JAPAN
Cabinet reshuffle next month
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said he plans to revamp his Cabinet early next month for the first time since taking office, on the back of falling approval ratings. “I want to reshuffle the Cabinet and review the line-up of party executives in the first week of September,” he told Japanese reporters accompanying him on a tour of Latin America on Thursday. Abe said he would try to keep women in the Cabinet and key party posts, as he looks to boost female workforce participation, according to Japanese media reports from Santiago, Chile, the fourth leg of his five-nation tour. Abe declined to say if he would replace ministers in key posts.
THAILAND
Musician jailed over insult
A musician has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for royal defamation, a court official said yesterday, in the latest conviction under a controversial lese majeste law. The 28-year-old was found guilty of posting insulting messages about the monarchy on Facebook between 2010 and 2011, a court official from the northeastern province of Ubon Ratchathani said, without giving further details. The court sentenced the musician to three years each for nine counts of lese majeste and four months each for 12 counts of violating the computer crime act. However, after admitting to all charges his sentence was reduced to 15 years in jail.
JAPAN
Police hide 81,000 crimes
Osaka police have admitted they did not report more than 81,000 offenses over a period of several years in a desperate bid to clean up the region’s woeful reputation for street crime. The revelation came earlier this week when embarrassed authorities said they had kept the data out of national crime statistics from 2008 to 2012. The deception, which amounted to nearly 10 percent of all crimes in the area during that period, meant that Tokyo appeared to have the worst national crime figures. The vast majority of covered-up crimes were for theft — including tens of thousands of stolen vehicle and bicycle cases — but hundreds of more serious offenses such as muggings and even murder may have been omitted from official crime data, the Asahi newspaper reported.
SOUTH AFRICA
Giraffe’s head hits overpass
Officials said they plan to file charges after the death of a giraffe whose head struck a highway overpass while it was being transported in a truck. Animal welfare officer Rick Allan yesterday said that the accident on a highway between Pretoria and Johannesburg was very unsettling because it could easily have been avoided. He said charges were likely to be filed against those responsible under animal protection laws. Startled motorists took photographs of the truck before the accident on Thursday. It was carrying two giraffes whose long necks were visible above the sides of the vehicle. The surviving giraffe was taken to a wildlife clinic.
UNITED STATES
Cantor resigning early
Representative Eric Cantor — who lost his re-election bid to a Tea Party-backed opponent in June — told a Virginia newspaper that he will resign his seat in the House of Representatives months earlier than expected. Cantor’s announcement came hours after he stepped down as House majority leader on Thursday. He had previously said he would serve his full term, which would have ended in January. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported early yesterday that Cantor will step down on Aug. 18. He said he had asked Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe to call a special election for his district to coincide with the Nov. 4 general election, which would allow his successor to take office immediately.
UNITED STATES
Envoy to Russia confirmed
The Senate approved President Barack Obama’s nominee for ambassador to Moscow on Thursday, a quick confirmation amid a long backlog of would-be envoys awaiting a vote. John Tefft, a career diplomat specializing in Eastern Europe, fills a post that has been vacant since February. The approval came only weeks after his nomination, although several other ambassadorial nominations remain in limbo on Capitol Hill.
UNITED STATES
Sudanese woman arrives
A Sudanese Christian woman sentenced to death for renouncing Islam, but acquitted after international pressure on Sudan, arrived in Philadelphia on Thursday with her family. Meriam Ibrahim Tehya Ishag was welcomed by Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, who presented her with a model of the Liberty Bell, media reports said. The 26-year-old, her two children and her husband, Daniel Wani, later continued on to New Hampshire, where Wani has family.
UNITED STATES
Rapid evolution saved birds
A branch of large, lumbering dinosaurs shrank over just 50 million years of evolution to become today’s modern birds, a study showed on Thursday. “Birds out-shrank and out-evolved their dinosaurian ancestors, surviving where their larger, less evolvable relatives could not,” said lead author Michael Lee, a professor at the University of Adelaide’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences. The bipedal, carnivorous dinosaurs dubbed theropods — a category that included Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor — were the only branch of dinosaurs to keep getting smaller and smaller, researchers said. “Being smaller and lighter in the land of giants, with rapidly evolving anatomical adaptations, provided these bird ancestors with new ecological opportunities, such as the ability to climb trees, glide and fly,” Lee said. “Ultimately, this evolutionary flexibility helped birds survive the deadly meteorite impact which killed off all their dinosaurian cousins.”
GERMANY
Phone hunt causes flood
A teenager who lost his cellphone in a pond tried to get it back by draining the water and pumping it into a nearby toilet, but caused major damage when the water flooded the tank and sent the waste spewing, the Neue Osnabruecker Zeitung newspaper reported. “I thought two pumps would drain enough of the water from the pond so I could find my cellphone,” the 16-year-old from Klein Hesepe said. “I knew the phone was probably dead, but wanted to get the data card back with the numbers, pictures and videos of my friends.” The pond contained 1.8 million liters of water, while the toilet had a 1,000-liter tank. “It almost worked,” the teen 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