MORROCCO
Politicians caught in the act
Two senior Muslim politicians have been suspended from their party, the group announced on Monday, following media reports that they were arrested in a “sexual position” on a beach. Moulay Omar Benhammad and Fatima Nejjar, both in their 60s and vice presidents of the Unity and Reform Movement, have been “suspended from all structures of the movement,” the party said in a statement issued after an emergency meeting of its leadership. According to private Web site al-Ahdath, police detained Benhammad and Nejjar early on Saturday last week on a beach in Mohammedia, about 60km south of Rabat. They were allegedly found in a “sexual position” inside a car, it said. Nejjar, a 62-year-old widow and mother of six, faces a charge of complicity to adultery. A married 63-year-old father of seven, Benhammad faces charges of “attempted corruption” of the policemen who detained the couple, the Web site said. Some social media in Morocco have reveled in the case, posting videos of Nejjar in full Islamic headdress exhorting female students not to give in to “temptation and vice.”
JAPAN
Father kills son over exam
A father stabbed his 12-year-old son to death after complaining the boy was failing to study for a school entrance exam, media said yesterday. Kengo Satake, the boy’s 48-year-old father, told police that he “argued with his son for not studying” before a test to enter a private junior-high school, public broadcaster NHK reported. The son, named Ryota, was taken to hospital on Sunday after the stabbing, but died from loss of blood, Aichi prefectural police in the central city of Nagoya told reporters. “The father stabbed his son in the chest with a kitchen knife,” a police spokesman said, declining to provide details of the motive. The father was arrested after police received a call from hospital staff, he said. Satake reportedly told police he had stabbed his son “by mistake.”
INDIA
Man swallows 40 knives
Doctors in northern India say they have surgically removed 40 knives from the stomach of a man who had swallowed them over the past two months. The 42-year-old man is recovering in a hospital in Punjab State after undergoing surgery on Friday in which doctors removed the knives — some folded and some with exposed blades up to 18cm long. Jatinder Malhotra, a doctor who was present during the five-hour operation, said yesterday that the man, who works as a police constable, was apparently suffering from a psychiatric disorder and is now being counseled. He said the man could not explain why he swallowed the knives. Malhotra said he had never before heard of a case of a person swallowing knives.
JAPAN
Sea Shepherd deal reached
The Institute of Cetacean Research and Kyodo Senpaku, which conduct the nation’s whale hunts, say they reached a mediation agreement with the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and its founder Paul Watson. Under the terms of the negotiated agreement, Sea Shepherd and Watson are prohibited from “physically attacking” Japan’s whaling vessels or crew, or approaching closer than 457m to the vessels on the high seas. The agreement settles a case brought by the Japanese institutions against Sea Shepherd at a Seattle court in 2011, in which the Japanese institutions sought an injunction from “violent behavior” of protesters which they said endangered the safety of the whaling vessels’ crew.
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
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.