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.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the