AUSTRALIA
Gas leak clears opera house
About 500 people yesterday were evacuated from the Sydney Opera House concourse and adjoining restaurants following a gas leak, firefighters said as they monitored the atmosphere for gas levels. Fire and Rescue New South Wales said on Twitter that gas company workers were fixing the problem. The leak happened when a low pressure gas main was hit during construction at the venue, the Australian newspaper reported.
PHILIPPINES
Quake hits day after first
A new powerful earthquake yesterday hit the center of the nation, a day after a magnitude 6.1 quake hit its north and killed at least 16 people. The US Geological Survey put the magnitude of yesterday’s quake at 6.4, while the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology said that it was a magnitude of 6.5. The quake was centered near the town of San Julian in Eastern Samar Province and prompted residents to dash out of houses and office workers to scamper to safety. There were no immediate reports of casualties or major damage from the new quake.
JAPAN
North Korea stance eases
The government yesterday dropped the push to apply “maximum pressure” on North Korea from its official foreign policy, an apparent softening of Tokyo’s position as major powers engage with Pyongyang. In last year’s Diplomatic Bluebook, published when tensions on the Korean Peninsula were soaring, the government said that it was coordinating efforts with its allies to “maximize pressure on North Korea by all available means.” “There have been major developments in the situation surrounding North Korea in light of events such as the US-North Korea summits in June last year and February,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters.
INDIA
Others to fill Iran oil loss
The government plans to get additional supplies from other major oil producing countries to compensate for the loss of Iranian oil, Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas Dharmendra Pradhan said yesterday. The US on Monday demanded that buyers of Iranian oil stop purchases by Wednesday next week or face sanctions, ending six months of waivers that had allowed Iran’s eight biggest buyers to continue to import limited volumes. Pradhan said on Twitter that a robust plan is in place to supply crude oil to refineries. “Refineries are fully prepared to meet the national demand for petrol, diesel and other petroleum products,” he said.
ALGERIA
Richest man held for graft
The nation’s richest man, Issad Rebrab, has been placed in jail on the public prosecutor’s orders, the official Algeria Press Service (APS) reported yesterday, a day after his arrest as part of a corruption probe. Rebrab, the chief executive of the nation’s biggest privately owned conglomerate, Cevital, was placed in detention overnight, APS said. It comes in the wake of youth, which make up two-thirds of the population, initiating nationwide protests that earlier this month toppled the only leader they had ever known: former president Abdelaziz Bouteflika, in power since 1999. “We are trying to make all the Algerian people follow us so that we can be unified to make a better Algeria,” said Sofiane Smain, a 23-year-old computing student.
AUSTRIA
Rat poem causes stir
The anti-migration Freedom Party has called “tasteless” a poem written by a local official that compared migrants with rats. The Town Rat appeared in a local party publication in Braunau. It warned against mixing cultures and drew strong criticism from the center-left opposition. Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, a conservative who governs with the party as his coalition partner, on Monday demanded that its branch in Upper Austria Province distance itself from the poem and said that “the choice of words is abhorrent, inhuman and deeply racist.”
BULGARIA
Jail for journalist killer
A court on Monday sentenced a man charged with the rape and murder of a television journalist to 30 years in prison. The 21-year-old Severin Krassmirov appeared handcuffed and under heavy guard before the regional court in Ruse, where he had pleaded guilty and had asked for swift sentencing. The body of Viktoria Marinova was found by the Danube River in Ruse on Oct. 6 last year. Investigators said she was raped, hit on the head and suffocated. Investigators concluded that Krassimirov acted alone. He was arrested in Germany, where he had fled, and extradited to Bulgaria a week after the murder. In entering a guilty plea, Krassimirov escaped the maximum penalty of life imprisonment.
IRELAND
New IRA sorry for killing
The New IRA militant group has apologized for the killing of journalist Lyra McKee — its first acknowledgment that one of its members was involved, the Irish News reported yesterday. The organization called McKee’s death “tragic” and offered “full and sincere apologies” to her partner, family and friends in a statement that the newspaper said it received on Monday night. The 29-year-old was shot dead in Londonderry on Thursday last week as she watched young nationalists attack police officers following a raid. Police said that McKee was hit when a gunman opened fire in the direction of officers.
VENEZUELA
Two counterprotests called
The government on Monday announced two marches to counter the ones National Assembly President Juan Guaido has planned. The street demonstrations in favor of President Nicolas Maduro are to take place on Saturday and Wednesday next week, Labor Day. Saturday’s event are also to mark the nation’s official exit from the Organization of American States, two years after Maduro made the decision to leave the group, accusing it of being part of a US campaign to “intervene” in the nation. “We want to summon our members to two great demonstrations,” said Hector Rodriguez, a leader of Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela.
MEXICO
Border delay ‘hurts both’
The Secretariat of Foreign Affairs on Monday said that speeding up the flow of goods on the US border is a matter of urgency, and that slowdowns are detrimental to both economies, after bottlenecks have held up trade following a row over migration. Delays along the border began late last month after US border agents were moved to handle an influx of migrants, slowing the flow of goods and people. The staffing shortages came shortly after US President Donald Trump threatened to close the border if Mexico City did not halt a surge of people seeking asylum in the US.
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.