GERMANY
Man attacks bakery workers
Police in the city of Fulda say they shot and killed a man who was attacking workers outside a bakery. Fulda police responded to a call at 4:30am that a man was attacking people outside the business in the city about 100km northeast of Frankfurt, they said in a statement yesterday. When they arrived, they say the man attacked them with stones and some sort of a truncheon. They say they shot and killed the man, whose name and age were not released. Police say the bakery was not open at the time of the incident, and that the victims attacked by the suspect were employees and a delivery driver. Some of their injuries were considered serious. Hesse state police and Fulda prosecutors are investigating.
TURKEY
Soldiers tied to cleric detained
Prosecutors ordered the detention of 70 serving army officers over alleged links to the US-based preacher accused of orchestrating an attempted coup in 2016, the Milliyet daily said yesterday. Police launched simultaneous operations in 34 provinces across Turkey in a probe led by state prosecutors in the central Turkish province of Konya, Milliyet said. It said the suspects were targeted based on statements by soldiers previously detained over ties to the cleric Fethullah Gulen and were believed to have been responsible for student houses for Gulen’s movement. The UN Human Rights Council last month said Turkish authorities had detained 160,000 people and dismissed nearly the same number of civil servants since the failed coup in July 2016, which Ankara blames on Gulen. He denies any involvement. Among those detained, more than 50,000 have been formally charged and kept in jail during their trials. The nation’s Western allies have criticized the crackdown. Ankara says the measures are necessary to combat threats to national security.
UNITED STATES
Buffalo launches ‘wing trail’
Buffalo, New York, is inviting tourists to eat their way through a new “wing trail” featuring a dozen chicken wing hot spots. Tourism officials unveiled the Buffalo Wing Trail on Thursday at the Anchor Bar, where the Buffalo wing took flight in 1964. While just about every restaurant in the city has wings on the menu, the restaurants chosen for the trail each put a unique spin on how they cook, season and serve the appetizer. Visit Buffalo Niagara says it polled its 86,000 Facebook followers, looked at online reviews and consulted with National Buffalo Wing Festival founder Drew Cerza before settling on the final list.
UNITED STATES
‘Fight club’ teacher charged
A former substitute teacher is charged with supervising a student “fight club” at a Connecticut high school. Police say cellphone videos show 23-year-old Ryan Fish encouraging students as they slap each other in the middle of a classroom at Montville High School. Fish pleaded not guilty on Thursday to charges including reckless endangerment and risk of injury to a minor. He has denied facilitating the fights and says he thought that the students were just being “rambunctious.” Fish was fired in October last year. Police began investigating in December after a student told a social worker that he had been beaten at school. Superintendent Brian Levesque told the Day newspaper that he did not alert police after firing Fish because he knew of only one fight and thought that it was an isolated incident.
JAPAN
Diaoyutai patrols stepped up
The military is to beef up airborne patrols of disputed islands in the East China Sea, an official said yesterday in response to increased Chinese activity in the area. New crew members will operate two additional airplanes that will be deployed over the next 12 months to strengthen patrols around the Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台), which are also claimed by Taiwan, a Japan Coast Guard spokesman said. “We’ll boost our aviation crew by bringing in 60 more members,” the spokesman told reporters. Japan is to deploy two Falcon 2000LXS jets this fiscal year and one more plane next year to allow a “24-hour patrol system” to monitor the disputed islands, known in Japan as the Senkaku Islands. Japan early this year spotted a Chinese nuclear-powered submarine in disputed waters.
VANUATU
Volcano prompts evacuation
Villagers on the island of Ambae were yesterday facing their second evacuation in seven months after a volcano rumbled back to life and rained ashes on their homes. Authorities have declared a state of emergency on the northern island, where 11,000 people were forced to leave in September last year. Many have only just returned home, but the Vanuatu Meteorology and Geo-Hazards Department said that the Manaro Voui volcano was undergoing a level-three eruption, the mid-point on a five-level scale. Vanuatuan Ministry of Climate Change Director-General Jesse Benjamin said that an evacuation would be more orderly than the one carried out last year, when a flotilla of small vessels were pressed into service to rush people off the island. “Last year’s evacuation was conducted in haste, amidst fears of a major eruption,” he told the Daily Post newspaper. “This time we will be evacuating people from the severely affected communities first.”
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
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing