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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
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