ISRAEL
Golan recognition sought
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday called on the US to recognize Israeli sovereignty of the Golan Heights. Netanyahu announced that he and US National Security Adviser John Bolton were to visit the region yesterday, weather permitting. “When you’re there, you’ll be able to understand perfectly why we’ll never leave the Golan Heights and why it’s important that all countries recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights,” Netanyahu said. Israel captured the area from Syria in 1967. It annexed the Golan Heights in 1981, but the international community has not recognized the takeover.
POLAND
Escape room maker charged
Prosecutors on Sunday detained and brought charges against a man who designed an escape room entertainment site where five teenage girls were killed in a fire. The man, identified only as Milosz S., was charged with intentionally creating a fire danger and unintentionally causing the deaths of the girls, prosecutor Ryszard Gasiorowski said, adding that the location’s heating system was faulty and there was no emergency evacuation route. Prosecutors said that a leaky gas container inside a heater was the most likely cause of the blaze. Autopsies showed that the girls died of carbon monoxide inhalation.
MARSHALL ISLANDS
Ship labeled ‘crime scene’
The grounding of a Chinese-flagged fishing vessel was being treated as a “crime scene,” officials in the Pacific Ocean archipelago said yesterday. The 94m boat, which ran aground last week on a remote northern atoll, was not licensed to be in the country’s waters. “What they were doing in Marshall Islands’ waters is still unanswered,” Chief Secretary Ben Graham said, adding that the government was “treating this as a crime scene.” The boat’s 24-member crew arrived in the capital, Majuro, on Sunday after being rescued by a government patrol boat and a Chinese fishing vessel, with the US Coast Guard providing aerial reconnaissance. The grounded vessel, the Ou Ya Leng No. 6, is a frozen fish carrier and the owner is reported to be a squid supplier to longline vessels fishing in the region.
UNITED STATES
Ocean cleaner breaks
A trash collection device deployed to corral plastic litter floating in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii has broken apart and is to be hauled back to shore for repairs. Boyan Slat, who launched the Pacific Ocean cleanup project, told NBC News last week that the 600m-long floating boom would be towed 1,300km to Hawaii. If it can not be repaired there, it would be loaded on a barge and returned to its home port of Alameda, California. The boom broke apart under constant wind and waves in the Pacific. Slat said that he was disappointed, but not discouraged and pledged that operations would resume as soon as possible.
CHINA
Knife attacker executed
A man who attacked several children with a knife at a kindergarten two years ago was executed, state media reported yesterday. Tan Pengan (覃鵬安) was executed on Friday for slashing young children at the school in the Guangxi Zhuang region, the Xinhua news agency reported. Tan went to the kindergarten with a kitchen knife in January 2017 and attacked 12 children, seriously injuring four of them. A teacher fended off the attack and called for help as Tan fled the scene. He later turned himself in.
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