EGYPT
Car bomb wounds police
A car bomb wounded six policemen yesterday as it exploded in front of a police building in Cairo, the Ministry of the Interior said, the latest in a wave of militant attacks that has rocked the country. The powerful blast in northern Cairo’s Shubra District came in the middle of the night, a journalist said. The blast made a wide crater near the four-story building, shattered its windows and destroyed a major part of the front portion of a surrounding wall, a correspondent reported from the site.
? TURKEY
Election date proposed
The Higher Election Board has proposed Nov. 1 as a possible date for early elections after the failure of attempts to form a coalition government following June 7 polls, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported yesterday. The proposal, presented to political parties before a final decision is made, came three days ahead of Sunday’s deadline for forming a new government. The election board is set to determine an exact date for elections after the parties give their opinions, Anatolia said.
SOUTH KOREA
Ex-PM’s conviction upheld
The nation’s first female prime minister, Han Myung-sook, is to be sent to prison after the Supreme Court upheld her bribery conviction, court officials said yesterday. The court said it had rejected the appeal by the 71-year-old Han, who was sentenced to two years in prison for taking kickbacks from a businessman in a 2013 ruling by the Seoul High Court. Han has avoided jail since 2013 while she appealed the prison sentence. Supreme Court officials said their ruling is final.
AUSTRALIA
Actress found guilty of abuse
Veteran actress Maggie Kirkpatrick, who played a violent and sadistic warden nicknamed “The Freak” in a cult soap opera set in a women’s prison, was convicted yesterday of molesting a 14-year-old psychiatric hospital patient in her home more than 30 years ago. The series was known as Prisoner in Australia, and Prisoner: Cell Block H or Caged Women overseas. Kirkpatrick, 74, had pleaded not guilty in the Melbourne Magistrates Court to two counts of indecently assaulting the young fan in 1984 and one count of gross indecency.
SPAIN
Axing of US singer slammed
The government has condemned a reggae festival’s decision to boot a Jewish-American singer from the line-up after he declined to state his position on a Palestinian state. Matisyahu, who fuses reggae and hip-hop with Jewish influences in his songs, had been due to perform at the weeklong Rototom SunSplash festival, one of Europe’s largest reggae festivals in Benicassim on Saturday. However, a local branch of the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement accused Matisyahu of being anti-Palestinian and a “Zionist” who supports the practice of “apartheid and ethnic cleansing.”
UNITED STATES
Spacesuit work Web-funded
The Smithsonian’s first shot at online crowdfunding ended on Wednesday after raising a hefty US$719,779 to restore the spacesuit that Neil Armstrong wore when he walked on the moon. A total of 9,477 people contributed to the month-long Kickstarter “Reboot the Suit” campaign, which surpassed its US$500,000 goal on July 24.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema