JAPAN
Emperor calls for openness
Emperor Akihito yesterday attended a ceremony to mark the 30th year of his reign while calling for the country to embrace openness in a more globalized world. The government-sponsored ceremony at the National Theater in Tokyo was attended by Empress Michiko and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. “Japan has long cultivated its own culture as an island nation, but now the world is becoming more globalized,” the 85-year-old emperor said. “I think it is now required for us to be more open to the outside world, to establish our own position with wisdom and to build relationships with other countries with sincerity.”
JAPAN
Donald Keene dies
Donald Keene, a longtime Columbia University professor who was a giant in the field of literature and translation, died yesterday of heart failure in Tokyo. He was 96. A prolific academic who worked well into his 90s, Keene published about 25 books in English, including translations of both classical and modern writers, and about 30 in Japanese. He move permanently to Tokyo in 2011 and became a citizen in 2012.
SENEGAL
Presidential election begins
Voters yesterday went to the polls in an election that President Macky Sall looks confident to win in the first round after his main challengers were banned from running. Sall faces competition from four lesser-known rivals who campaigned hard against his plans for a second phase of his “Emerging Senegal” infrastructure project, which critics call a waste of taxpayers’ money and a potential debt burden.
CHINA
New outbreak confirmed
The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs yesterday confirmed a new outbreak of African swine fever in Hebei Province. The outbreak is on a farm in the Xushui District of Baoding, which has 5,600 hogs, some of which died because of the disease, the ministry said a statement on its Web site, without giving a death toll.
INDIA
Moonshine toll rises
At least 35 more workers have died in Assam State after drinking toxic liquor, police said yesterday, taking the death toll from the latest mass alcohol poisoning beyond 130. At least 200 more people were still hospitalized across Assam. “A total of 10 people have been arrested. We have sent the samples of the liquor ... to a forensic laboratory,” Mukesh Agarwala, additional director-general of state police, said. Police said people started falling sick after consuming a batch of illegally produced liquor late on Thursday. Those affected, who include many women, worked at local tea estates in the region.
PHILIPPINES
Central bank head dies
Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Governor Nestor Espenilla died on Saturday after a battle with cancer. He was 60. Espenilla disclosed his medical condition in February last year as he recovered from surgery and radiation therapy for tongue cancer. Espenilla had taken intermittent medical leave since September in addition to an overseas trip for treatment last month. The Monetary Board has designated Deputy Governor Cyd Tuano-Amador as the central bank’s officer-in-charge effective immediately until President Rodrigo Duterte appoints a successor, the bank said in a statement yesterday.
IRAN
Cruise missile tested
The navy yesterday successfully tested a cruise missile during naval exercises near the Strait of Hormuz, state media reported. “On the third day of the ... exercises, a Ghadir-class Iranian navy submarine successfully launched a cruise missile,” the official news agency Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported. More than 100 vessels were taking part in the ongoing three-day war games in an area stretching from the Strait of Hormuz to the Indian Ocean, state media reported. The nation’s other submarines, the Tareq and the new domestically built Fateh have the same anti-ship capability, IRNA quoted a military statement as saying.
MOLDOVA
Parliamentary elections held
Voters yesterday cast ballots in parliamentary elections that could deepen a split between pro-Western and pro-Russian forces. More than 3 million voters are eligible to elect representatives to the 101-seat legislature for a four-year term, and parties need to win 6 percent of the overall ballot to enter parliament. Opinion polls suggest the opposition Socialist party, which favors closer ties to Moscow, will win most seats, but fall short of a majority. The ruling pro-Western Democratic Party trails in second and an opposition bloc called ACUM, campaigning to fight entrenched corruption, is third.
EGYPT
Party complains of arrests
The Constitution Party founded by Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei on Saturday denounced what it said was a “campaign of arrests” targeting its members after it criticized a bid to extend President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi’s powers. Four of its members had been arrested “in the past 48 hours,” the party posted on Facebook, while others faced “security restrictions.” It called on authorities to “stop these violations and repressive practices.” Security sources said they had “no information” on the crackdown.
FRANCE
‘Yellow vests’ protest again
Tens of thousands of people on Saturday marched in Paris and other cities as the “yellow vest” movement staged its 15th consecutive weekend of demonstrations against the government. Dozens of people were arrested. About 46,600 people joined the protests nationwide, including 5,800 in Paris, the Ministry of the Interior said. Paris police said the march was largely peaceful, although scuffles broke out as it wound down.
ITALY
Winds kill four people
Strong winds whipping through the center of the nation on Saturday killed four people, including a teen who died when his father fell off the roof and crushed him, the Fatto Quotidiano said. The 14-year-old in Capena, near Rome, was holding the ladder for his father as he attempted to fix damage to the family roof, when the latter was knocked off by a gust of wind, falling 6m and landing on his son, the daily said. Two men in their 70s were killed by a farm wall that collapsed on top of them near Frosinone, while a 45-year-old man died when a pine tree in Guidonia crushed his car, it said.
UNITED STATES
Film director Donen dies
Filmmaker Stanley Donen, a giant of the Hollywood musical who directed Singin’ in the Rain, Anchors Away, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Funny Face among other films, died on Thursday. He died in New York from heart failure, his sons Joshua and Mark Donen said on Saturday. He was 94.
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.