AFGHANISTAN
Taliban storm building
Taliban fighters opened fire and stormed a government building in the east of the country in the most serious of a string of attacks early yesterday that marked the start of their annual spring offensive. In Kabul, two rockets struck inside the grounds of the city’s international airport, but caused no damage. Following the attack, police surrounded the provincial justice ministry building in the city of Jalabad and were engaging in sporadic exchanges of gunfire with the militants inside. The attackers struck at about 9am as employees were arriving for work.
CHINA
Irridium-192 suspects held
Police have detained four people after radioactive material being used in a construction project went missing, state media reported yesterday. A tiny piece of irridium-192, used to locate flaws in pieces of metal, vanished on Wednesday last week from a construction site in Nanjing and was not recovered until Saturday afternoon, China Daily reported. It was found in bushes 1km from the construction site wrapped in a plastic bag, put in a lead container and then taken away, the newspaper said.
JAPAN
Bus-jacker missed parents
A middle-aged man who allegedly hijacked a bus because he wanted to visit his parents was arrested, police said yesterday, after he let the driver go to the toilet. The bus was traveling from an airport in Miyazaki when Seiichi Sato, aged 45, allegedly took charge of it, threatening the driver and passengers with a pair of scissors, Jiji press reported. Media reports said the bus made a number of stops to let passengers off, before pulling over at a convenience store some time before midnight. After a stand-off that lasted more than an hour, officers swooped in when Sato let the driver off the bus, ostensibly to go to the toilet, media reported. Sato told police he had hijacked the bus “to see my foster parents in Ebino city,” Fuji Television reported.
GERMANY
Wave of tax evaders confess
The tax evasion trial and conviction of former Bayern Munich president Uli Hoeness triggered a wave of self-disclosures resulting in 16,926 tax dodgers turning themselves in during the first four months of the year, the Welt am Sonntag newspaper reported on Sunday. It said it had surveyed finance authorities in the nation’s 16 states and the number of self-disclosures in the first four months of this year was more than the combined total of 2011 and 2012.
UNITED KINGDOM
Lottery funds independence
A couple who won a record EuroMillions jackpot in 2011 are bankrolling the campaign for Scottish independence, contributing ￡2.5 million (US$4.2 million) in the past year, the campaign said on Sunday. Colin and Christine Weir, from Largs near Glasgow, won 185 million euros (then US$260 million) in July 2011, becoming Europe’s biggest ever lottery winners.
YEMEN
Drone kills six suspects
A drone strike yesterday killed six al-Qaeda suspects, tribal sources said, in the first such raid since the army launched an offensive against jihadists last month. The drone targeted a vehicle carrying “al-Qaeda members” near al-Husun, a village in Marib Province, one source said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
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