TURKEY
Girl killed in rebel attack
Police said that a rocket fired by Kurdish rebels missed its target and hit a home in a town in the southeast, killing a nine-year-old girl. Five other people were injured in the incident. A police statement said rebels of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) aimed their attack late on Friday at a police vehicle in the town of Bismil, but hit the house instead. Yesterday, suspected PKK rebels detonated a bomb on a road in the mainly Kurdish Bitlis Province, injuring about 20 soldiers riding in a military vehicle, the private Dogan news agency reported. None of them was in serious condition. Violence between the PKK and the Turkish security forces reignited this summer, shattering a fragile peace process with the Kurds.
UNITED STATES
Super blood moon treat
Stargazers were in for a rare treat when a total lunar eclipse combined with a so-called supermoon. Those in the US, Europe, Africa and western Asia were able to view the coupling, weather permitting, on Sunday night or early yesterday. It was the first time the events have made a twin appearance since 1982, and they would not again until 2033. When a full moon makes its closest approach to Earth, it appears slightly bigger and brighter than usual and has a reddish hue. That coincides with a full lunar eclipse where the moon, Earth and sun will be lined up, with Earth’s shadow totally obscuring the moon. The so-called “super blood moon” occurred on the US east coast at 10:11pm and lasted about an hour. In Europe, the action unfolded before dawn yesterday. In Los Angeles, a large crowd filled the lawn of Griffith Observatory to watch the celestial show while listening to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata played by 14-year-old pianist Ray Ushikubo. “You always want to see the eclipse because they’re always very different,” observatory director Edwin Krupp said. The additional component of the Earth’s atmosphere adds “all kinds of twists and turns to the experience,” he said. “What we see tonight will be different from the last event: how dark it is, how red it is. It’s always interesting to see.”
PAKISTAN
Hundreds of pilgrims found
Minister for Religious Affairs Sardar Muhammad Yousaf said that authorities have tracked down 217 Pakistanis who went missing following last week’s stampede, which killed more than 700 pilgrims during the hajj in Saudi Arabia. Yousaf told state-run Pakistan Television on Sunday night from Saudi Arabia that 85 Pakistanis were still missing and efforts were under way to locate them. He said that 36 Pakistanis were killed and 35 injured in the stampede. Saudi authorities said that at least 769 people died when two large waves of pilgrims converged on a narrow road during the final days of the annual hajj, near the holy city of Mecca.
AUSTRALIA
Kiwi faces terror charges
Prosecutors yesterday said that a New Zealand man accused of trying to enter Syria to fight alongside extremists used four different phones to have coded conversations about “a big job” days before attempting to fly to Turkey. The allegations in Victoria state Supreme Court come two years after Amin Mohamed was stopped in Brisbane when trying to board a flight to Turkey. Mohamed was later charged with three counts of preparing to enter a foreign state to engage in hostile activities. If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison on each count. He has pleaded not guilty.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
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