TURKEY
Journalist gets three years
A court yesterday sentenced a journalist from opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet to three years in prison on a charge of spreading terrorist propaganda over a tweet that the paper briefly posted in May, state media said. The newspaper’s online editor, Oguz Guven, was accused of discrediting Ankara’s fight against supporters of US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, who the government says orchestrated a coup attempt last year. The tweet had referred to a prosecutor being killed in a road accident with the expression that he had been “mowed down by a truck.” Cumhuriyet says the tweet was replaced within one minute by one saying the prosecutor “died awfully in a truck accident.” The prosecutor who died had prepared an indictment against Gulen’s network.
UNITED STATES
Object from another system
A rocky cigar-shaped object detected in space last month came from another solar system, astronomers said on Monday, as they confirmed an unprecedented observation. The discovery could provide clues as to how other solar systems formed, said the researchers, who published their study in the British journal Nature. The asteroid, named Oumuamua by its discoverers, is 400m long and highly elongated — perhaps 10 times as long as it is wide. That odd shape is unprecedented among an estimated 750,000 asteroids and comets observed in our solar system where they formed, the researchers said. They concluded that the cigar-shaped thing is from another solar system due to data on its orbit. Asteroids like Oumuamua enter our solar system about once a year, but they are hard to trace and had not been detected until now, thanks to stronger telescopes, they said.
UNITED STATES
Bus ruins demolition show
An unlucky TV producer has been left cursing a large commuter bus, after it pulled up at just the wrong moment to ruin a live broadcast. On Monday, the Georgia Dome, an 80,000-capacity stadium that hosted events at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, was demolished in a spectacular controlled implosion. Like many other media outlets, the Weather Channel set up a livestream to catch the moment on film. In footage posted online, a crowd of onlookers can be seen lined up to watch the demolition, as a voice slowly counts down to the demolition of the stadium. Seconds after the first plume of smoke appears, a bus slowly enters the frame. “No bus. Go away,” a man can be heard shouting. The bus then stops, completely obscuring the stadium, while he swears and sighs in frustration. By the time the 20-second stop is over, the implosion has finished.
JAPAN
Mother ‘dumps’ babies
A mother who dumped four of her babies in buckets filled with concrete that she then kept in her apartment for two decades was arrested yesterday. Mayumi Saito, 53, told investigators she had given birth to the infants between 1992 and 1997, a police spokesman said. Saito handed herself in at an Osaka police station on Monday and confessed, saying she did not think her financial predicament made it possible for her to look after the babies, local media reported. Detectives who searched her home found four concrete-filled buckets in a closet. Scans indicate that each one contains what appears to be the remains of an infant, the Asahi Shimbun reported. Police are still interviewing the woman, who lives with her son, and trying to determine whether she killed the babies or whether they were stillborn, the report said.
‘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
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
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