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.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
RIVER TRAGEDY: Local fishers and residents helped rescue people after the vessel capsized, while motorbike taxis evacuated some of the injured At least 58 people going to a funeral died after their overloaded river boat capsized in the Central African Republic’s (CAR) capital, Bangui, the head of civil protection said on Saturday. “We were able to extract 58 lifeless bodies,” Thomas Djimasse told Radio Guira. “We don’t know the total number of people who are underwater. According to witnesses and videos on social media, the wooden boat was carrying more than 300 people — some standing and others perched on wooden structures — when it sank on the Mpoko River on Friday. The vessel was heading to the funeral of a village chief in