CHINA
Explosion kills two
A massive explosion hit a food shop in the country’s east during the breakfast rush yesterday, killing two people and injuring 55. Security camera footage from the shop in the eastern resort city of Hangzhou showed the blast flinging dust and debris across a major road traversed by cars, buses, bicycles and scooters. Footage from state broadcaster China Central Television showed charred shop fronts facing the street in the residential area. Most such small establishments use bottled gas to fuel their cookers.
TURKEY
Government denies leak
The spokesman for the president said the government had no role in the publication by the state-run news agency of a map showing US military posts in Syria. The US military said it had raised concerns with Ankara after Anadolu Agency published a map showing 10 locations where it said US troops are located. The posts span a stretch of northern Syria controlled by Syrian Kurdish forces that the US supports, but that Turkey considers a terrorist group. Spokesman Ibrahim Kalin on Thursday said the news article that contained the map was based on the agency’s “own news-gathering network,” adding that the government had not given “the information or directed the agency.”
MALAYSIA
‘Despacito’ banned
The government has banned the catchy summer dance song Despacito from state radio and television broadcasts after critics in the Muslim-majority country complained the lyrics were obscene. The ban was on Wednesday announced on the government’s Radio Televisyen Malaysia by Salleh Said Keruak, the communications and multimedia minister, but the song can still be played on private stations and online platforms.
ZIMBABWE
Hunter kills Cecil’s cub
A trophy hunter has shot dead a cub of Cecil the lion, whose death in 2015 caused worldwide outrage, researchers tracking the pride confirmed yesterday. Xanda, a six-year-old lion fitted with a radio collar, was killed on July 7 in northwest Zimbabwe, close to where US dentist Walter Palmer shot Cecil with a high-powered bow and arrow two years ago. “Xanda was shot by a trophy hunter on a legally sanctioned hunt in a hunting area outside Hwange National Park,” Andrew Loveridge from Oxford University’s zoology department said. “As researchers we are saddened to lose a well-known study animal we have monitored since birth.” Both Cecil and Xanda wore electronic GPS tracking collars in a project run by Oxford University’s wildlife conservation research unit, but they had strayed out of the park boundaries and into a legal hunting area.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
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