PHILIPPINES
UN troops to guard pope
The government has assigned a thousand UN peacekeepers to guard Pope Francis when he visits the country in January, the military said yesterday. The security detail is to include more than 300 soldiers who were withdrawn from the UN-administered Golan Heights after the unit fought off an attack by Syrian rebels last month. “We believe that their exposure and experience in peacekeeping operations in Syria will be beneficial towards the successful security of Pope Francis’s papal visit to the Philippines,” armed forces head, General Gregorio Catapang said in a statement.
CHINA
Boys drown looking for eggs
Four boys drowned off the coast of Guanxi Province on Saturday while searching for duck eggs in a bay, officials said. The city of Beihai said in a statement online that the four boys — three of them aged 12 and one of them 11 — were searching in a city bay on Saturday afternoon when they drowned. They were part of a group of eight boys that went egg hunting. Two of them drowned and two went missing, prompting a search.
MYANMAR
Helicopter goes missing
A rescue helicopter from Thailand has lost contact with ground control during a search for two climbers in the mountainous border region. The helicopter is carrying three people, including a Thai pilot. According to the Htoo Foundation, the helicopter left Putao airport in the northern Kachin state on Saturday to drop food for a team searching for two Burmese climbers missing since Aug. 31. The foundation is leading the search effort for the climbers. They went missing after scaling the 5,881m snow-capped Hkakabo Razi mountain, Southeast Asia’s highest.
THAILAND
Safety measures to be taken
The government is to install more surveillance cameras and better lighting in tourist areas after two British tourists were killed on Koh Tao on Sept. 15, a senior government official said on Thursday. More police and soldiers were being sent to help investigate the slayings of Hannah Witheridge, 23, and David Miller, 24, who were found battered to death on a beach. Deputy Prime Minister General Prawit Wongsuwan told reporters he has ordered the Ministry of the Interior, Bangkok’s city government and police to install the surveillance cameras and improve lighting. “The area where the incident happened was very dark. The closed-circuit cameras could not capture images. I have ordered [authorities] nationwide that there must be sufficient lighting, especially in Bangkok and major tourist cities, and there must be closed-circuit TV cameras all over the country,” he said. Police said yesterday that they are no closer to a breakthrough in the case.
PHILIPPINES
Tree-planting record set
Officials on Saturday said they had set a new world record for the most trees planted in an hour, with 3.2 million seedlings sown as part of a national forestation program. Official Guinness World Record certification is still weeks away, but officials expressed confidence they had broken the former record of 1.9 million trees planted on Aug. 15, 2011, in India. The trees were planted in six different areas on Mindanao Island by 160,000 people, including government employees, students and volunteers, the regional environment director Marc Fragada said.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
‘DELUSIONAL’: Targeting the families of Hamas’ leaders would not push the group to change its position or to give up its demands for Palestinians, Ismail Haniyeh said Israeli aircraft on Wednesday killed three sons of Hamas’ top political leader in the Gaza Strip, striking high-stakes targets at a time when Israel is holding delicate ceasefire negotiations with the militant group. Hamas said four of the leader’s grandchildren were also killed. Ismail Haniyeh’s sons are among the highest-profile figures to be killed in the war so far. Israel said they were Hamas operatives, and Haniyeh accused Israel of acting in “the spirit of revenge and murder.” The deaths threatened to strain the internationally mediated ceasefire talks, which appeared to gain steam in recent days even as the sides remain far
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of