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.
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