AUSTRALIA
Burmese brass sanctioned
The government yesterday slapped travel and financial sanctions on five top Burmese military officers, accused of overseeing brutal violence against Rohingya Muslims by units under their command, following similar moves by the EU and the US. The country, which has previously provided training for the Burmese army and refrained from imposing sanctions, yesterday responded to a UN report calling for sanctions by targeting four of the men named, as well as one other senior commander. “I have now imposed targeted financial sanctions and travel bans against five Myanmar military officers responsible for human rights violations committed by units under their command,” Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Marise Payne said in a statement.
CHINA
Crews seek trapped miners
Emergency crews are struggling to rescue 18 coal miners trapped underground in Shandong Province following a collapse inside the shaft on Saturday. Three miners were killed by falling rocks in the accident that also destroyed part of a drainage tunnel. State-owned media yesterday showed ambulances standing by at the mine entrance and crews equipped with oxygen tanks heading underground. More than 300 people were working inside the mine at the time of the collapse, and most were successfully lifted to safety. China long had the world’s deadliest coal mines, but it has closed most of the smallest, most dangerous mines.
BANGLADESH
Dissenting publisher charged
A prominent lawyer and newspaper publisher who is tied to the political opposition has been arrested on defamation charges amid concern that the government is acting tough on dissent ahead of national elections, police said yesterday. Detectives arrested Moinul Hosein late on Monday in the capital, said Mahbub Alam, a joint commissioner in the Detective Branch of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police. Hosein is the publisher of the English-language New Nation daily. Alam said the warrant issued on Monday involved a television talk show appearance in which Hosein called a journalist “characterless.” The government has executed almost all political party leaders thought to have had a role in killings, arson and rape during the country’s 1971 war of independence against Pakistan.
UNITED STATES
Alleged student-killer sought
Police are searching for a man they say shot and killed a University of Utah student outside of a dormitory on campus, the Salt Lake Tribune reported. The female student’s body was found at about 9pm in a car near the medical towers, University of Utah Police Lieutenant Brian Wahlin said. The man and the student had “a previous relationship,” Wahlin added. Dozens of police had the situation under control, Wahlin told the Tribune. “It was really scary to look out the window and see. I saw 15 to 20 police officers right where we’re standing right now,” Tyler Olsen, a student who lives in family housing near the shooting scene, told the Deseret News.
UNITED STATES
Hopefuls crash lottery site
The US Mega Millions lottery Web site crashed on Monday ahead of a record US$1.6 billion drawing to be held yesterday evening. Visitors to the Web site saw an error message after too many users visited the site and it crashed, said a spokeswoman for the Maryland Gaming Commission, which administers the Web site.
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
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
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.