UNITED STATES
Trump to meet over tariffs
President Donald Trump was yesterday to meet with his top trade advisers to decide whether to activate threatened tariffs on billions of US dollars in Chinese goods, a senior official said. Trump is due to unveil revisions to his initial tariff list targeting US$50 billion of Chinese goods today. People familiar with the revisions said that the list would be slightly smaller than the original, with some goods deleted and others added, particularly in the technology sector. Another official said that a draft document showed that the new list would still be close to US$50 billion, with about 1,300 product categories, but both the dollar amount and quantity of products were still subject to change.
UNITED STATES
Conditions to worsen fires
Fierce winds and bone-dry conditions were expected yesterday across a five-state region, where firefighters are wrangling several wildfires that have forced thousands to flee their homes. Red flag warnings have been issued for parts of Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming, where winds gusts could reach 65kph and humidity could drop to 5 percent, the National Weather Service said. Weather conditions along with possible dry lightning could contribute to “extreme fire behavior” in the southwest, where more than two dozen wildfires are burning, the service said. The largest and most threatening blaze, the 416 Fire, has scorched 11,088 hectares of grass, brush and timber at the edge of the San Juan National Forest in southwestern Colorado. Crews had contained 15 percent of the blaze, fire officials said.
SOUTH AFRICA
Two killed at mosque
A man stabbed two people to death in an attack at a mosque early yesterday, before being shot dead by officers, police said. Several people were also wounded in the attack in the town of Malmesbury near Cape Town. “The suspect believed to be in his 30s and armed with a knife charged at the police who tried to persuade him to hand himself over,” Western Cape Police spokesperson Noliyoso Rwexana said. The motive for the attack was not immediately clear.
Philippines
Aussie given life for abuse
An Australian man on Wednesday was sentenced to life as part of a notorious child sexual abuse case in which prosecutors say he chained the victims like dogs. Peter Scully still faces another trial and dozens more charges, including allegations he made child pornography and murdered a young girl. Scully was convicted of trafficking and rape three years after he was arrested in the southern Philippines and accused of sexually abusing and filming girls, including an 18-month-old baby. The Cagayan de Oro court sentenced Scully and his local partner to life in prison without parole and imposed a fine of 5 million pesos (US$93,850) for trafficking girls then aged 10 and 12, the regional prosecutor said.
JAPAN
‘Dead’ man returns home
A woman has told police the body she thought was of her missing husband belonged to a stranger after her spouse turned up alive a year later. Tokyo police on Wednesday said that the body found in a river in eastern Tokyo in June last year was of another man reported missing about the same time. Police apologized for the mix-up and said the remains would be returned to the right family.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not