CHINA
Parade to show new weapons
President Xi Jinping (習近平) will use a World War II victory parade to showcase new weapons systems, a general said, amid growing regional concern about the country’s military reach. The Tiananmen Square pageant on Sept. 3 marking the 70th anniversary of Japan’s surrender will feature domestically made military hardware, Major General Qu Rui said on Tuesday at a briefing in Beijing. Much of the equipment will make its public debut at the event to be presided over by Xi, Qu said without elaborating.
AUSTRALIA
Terrorists to lose citizenship
The government yesterday said it would introduce new laws this week to strip dual nationals linked to terrorism of their citizenship, but backed away from putting the power in the hands of a single minister. The legislation will see the Citizenship Act — which currently stipulates a person ceases to be a national if they serve in the armed forces of a country at war with Australia — expanded to include people who “fight against us in a terrorist group.” There are currently 20 such groups on Canberra’s list of terrorist organizations.
NEW ZEALAND
Radar failure grounds flights
All of the country’s international and domestic flights were temporarily grounded yesterday afternoon after authorities reported that the nationwide radar system had failed. Airways New Zealand, which provides navigational services, wrote on Twitter that it experienced a radar failure at 2:48pm. It said in a later statement that it had identified the issue, tested the system and resumed full service about two hours after the flights stopped. The agency did not say what caused the problem. It said that “at no point was the safety of any airport operations compromised.” Minister of Transport Simon Bridges said that after the failure, aircraft that were aloft were able to land in a staggered fashion, with air traffic control able to communicate with the planes via radio contact. National carrier Air New Zealand said about 160 of its international and domestic flights had been affected. It said it had resumed flights yesterday afternoon, but the backlog would take some time to clear.
VIETNAM
Social insurance amended
Vietnam’s National Assembly has back-tracked on a controversial social insurance law that sparked massive protests earlier this year. The lawmakers overwhelmingly passed a resolution allowing workers to receive a one-time payment when they resigned instead of getting a monthly allowance when they retire, the government said on its Web site late on Monday. Last year, the Communist Party-dominated assembly passed a social insurance law that requires workers to wait until their retirement age — 60 for men and 55 for women — to get the allowance, saying the government wants the workers to have a stable life after their retirement. That law would have taken effect on Jan. 1 next year. In March, tens of thousands of workers at a major Taiwanese-owned footwear factory in Ho Chi Minh City went on a week-long strike to protest the law. They said they preferred the lump sum to help pay for their daily needs while seeking new jobs. The stoppage at the factory producing shoes for Nike and Adidas was a rare challenge to communist authorities over policy issues, although strikes over low pay and poor working conditions are common.
GERMANY
Al-Jazeera journalist freed
German authorities on Monday released al-Jazeera journalist Ahmed Mansour, two days after detaining him at the request of Egypt in a move that sparked outrage from rights groups. “I’m free, I’m free, I’m free,” Mansour, an Egyptian-British dual national, said outside the Berlin prison, greeted by dozens of cheering supporters. “We welcome this decision by the German prosecutor,” al-Jazeera spokesman Hareth Adlouni said, adding that all charges had been dropped against 52-year-old Mansour, one of the best known TV journalists in the Arabic world. Berlin prosecutors in a short statement said they would not seek his extradition and had ordered Mansour’s release, citing both “legal aspects and possible political-diplomatic concerns,” without detailing them. Mansour had been sentenced last year by an Egyptian court in absentia to 15 years in prison on torture and other charges, which he has rejected as “absurd.”
UNITED KINGDOM
Skinny jeans a health risk
Squatting in super-tight “skinny” jeans may pose a health risk, Australian doctors said yesterday, reporting the case of a woman who temporarily lost feeling in her legs from an hours-long squeeze. The 35-year-old collapsed and had to be hospitalized the day after helping a relative move home, spending hours on her haunches to unpack cupboards. The unusual case was reported in a British specialist publication, the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery & Psychiatry. The woman’s legs were so swollen that the jeans could only be removed by cutting them off, the statement said. She was put on a drip, and was able to walk normally again four days later.
MEXICO
Acapulco mass graves found
Authorities on Monday found 10 bodies in mass graves on the outskirts of Acapulco, a city beset by drug gang violence. The corpses of seven men and three women were exhumed from seven clandestine pits far from the tourist zone, Guerrero State chief prosecutor Miguel Angel Godinez said. “There are apparently no more [bodies] and with that we concluded the exhumation,” Godinez said. The graves were discovered late on Sunday following an anonymous tip and the bodies were found with the help of sniffer dogs in a search that continued through Monday.
FRANCE
Sex with Neanderthals?
Were the Neanderthals wiped out by Homo sapiens, or did they peter out as a separate line, surviving as a genetic echo in DNA they bequeathed to us? A new study, published in the journal Nature on Monday, delves into the controversial sex-with-Neanderthals theory. The hanky-panky, it suggests, had deep roots, for it began soon after Homo sapiens showed up in Europe. Researchers extracted DNA from a 40,000-year-old jawbone found in 2002 in the Pestera cu Oase cave system in southwestern Romania, which is claimed to come from the oldest modern human found in Europe. “The sample is more closely related to Neanderthals than any other modern human we’ve ever looked at before,” said David Reich of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Harvard Medical School, who co-led the probe. “We estimate that 6 to 9 percent of its genome is from Neanderthals. This is an unprecedented amount. Europeans and East Asians today have more like 2 percent.” The proportion is so big that in this individual’s case, Neanderthal and sapiens got it on just 200 years earlier, or four to six generations previously, the scientists believe.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not