AFGHANISTAN
Taliban storm building
Taliban fighters opened fire and stormed a government building in the east of the country in the most serious of a string of attacks early yesterday that marked the start of their annual spring offensive. In Kabul, two rockets struck inside the grounds of the city’s international airport, but caused no damage. Following the attack, police surrounded the provincial justice ministry building in the city of Jalabad and were engaging in sporadic exchanges of gunfire with the militants inside. The attackers struck at about 9am as employees were arriving for work.
CHINA
Irridium-192 suspects held
Police have detained four people after radioactive material being used in a construction project went missing, state media reported yesterday. A tiny piece of irridium-192, used to locate flaws in pieces of metal, vanished on Wednesday last week from a construction site in Nanjing and was not recovered until Saturday afternoon, China Daily reported. It was found in bushes 1km from the construction site wrapped in a plastic bag, put in a lead container and then taken away, the newspaper said.
JAPAN
Bus-jacker missed parents
A middle-aged man who allegedly hijacked a bus because he wanted to visit his parents was arrested, police said yesterday, after he let the driver go to the toilet. The bus was traveling from an airport in Miyazaki when Seiichi Sato, aged 45, allegedly took charge of it, threatening the driver and passengers with a pair of scissors, Jiji press reported. Media reports said the bus made a number of stops to let passengers off, before pulling over at a convenience store some time before midnight. After a stand-off that lasted more than an hour, officers swooped in when Sato let the driver off the bus, ostensibly to go to the toilet, media reported. Sato told police he had hijacked the bus “to see my foster parents in Ebino city,” Fuji Television reported.
GERMANY
Wave of tax evaders confess
The tax evasion trial and conviction of former Bayern Munich president Uli Hoeness triggered a wave of self-disclosures resulting in 16,926 tax dodgers turning themselves in during the first four months of the year, the Welt am Sonntag newspaper reported on Sunday. It said it had surveyed finance authorities in the nation’s 16 states and the number of self-disclosures in the first four months of this year was more than the combined total of 2011 and 2012.
UNITED KINGDOM
Lottery funds independence
A couple who won a record EuroMillions jackpot in 2011 are bankrolling the campaign for Scottish independence, contributing £2.5 million (US$4.2 million) in the past year, the campaign said on Sunday. Colin and Christine Weir, from Largs near Glasgow, won 185 million euros (then US$260 million) in July 2011, becoming Europe’s biggest ever lottery winners.
YEMEN
Drone kills six suspects
A drone strike yesterday killed six al-Qaeda suspects, tribal sources said, in the first such raid since the army launched an offensive against jihadists last month. The drone targeted a vehicle carrying “al-Qaeda members” near al-Husun, a village in Marib Province, one source said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited