he said.
CHINA
Rover meets control glitch
The Jade Rabbit moon rover has experienced a “mechanical control abnormality,” state media said yesterday, in what appears to be a setback for a landmark mission in the country’s ambitious space program. The abnormality occurred due to “the complicated lunar surface environment,” Xinhua news agency said, citing the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (SASTIND). Scientists were “organizing an overhaul,” the report added. There were no reports of the abnormality on SASTIND’s Web site.
INDONESIA
Soldier, ‘radicals’ killed
A soldier and three armed “radicals” were killed in two related shoot-outs in the country’s restive Papua region, an army official said yesterday. A team of soldiers were conducting a raid in the mountainous Puncak Jaya area, a known hideout for armed Papuan separatists, after receiving intelligence on a “radical group,” army spokesman Andika Perkasa said. The soldiers seized a rifle from the gunmen and three were killed in an extended shoot-out, Perkasa said, adding that it was unclear who opened fire first in the incident on Friday. “The team of soldiers had called for back-up,” Perkasa said. “The reinforcement team of 25 people were then ambushed by gunmen on the way to the site. They killed one soldier in that incident.” Police in Papua Province said the gunmen belonged to the separatist Free Papua Movement, but Perkasa said it was too early to speculate on the gunmen’s connections, adding that their motivations could be more complex.
INDONESIA
Earthquake shakes Java
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off Java yesterday, the US Geological Survey (USGS) reported, sending panicked residents running from their homes. People in the town of Adipala near the epicenter said they felt the ground shaking hard for up to 20 seconds, as the quake struck in the sea off the coast of southern Java. “We all just ran onto the street, there were so many people,” Astri, a florist who goes by one name, said by phone. “But it doesn’t seem to have damaged anything around here, and we’re getting back to work.” The quake struck at 12:14pm 39km south-southeast of Adipala at a depth of 83km, the USGS said. Officials said there was no risk of a tsunami and no immediate reports of damage or casualties. “We don’t expect a lot of damage because the quake was deep, but we will monitor as it was felt quite strongly on the coast near the epicentre,” meteorology, climatology and geophysics agency technical chief Suharjono said.
FRANCE
Chinese slur sparks fine
Leading magazine Le Point was fined 1,500 euros (US$2,050) on Friday by a court for slurring the country’s ethnic Chinese community as stingy, work-obsessed tax dodgers. The ruling followed a legal complaint filed by prominent anti-racism group SOS Racisme over an article published on Aug. 23, 2012, titled The Devious Success of the Chinese in France. Le Point editor-in-chief Franz-Olivier Giesbert had defended the article as a humorous piece of writing that had been misconstrued. A boxed text accompanying the article listed the “Five Commandments of the Chinese businessman.” These included: “Thou shalt work 80 hours a week,” “Thou shalt sleep in thy shop” and “Thou shalt not pay taxes.” The court said three of the points were defamatory and rejected Giesbert’s plea that the piece was humorous.
PERU
No sterilization charges
Prosecutors have decided not to file criminal charges against former president Alberto Fujimori or any of his ministers over a 1990s sterilization program that hundreds of women complained was coercive. Prosecutors said in a statement on Friday that the inquiry against Fujimori and more than 20 other former high-ranking officials in the case had been shelved. More than 2,000 women have formally complained of being forcibly sterilized under the program. Fujimori is now in prison for corruption and authorizing death squads. He says the sterilizations were voluntary, but women say they were deceived, threatened and bribed to meet quotas. At the urging of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, prosecutors in 2011 reopened a criminal investigation into the program that sterilized more than 300,000 women, mostly impoverished, illiterate Indians.
MEXICO
Man held in tourist’s death
Authorities detained a man Friday suspected of killing a Dutch tourist in Ciudad Juarez in 1998, officials said. Roberto Flores, 52, who went by the name Ramiro Adame Lopez, was arrested in Chihuahua after he was deported from the US. He had served jail time in the US state of Mississippi for illegally entering the US. Prosecutors said Flores rented a room in a downtown Ciudad Juarez hotel where the body of Hester Suzanne van Nierop, a visiting architect who was 28 at the time, was later found with signs of strangulation. When the case came to light 16 years ago, prosecutors said the woman was forcibly taken to the hotel, where she was tortured, raped and strangled. Local civic groups denounced Flores as a serial murderer of women. In 2004, van Nierop’s parents traveled to Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, Texas, with a group of Dutch TV reporters to press the authorities to revive the case.
CANADA
Archbishop guilty of assault
An Orthodox archbishop has been found guilty of sexually assaulting one of two brothers almost 30 years ago. Justice Christopher Mainella on Friday said in his ruling that Seraphim Kenneth Storheim of the Orthodox Church in America was evasive and untrustworthy in his denials on the witness stand in Winnipeg. The judge also said one brother was clear in his testimony, while the other had memory and mental illness problems. The brothers, who are now in their 30s, testified they lived with Storheim briefly, on separate occasions, when they worked as altar boys in 1985. They said Storheim walked around naked and touched them sexually — accusations Storheim denied.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
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
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion