■JAPAN
Journalist freed: report
A Japanese journalist believed to have been kidnapped by the Taliban has been released after five months, a report said yesterday. Kosuke Tsuneoka, a freelance journalist who had been missing in northern Afghanistan since April, is now under protection at the Japanese embassy in Kabul, the Jiji Press agency said, quoting diplomatic sources. A foreign ministry official in Tokyo declined to comment. Members of the group holding Tsuneoka reportedly asked the Japanese government to negotiate the release of their imprisoned comrades, while Taliban militants also demanded the Afghan government pay a ransom for the journalist. Japanese media reported that negotiations were underway on a payment for Tsuneoka’s release.
■UNITED STATES
Treasury denies bank reports
The US Treasury Department denied media reports on Saturday that US taxpayer funds would be put towards bailing out Afghanistan’s beleaguered Kabul Bank. The White House said the allegations were not true and pointed to a statement from Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin that said the bank’s troubles were “an Afghan issue.” “They are taking immediate steps to ensure the stability of Kabul Bank and to protect the financial assets of the Afghan people,” Wolin said. “While we are providing technical assistance to the Afghan government, no American taxpayer funds will be used to support Kabul Bank.” In Afghanistan meanwhile, government officials on Saturday were seeking to head off a run on the country’s biggest bank, reassuring customers of Kabul Bank that their money was safe. The privately owned bank has been the subject of reports alleging large-scale corruption by executives.
■JAPAN
Ozawa talks tough on islets
Ichiro Ozawa, one of two men vying for the role of prime minister in a party leadership race, said yesterday Tokyo must bluntly fend off Beijing’s claim to disputed islets in the East China Sea. Ozawa is facing off against Prime Minister Naoto Kan in a Sept. 14 election for leadership of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan. If Ozawa wins, he will become prime minister. During a television debate with Kan, Ozawa said the islets of Senkaku (Diaoyutais in Chinese) “have never been recognized as Chinese territory in history.” “We have to get this straight,” Ozawa told the debate, aired by broadcaster NHK. “There are various concerns over China, but it is important to speak to each other plainly.” The uninhabited islets lie between Japan and Taiwan, which also claims them.
■JAPAN
Whale on school menus
Whale meat is on the menu at around a sixth of the country’s state-run elementary and junior high schools, a survey released yesterday showed. Of 29,600 public elementary and junior high schools nationwide providing lunches for students, 5,355 schools served whale meat at least once during the fiscal year to March, the survey by Kyodo news revealed. Whale meat was a regular item on school lunch menus in the 1960s and 1970s as the annual supply of the meat reached a peak of 220,000 tonnes. It subsequently fell out of favor, with the supply dwindling to around 1,000 tonnes in the 1990s as an international ban on commercial whaling was introduced. However, whale meat has recently made a reappearance on the school lunch table as the country gradually increased its catch of the ocean giants, Kyodo said.
■BAHRAIN
Shiites activists charged
The security agency accused 23 Shiite activists of forming a terrorist network aiming to topple the Sunni-dominated government, a defense lawyer and a senior lawmaker said on Saturday. State TV had earlier broadcast pictures of the alleged leaders of the networks and official media said the activists had been charged. However, lawyer Mohammed al-Tajir said prosecutors are still interrogating the men and have not yet pressed formal charges. Al-Tajir added that he has not been allowed to meet with any of his clients since they were arrested, some of them as early as Aug. 13.
■WEST BANK
Ahmadinejad lambasted
The Palestinian Authority lashed out on Saturday at Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over his remarks about the relaunching of direct Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. The Iranian president, “who does not represent the Iranian people, who falsified elections and took power by fraud, does not have the right to talk about Palestine, its president or its representatives,” Palestinian Authority spokesman Nabil Abu Rodeina said in a statement distributed by the official Palestinian news agency Wafa. “We are defending our national rights and interests” and will not allow anyone to “threaten us or question the legitimacy of the Palestinian Liberation Organization” led by President Mahmud Abbas, Rodeina added.
■GAZA STRIP
Airstrike kills smuggler
Security officials say an Israeli airstrike targeting a smuggling tunnel has killed one Palestinian, wounded a second and left three more missing. The Hamas officials identified the five as smugglers working in the tunnel under the Gaza-Egypt border. They spoke yesterday on condition of anonymity because authorities had not officially released the information. The Israeli military said aircraft attacked tunnels in retaliation for Hamas shooting attacks against Israelis in the West Bank over the last week. The Hamas attacks killed four settlers and wounded two others. They took place as Israelis and Palestinians relaunched direct peace negotiations in Washington.
■EGYPT
Elbaradei condemns photos
Mohamed ElBaradei, the former UN nuclear chief turned reformer, accused the government of publishing pictures of his daughter in a swimsuit and at an event in which alcohol was served, a newspaper reported on Saturday. However, the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) strongly condemned the publication of the pictures on a Facebook group. The Nobel Laureate, who returned to Egypt earlier this year to push for reforms, told the independent Al-Dustor daily that the pictures, which were also run by some local newspapers, were the government’s “usual response.” They showed his daughter Laila, an investment lawyer with a practice in London, in a swimsuit and at her wedding, where alcohol was served. “Such a campaign is the usual and only response of the regime towards whoever demands democracy, which is the only way for freedom and economic reform and social justice,” ElBaradei told the newspaper. An NDP spokesman said the publication of the pictures was “dishonorable.” The pictures, insinuations of drinking alcohol, which is forbidden by Islam, and Laila’s marriage to a banker in London with a non-Muslim name could raise eyebrows in the increasingly conservative country, where Muslim women largely dress modestly and cannot wed non-Muslim men.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
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